01.26.09
Neil Gaiman Wins Newbery Medal for “The Graveyard Book”!
We just learned today that, yes, moving from England to America has one definite advantage: it makes your writing eligible for the American Library Association’s Newbery Award.
At the National Book Festival last fall, Gaiman called his award-winner “the book that took me the longest to write.” It began with a notion that came to him more than two decades ago. Wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to write something like Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Books,” except instead of having his protagonist raised by animals, he’d be raised by a graveyard full of ghosts?
“I wrote about a page and a half and I looked at it, and I thought: This is a better idea than I am a writer,” Gaiman said. Eventually he decided “I’m not getting any better” and finished “The Graveyard Book.”
The full story, and other award winners, can be found at the original article here.
You can find “The Graveyard Book” at all Schuler Books locations. And if you like that, why stop there? Check out “Coraline,” “American Gods,” “Anansi Boys”, “Neverwhere” and “Stardust.”
(both versions, lest we forget he used to write comics, too) ; )
- Jim Tremlett
01.21.09
Classic Poetry Animated As Never Before
One of the many other bookselling blogs led me to the discovery of an absolutely fascinating, if at times mildly creepy, poetry project posted on YouTube by British videographer Jim Clark.
Essentially, he has taken photographs of famous poets and modified them with computer animation, so it seems as if they are reading their poetry to you. In some cases the audio recording is of the author’s actual voice, creating an incredible composite that Clark refers to as “poem animation”.
The selection of poems is fabulous, capable of tempting hours of free time away. Check it out at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/poetryanimations
01.14.09
And on into the New Year!
We’ve been slacking a little in the blog department, but now that the holidays are over, we’ve got no excuse not to be sharing our inordinately immense book-loving knowledge! 
I have made a New Year’s Resolution that will hopefully translate into a blog component – my husband and I both agreed to try to read a novel a week for the entire year, and keep a journal both about the books and the process of endurance reading.
I am an avid reader, so a novel a week is not far off from what I was already doing – what I do expect is that it will force me to focus in my efforts. I typically have 4 or 5 books going at any given moment, reading them as they suit my mood. Different days call for different texts — I need a non-fiction option, a horror option, a literary option, a brain-fluff option. But this resolution requires commitment! I am hoping it will be an antidote to the Literary ADD that had left me unable to finish a single title for all of December, leaving a greater and greater succession of books unfinished.
Thus far the experiment has proved an initial success – I began last Wednesday with Brideshead Revisted by Evelyn Waugh, and finished it last night. As a literary anglophile (truly an all-around anglophile), the grim English setting was a perfect palate cleanser, and popped me right out of my reading rut. Waugh has an incredible style, replete with lush metaphorical phrasings and acute social observations.
As an added bonus, the film adaption just came out on DVD – but Remember! Always read the book first (and the book’s ALWAYS better)!
Avast ye New Year! I am on my way! — Whitney
