Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
What Do Teens Want to Read?

Publishers Weekly goes off in search of the answers.

They’re absolutely tremendous statistics to pore over, if you get a chance. Take, for instance:

When asked what formats they prefer, 79% noted paperback while 74% said hardcovers. Audiobooks were favored by 6%, while e-books were noted only by 6% and 13% had no preference as to format.

I don’t think the ‘Death of Print’ is going to happen anytime soon… Not for books, and not for this generation, at any rate.

Oct 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Sherman Alexie: "Don't Call Me Warrior"

Mother Jones Magazine takes a few moments to interview popular Native American author Sherman Alexie about a range of things – like “Obama’s tribe, Native wannabes, and why Kindles aren’t sexy.”

His 2007 novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is one of the best Young Adult books published (one of my favorite books ever, in fact), and as far as recognising and sympathising with children’s perspectives goes, I think Alexie is one of the best authors a person can read.

Now, as usual, he’s back with his witticism and cultural insight in this interview. I particularly love his opinion on what some call the “death” of the printed word:

If I had been talking about drowning polar bears, people would have been weeping with me. But nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And right now in this country, magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears. And if people can’t see that or don’t want to talk about it, I don’t understand them at all.

Oct 12, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Children's Literature Grows Up

An old 2002 piece from Salon about the surge in adult genre and fiction writers – like Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and Carl Hiassen – who have shifted their focus toward writing children’s literature:

It’s partly the memory of the potency of their childhood reading that prompts many adult authors to try their hand at the form. Handler says, “You never love a book the way you love a book when you’re 10. No matter how much I admire the work of Nabokov or Murakami, I’m not going to reread ‘Lolita’ or ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ nearly as many times as I reread ‘Harriet the Spy’ in third grade.” (It might be interesting to see what part “Harriet the Spy,” a book about the pleasures of voyeurism if ever there was one, played in the development of future film critics. I know of at least three who worshipped it as kids.)

Chabon feels similarly: “You never forget the delight that the books you loved as a child brought you; it’s all still there, you remember it. It’s fairly inevitable, I’d say, to want to try and get some of that for your own kids; but in the past, in this country at least, it was not necessarily feasible and perhaps not quite taken seriously enough.”

All of these authors have written really smashing good children’s books – and I’m glad they, and more authors like them, are recognizing the real rewards of writing for children. Let’s hope they continue.

(Discovered via Boing Boing.)

Jul 23, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Sympathizing with Vampires

With Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series at the forefront, Liz Rosenberg considers why so much of young adult literature today is rooted in the supernatural:

Like all speculative fiction, that of the supernatural allows teenagers to grapple with ideas. In this it’s kin to science fiction, though that genre tends to be social and political – “Stranger in a Strange Land’’ by Robert Heinlein or “A Clockwork Orange’’ by Anthony Burgess – while the supernatural inclines toward the psychological and personal.

Jun 28, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #