So where can you find all that YAuthor information? RIGHT HERE because it’s YAuthor Stalking Tuesday! Learn about your favorite authors, have a chat with them and then share your YAuthor adventures. This week is Justine Larbalestier!
Favorite Recent Twitter quote: Today’s guest blogger, @thesarahcross has gone too far. My blog is now infested with uni***ns. Not happy. http://wp.me/peDKA-22W 4:01 PM Feb 12th
Sadly, I have not met Justine ::frown:: so instead of an Amber Adventure we will call this feature Awesome Author Says What?! where we will highlight a discussion by the Author (usually on their blog) that makes us think or laugh or stand up and clap our hands.
Justine Larbalestier Says What?!: The Cover of Liar:
Last summer, a controversy broke out when readers who were lucky enough to score an advanced reader’s copy of Liar realized that the girl they were reading about did not have the same skin color as the girl portrayed on the book’s cover. Here is what Justine had to say about the cover:
“Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them….How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?” Check Justine’s blog post for the rest of her comments.
Those are like three of my favoritest things! Tomorrow (February 16, 2010), Meg Cabot will twitter the first line of a novel and then we other twitterers will twitter the rest! So interactive, super-collaborative!!!
-To read the story, you just need to go to the BBC Audiobooks America twitter page: @BBCAA
-To add to the story, you will need to have a twitter account. Click here to join! Then send your contribution to @BBCAA and end it with the #bbcawdio tag. For example: @BBCAA And then the zombies arrived wearing princess dresses. #bbcawdio
-And to REALLY get how the collaboration is happening, search twitter for the #bbcawdio tag and you’ll get to see everybody’s contributions and compare them to the ones that get chosen for the actual story. Crazy stuff!
I like lots of nonsense and humor in my poetry, so no joke I am LOVING Eugene Ostashevsky’s recent collection titled The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza. Part screenplay, part sketchbook, part mathematical treatise…but ALL POETIC. Check out Bookslut’s review here and get a taste of the poetry below where I have transcribed the ending of one poem and the beginning of another.
The ending of Act Two:
Rejoicing at the window, DJ Spinoza falls onto the flowerbed and sprains his ankle.
The beginning of Act Three, Scene 1:
The woodchuck and the woodpecker
met each other in the wood.
The woodchuck and the woodpecker
could not make themselves understood.
The woodchuck and the woodpecker
walked away really bumming.
Alas! No two species of animals
have a language in common.
And now a sidenote from Amber: One time I wrote a poem about a pineapple air freshener in my car–it wasn’t very good. the poem, that is. the pineapple air freshener was divine. <—-that was kinda a poem, wasn’t it?
Get out the black construction paper and scotch tape. It’s time to make yourself a top hat because today is Lincoln’s B-day! Why not celebrate full force by sportin’ your homemade stovepipe hat and sauntering on over to DPL to check out the fascinating new Young Adult non-fiction thriller, Chasing Lincoln’s Killer.
Just listen to what the book jacket has to say…
“This story is all true. All the characters are real and were alive during the great manhunt of April 1865. Their words are authentic and come from original sources: letters, manuscripts, trial transcripts, newspapers, government reports, pamphlets, books, and other documents. What happened in Washington, D.C., that spring, and in the swamps and rivers, forests and fields of Maryland and Virginia during the next twelve days, is far too incredible to have been made up.”
So begins the fast-paced thriller that tells the story of the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth and gives a day-by-day account of the wild chase to find this killer and his accomplices. Based on James L. Swanson’s bestselling adult book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, this version, written especially for young people, is a fascinating look at the assassination of the sixteenth president of the United States. But there’s more to the story. Here readers will meet Abraham Lincoln the man, the father, the husband, the friend. And they will get a firsthand look at how Lincoln’s death impacted those closest to him.
Seems like we have a book for every occasion here at DPL. Chasing Lincoln’s Killer is a quick, engaging read and will appeal to fans of true crime and all things Presidential. Also a perfect choice for your next American History report!
So where can you find all that YAuthor information? RIGHT HERE because it’s YAuthor Stalking Tuesday! Learn about your favorite authors, have a chat with them and then share your YAuthor adventures. This week is sword-fighting and pyrotechnics expert Sarah Prineas!
