CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

The July/August 2008 Horn Book magazine has been published and some of the articles are already available online. The profiles of Newbery and  Caldecott awards winners Brian Selznick and Laura Amy Schlitz will interest Australian readers.

Neil Gaiman was the guest on the Radio National’s Book Show yesterday. In conversation with Michael Sherrifs, he talks about graphic novels, his two-decade-long collaboration with Dave McKean and classic YA literature.

It is for online listening only, but the transcript is also available.

Speaking of books of a bygone era, the Fine Lines blog revisits some loved titles of the ’70s and ’80s with a more critical eye. The latest post is about Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, now an astonishing 39 years old! This weekly blog is worth a nostalgic visit.

Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant recently won the Red House Children’s Book Award - the longest running children’s choice award in the world. The popularity of this charming, although skeletal, detective and his adventures with Stephanie Edgley is as great in Australia and the United States as it is in Landy’s native Ireland.

Now, the second book, Playing with Fire, is out, and to celebrate , the dedicated website has the audio of Book 1 available online for free listening (but not downloading) for a limited time. The narration by Rupert Degas retains the Irishness of the tale and he is able to inject just the right amount of dark humour.

Skulduggery’s many fans should take advantage of the offer while it lasts.

Have you caught up with Inanimate Alice yet? It is digital storytelling at its most delicious. The fourth of ten episodes has recently come online.

Beginning with Alice as an eight year old living in remote regions of China with her parents, the story will develop in interactive complexity as Alice matures into her twenties. She has so far also been to Russia and Italy and in the fourth episode she is fourteen and living in an ordinary town in England. Why?

The related pedagogy project is attracting educators from around the world.

Each episode takes about half an hour to view. Treat yourself and your students soon.

Inanimate Alice has been created by Chris Joseph, digital writer in residence at The Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montford University, Leicester in the UK.

Book Week 2008 draws ever closer. CMIS will be interpreting the slogan ‘Fuel Your Mind’ by suggesting that we challenge students to read and respond to literature that might be unusual or a little out of their comfort zone.

The Book Week 2008 pages are still a work in progress, but we have made a start on the lists for Older Readers and the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books.

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Boys and books have been on the reading agenda for a while now. James Roy is one who has been an articulate advocate of the cause. Here are some blogs dedicated to boys and books, well worth you and the boys in your school keeping an eye on:

• Boys, Blokes, Books, from the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria
• Guys Lit Wire, a new YA blog from the US
• Boys Blogging Books, a blog for boys by boys
• Books and Boys, another US site

And then there’s Guys Read, the site of US Ambassador for Children’s Literature, Jon Scieszka.

If you are aware of any others, let us know.

The sad news has come through that the Endicott Studio Journal of the Mythic Arts is to close. We last referred to this site in relation to Neil Gaiman’s poetry following the CBCA conference at the beginning of May.

The farewell issue will be published in July.

As well as being in outer space, intreprid hero Hal Spacejock has gone into cyberspace. To coincide with the launch of Book 4 in the series, Hal Spacejock : No Free Lunch, the eponymous title, published in 2005, is now freely available online from the Fremantle Press website.

Many Australian readers know and love Hal, the bumbling, none-too-bright but well-meaning space pilot, but Perth author Simon Haynes is hoping that by making him Internet-accessible, he will reach a far wider audience.

It’s a great opportunity for teachers to plan a lesson around humour in writing and in viewing. Comparison with zany television space shows, such as Red Dwarf, could lead to some fun in the classroom with scriptwriting or drama activities based on Hal’s adventures.

Other titles in the series are Hal Spacejock : Second Course (2006) and Hal Spacejock : Just Desserts (2007).

The US-based weblog Chasing Ray is coordinating the annual Summer Blog Blast this week. Last year lots of our Australian YA authors participated in this blogging feast. The 2008 Blast stays a little closer to home with a list of UK and US writers taking part.

How does it work? A number of litblogs host an author for a day. For example, today (US time, remember) David Almond will log on to Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast and Susan Beth Pfeffer (always good value) will be at Interactive Reader. Tomorrow SBP hops onto the YA YA YAs .

Others taking part include Laurie Halse Anderson, Barry Lyga and Elizabeth Scott.

The full program for the week is here. And the beauty of blogs is that the posts and comments remain, so if there’s no time this week to check out what is being discussed, there’s always next week.

More than a dozen blogs, all passionate about discussing YA books and writers, are taking part in the Summer Blog Blast. These include Finding Wonderland, Fuse #8, shaken & stirred, Bookshelves of Doom, Writing and Ruminating, Bildungsroman, HipWriterMama, A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy and Miss Erin.

The papertigers site is currently celebrating Asian Pacific Heritage Month and has a terrific collection of authors talking about what it means to be a writer with what Laurence Yep calls an ‘ethnic qualifier’.

An interview with Linda Sue Park, author of the Newbery-winning A Single Shard, essays on topics such as breaking down the assumptions about books by ‘hyphenated Americans’ and book reviews make for some thoughtful reading, albeit with a distinct American focus. The pages will be up until the end of June.

And if you haven’t yet caught up with American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang’s award-winning graphic novel, make the celebration of this month the catalyst to do so.