Hmm… what’s the trend?
Recent themes of books recommended here?
Top tags and noteworthy notes?
Wordclouds can give a graphical look at patterns in information.
Try Tagxedo or Wordle to make your own free wordcloud of a passage from a favorite book, your Facebook posts, Twitter feed –
do you see any patterns that surprise you?
And watch for upcoming books on BooksYALove – with familiar subjects and new horizons for us to explore together.
Which recently recommended book intrigues you most?
**kmm
Lots of traveling lately on BooksYALove, especially on World Wednesdays as we look at life through the eyes of folks living outside the USA.
Which is the real Australia – the remote Red Center where Gemma’s kidnapper has taken her, Stolen from her parents in a busy airport?
The sleepy country town where Laura and Leon investigate the mysteries surrounding The Visconti House?
Urban Sydney where The Reformed Vampire Support Group meets every Tuesday night, trying to keep out of temptation’s way?
Deo loves soccer and his family – will he have either one left after fleeing a massacre? Now is the Time for Running as he suddenly becomes one of the many refugees struggling to enter South Africa.
Maya’s trip from her birthplace in Canada to her parents’ homeland of India became a much longer and more perilous journey than she or her father ever imagined, as chronicled in the verse-novel Karma.
When I Was Joe jumps right out of the headlines about urban London gang fights and the witness protection programme, followed by the gripping Almost True – yes, Keren David is writing a third book about Ty right now.
Trapped between a massive glacier and the frozen fjord, Solveig and her siblings pray for rescue by their royal father, listening for Icefall, trapped in a mountain fort with a traitor.
Louise suddenly went from the Connecticut suburbs to the decks and plush staterooms of the Titanic as she unwittingly became The Time-Traveling Fashionista.
Of course, the River of Time series took us far away and far back in time, as Gabi and Lia traveled back to the 14th century from their archaeologist mother’s dig site in Tuscany. Swordfights, romance, and intrigue! Start with Waterfall (first in the series), then continue the adventure in Cascade and Torrent. Lisa T. Bergren is working on the next book in the series, after her recent trip to Italy for more research.
More of the wide world coming up, as we travel soon to Iran, to the Moon, to the future, to Australia, and beyond with the BooksYALove (but won’t find on the bestsellers’ lists).
Found this great statue of kids reading in Kingston, Jamaica.
**kmm
Technology seems mighty essential to us these days, but sometimes unplugging is the right thing to do.
The internet access that I hoped to have during our travels through the American West began to vanish as the mountains grew higher and the distances between towns grew longer.
Yellowstone National Park was wonderful, as we watched Old Faithful and other geysers erupt, hiked to waterfalls, and celebrated the forest’s recovery from the huge wildfires of 1988. Elk? yep. Bison? in abundance! but no online access as we camped above quiet Lewis Lake.
Relaxing and enjoying the scenery will be the norm for a while as we travel places that Kelsa went (will go?) in Trickster’s Girl, through the lava-strewn wild country of Craters of the Moon National Monument, just down the road from the 50 (yes, fifty) nuclear reactors of the Idaho National Laboratories…
So it’s on to Seattle for the Kidlitcon bloggers’ convention this weekend, with Scott Westerfeld as keynoter (yay!), then time to tour the Oregon coast (hmm… where Maddie will chafe under the restrictions of DigitalSchool in the future of Awaken) and amazing national parks in several states (hello, Redwoods! hi, Crater Lake! nice to see you, Bryce Canyon!).
It might be a while before I can get new books posted here, but never fear! BooksYALove has lots of outstanding books beyond the bestsellers coming your way!
**kmm
We’ve circled the globe during July and the Ultimate Blog Challenge, highlighting books set in many countries (and eras).
The Grassland Trilogy reaches back beyond written history, showing the courage of young people trying to Escape the Mask, see Beneath the Mask, and go Beyond the Mask.
Cate of the Lost Colony traveled from the glittering court of Queen Elizabeth I to the desolate sand dunes of Roanoke in the New World, and Plain Kate, driven from her home by superstition, must search for answers down the river, into the mists.
Esty’s Gold took us from famine-stricken Ireland to the Australian goldfields in the 1880s, while The Reformed Vampire Support Group sticks together in today’s Sydney.
Online gamers in China, India, Singapore and the US are fighting For the Win and a fair chance at life.
Annexed and Briar Rose brought us perspectives on the Holocaust – the Netherlands, Germany, Poland – so many bitter sorrows, so many untold tales.
Modern-day Paris hides decades-old secrets in Die For Me, while in Montreal, Mira just wants her own today in Pieces of Me.
And we’ve just begun the Rivers of Time trilogy, as Lia and Gabi go back to 14th century Tuscany in Waterfall.
Oh, the photo up there? That’s me aboard the wooden sailing ship Southern Swan in Sydney Harbour in the 21st century. Ready for more great books in August?
**kmm
Terry Border makes weird things – Bent Objects, to be exact. And he concocted this still-life at the behest of his publisher. Yep, a book publisher asked for a sculpture that showed eReaders zooming way beyond printed books… anyone else see the ‘huh?’ in that??
Of course, it is the contents of books that we crave – the drama, the emotion, the relationships, the information, the humor – and sometimes the container doesn’t matter at all.
If I’m looking for a map of the Lewis and Clark Trail, I don’t care if it’s online, in a National Park Service guide, or in a library book.
I’ve read numerous books in bite-sized pieces delivered to my email by Daily Lit, as Advance Reader Copies through NetGalley, and in whole works through Project Gutenberg (and have even helped proofread some new digitizations there).
But our brains just don’t read text on the screen the same way that they read text on a page, according to researchers, as Thomas Larson notes in his overview of several recent books and studies on the two methods of reading.
I still love print books best for fiction, curled up in my chair, with a cat or two on my lap. No batteries to run down, no cords or mice (sorry, kitties), no overheating (laptops can be lapscorchers). The tactile experience of turning the pages of a book contributes to our reality of the reading experience.
I like real.
**kmm
Since my dad is (a) driving with Mom somewhere in Canada with the cellphone off, (b) doesn’t get online at all (but does ask us kids to look up things when visiting), and (c) probably doesn’t know exactly what a blog is, I’ll still wish him Happy Father’s Day here as we look back at some fictional fathers in recent BooksYALove recommendations.
In YA books, dads can often be a cipher, just kind of a placeholder while Mom is the key figure – try Ten Miles Past Normal and Stolen for father-who’s-there-but-barely. Other times, Dad has to fill both parental roles (Zen & Xander Undone -not so well, and I Love Him to Pieces, much better).
Some are adoptive fathers as in Dogtag Summer and Heart of a Samurai, while others are fathers no longer in the child’s home, like This Thing Called the Future.
We have bumbling-yet-well-meaning fathers in Kat, Incorrigible and Visconti House, then trying-the-best-they-can dads in What Happened to Goodbye and Astronaut Academy.
Plenty of papas are long, long gone, as in Flawless and Fire, while others are rather too involved in their teenagers’ lives (Awaken, anyone?), as far as the teens are concerned.
Fathers might leave through divorce (Who Is Frances Rain?) or through death (Saraswati’s Way and Trickster’s Girl), and yet young adults must cope with their changed world, a world with one pair of guiding hands forever gone…
Of course, we’ll find these various sorts of fathers, father-figures, and conspicuous-by-their-absence fathers as we go along on BooksYALove = family is so often a key element in YA fiction.
So, wish a dad Happy Father’s Day today, even if he’s not your dad; there’s enough love to go around, right?
**kmm
Time to put a little structure into BooksYALove (but promise me that you’ll try some titles outside your “favorite” genre):
Mysterious Mondays – because there’s not a day that starts with P for paranormal! Books featured on Monday will have elements of the supernatural, mystery, magic, or other paranormal characters and situations. Quite a few recommendations recently in this category, like Awaken (futuristic), House of Dead Maids (ghosts, mystery), and Kat, Incorrigible (magic, alternate history).