Amber’s Sarah Prineas Adventure:
I lived a Sarah Prineas Adventure EVERYDAY FOR TWO YEARS! yup, when I lived down the street from her in Iowa City. YES SARAH PRINEAS IS FROM IOWA ISN’T THAT AWESOME AHHHHHHH! I get super excited when people or things or ice cream flavors are from Iowa. Sarah even designed her city of Wellmet, home of Conn and the rest of the characters in the Magic Thief books, to look like Iowa City! SEE WELLMET MAP HERE. SEE IOWA CITY MAP HERE. So of coooooooourse, you know what that means: I delusionally think that I lived in Wellmet, too…Doesn’t get more adventurousingly than that, eh?
The Winter Reading Program is here! And it’s pretty darn cool. Get this — just for checking out books and reading, you could win yourself a Wii! Everyone can participate: Mom, Dad, son, daughter, cousin, aunt, uncle, great-great-great grandma, third cousin twice removed — get the whole family involved! You can even compete against each other. Here’s how it works:
Stop by either the Main Library or the Fairmount Branch to pick up your official reading log. Logs will be available all over the library. You’ll be skiing down a mountain on your log, and once you get to the bottom, you’re done! You can fill out the entry slip, and bring it back to the library for a chance to win one of two Nintento Wii gaming systems. Check out some books — and you’ve skied your first stretch of the mountain. Read for fifteen minutes — the next stretch is done. Keep on doing this, and in no time you’ll be down the mountain, and that much closer to winning your own Wii.
And just because you’ve gotten down the mountain once, you’re not done! Keep on checking out books and reading them, and you can keep on submitting entries for the Wii. Enter as many times as you like! The ski fest is over on March 13, 2010, and we’ll draw the winners at Family Story Time on Tuesday March 16, at the Fairmount Branch. You don’t need to be there to win, but if you are, you could walk home that night with a brand new Wii. Just for reading!
So get to either Davenport Public Library, get yourself a log, and start skiing!
Battle Studies is John Mayer’s 4th studio album that was released November 17, 2009. When John Mayer first announced the title of his new album at a live show in June of 2009, he said “The album is called Battle Studies and that’s because it incorporates a lot of the lessons, a lot of the observations, and a little bit of advice. Like a handbook, like a heartbreak handbook.” Twitter was Mayer’s main place where he advertised the new album. He gave out track listings and link to songs. Some of the hits on the album include “Who Says” and “Heartbreak Warfare”. As quoted before, the album is filled with sad break up songs. The album is filled with sad, heartfilled but absolutely wonderful lyrics. Each song contains the origional John Mayer style along with the catchy rhythm of the rhythm section. When the album was first released, it reach the #1 place on the Billboard 200 Chart, selling 286,000 copies within it’s first week of being on the market. Of those 286,000 copies, I contain 1 of them. It also had a huge it in the iTune Store, ranking up to the 4th place in top album sales. Not all of his songs on the album are origional, he does a cover of the Cream song “Crossroads” and if you order the album off of the itunes store, you recieve the Bruce Springstein cover of “I”m On Fire”. He also does a song called “Half of My Heart” featuring the ever talented Taylor Swift. This is by far my favorite album of John Mayer’s and I would have to give the album a 5/5 star rating. -Dylan
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Get out the black construction paper and scotch tape. It’s time to make yourself a top hat because today is Lincoln’s B-day! Why not celebrate full force by sportin’ your homemade stovepipe hat and sauntering on over to DPL to check out the fascinating new Young Adult non-fiction thriller, 
The Winter Reading Program is here! And it’s pretty darn cool. Get this — just for checking out books and reading, you could win yourself a Wii! Everyone can participate: Mom, Dad, son, daughter, cousin, aunt, uncle, great-great-great grandma, third cousin twice removed — get the whole family involved! You can even compete against each other. Here’s how it works:
And just because you’ve gotten down the mountain once, you’re not done! Keep on checking out books and reading them, and you can keep on submitting entries for the Wii. Enter as many times as you like! The ski fest is over on March 13, 2010, and we’ll draw the winners at Family Story Time on Tuesday March 16, at the Fairmount Branch. You don’t need to be there to win, but if you are, you could walk home that night with a brand new Wii. Just for reading!