World Wednesdays – getting away from the confines of home. Find a different place in the world with every Wednesday book, set in a country outside the USA. Recent recommendations in this group include Mamba Point (Liberia) and Stolen (Australia).
Fun Fridays – going into the weekend with a grin. Friday books will range from humorous ways that characters cope with life (Ten Miles Past Normal) to crafty books (Little Green Dresses) to graphic novels (I Love Him to Pieces).
Oh, Tuesday and Thursday? Gotta have time for books that don’t fit in these three boxes, although sometimes they’ll have books with theme-day elements (especially when a series is covered over successive days). Lots of realistic fiction here, like Zen & Xander Undone and Last Summer of the Death Warriors.
Watch for some Reflective Sundays, like last week’s post on YA Saves! and perhaps the occasional Sneak-in Saturday, where I discuss a book that – dang it – has gone shooting toward the bestseller lists before I got a chance to showcase it here, and I just love it too much to leave it off our lists here.
Think this’ll work? Any “hidden gem” titles that I need to include on BooksYALove?
**kmm
I wasn’t gonna post today, but yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article about YA books “Darkness Too Visible” has me and lots of other folks pretty steamed up.
Check the Twitter conversation #YASaves for reaction from authors, readers, and librarians; we gotta wonder about the article author’s qualifications as a book reviewer… (search her name and tell us what you think)
Did she ask any independent bookstore folks about what books they would recommend to the worried mom in paragraph one? How about her child’s school librarian? Or their public librarian?
Maureen Johnson (whose 13 Little Blue Envelopes and The Last Little Blue Envelope are bestsellers and won’t get the full BooksYALove treatment – so just go read them!) has a new favorite picture, by Anastasiy Gorbunov, which illustrates exactly how books lead to new interests and visions and experiences. (The caption translates as “Reading isn’t dangerous. Not reading is.”)
Dr. Teri Lesesne, “the goddess of YA literature” and major expert in the field, was explosively ticked-off by the article, as her LiveJournal today shows. The points that she notes there are exactly why YA books are so important, and why I’m trying to get the word out about the great titles that you’ll miss if you don’t dig past the big display stacks at the big-box bookstores or the “you’ll like this one” lists at the big online retailers.
Too bad that the mom in the WSJ article didn’t have someone to help her find that great book for her 13 year-old daughter… like Smile and Dancing Through the Snow and Sequins, Secrets and Silver Linings… sigh…
At least the #YASaves hashtag is trending high right now (#3) so the conversation continues! C’mon over to Twitter and join in.
**kmm
Whew! Time to step back and look at the first month of BooksYALove…
So many firsts = first posting on May 1st as WordCount’s Blogathon2011 gets rolling. Followed by first book recommendation, first comments, first subscribers, first tweets – and lots of friendly feedback from fellow Blogathonners.
Most of my recommendations were for fiction books, with some cool nonfiction thrown in, all books that young adults (and young-at-heart adults) will enjoy reading, but might not find in the big displays at booksellers or on best seller lists.
Worth looking at again:
Scary books: Stolen and The House of Dead Maids
High school drama (but funny): Flawless and Ten Miles Past Normal
Futuristic books: Awaken and Across the Universe
Graphic novels: Smile and My Boyfriend is a Monster
Across the sea: Warriors in the Crossfire and Saraswati’s Way
I have a big stack of books that I;ve read and just cannot wait to share with y’all, this summer I’m planning to post several new book recommendations every week (though perhaps not one a day), with occasional reflective musings and some guest posts that highlight “forgotten gems” of YA lit from earlier years.
So, grab a book and take your mind somewhere else this summer – you’ll be glad you did! And let me know of any books that I need to read and recommend here, too.
**kmm
A book a day, all through May!
Thanks, WordCount Blogathon 2011 for setting me on this mindful path of daily posting.
Happy Memorial Day, for US readers – and everyone read Dogtag Summer by Elizabeth Partridge, today’s great YA book beyond the bestsellers.
**kmm