I’ve come across some interesting bookish articles and news that I thought I’d share, then I’ll announce a winner!!

From Salon.com, “Book Owners Have Smarter Kids”  by Laura Miller not only mentions research that shows that children who are surrounded by books at home are more likely to complete more years of education — but also cites another study that found that giving low-income children several books (that they choose themselves) at the beginning of summer vacation helps prevent the three-month slipping back in academic skills.  

I happen to support the idea year-around schools for all kids (with short breaks throughout the year, rather than a three-month break) –but that is a soap box of my own.   Hope you take a look at the article — it’s worth reading.

Salon.com also has another recent article that I found interesting, again by Laura Miller: “Young Romantics: Bohemians Behaving Badly”.    This article mentions a couple books that I’m now curious about:  “Young Romantics” by Daisy Hay (released a couple months ago) and “The Age of Wonder:  How the Romantic Generation discovered Beauty and Terror of Science” (released last year).  After reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for the Dueling Monsters read-along  last fall and more recently “Wildly Romantic” by Catherine Andronik, I want to find out how these books would add to the knowledge and insight of the people of the Romantic Era — Shelley, Byron, Keats, and so on.

Did you hear that Target has been authorized to be the first (and right now, only) bricks-and-mortar store to sell the Amazon.com Kindle?  I first heard from Publisher’s Weekly’s website: E-Reader Wars Escalate: Target to Sell Kindle.  I’m not ready yet for an e-reader (although I sure wouldn’t turn one down if it were a gift), but I do know this — I would want to compare each one in a hands-on manner before buying.  That couldn’t be done with the Kindle until now.  Now we can all just go to Target to take a look!

If you like reading works in translation, you may like knowing amazon.com is starting a new imprint: AmazonCrossing.  The link explains more, and you can sign up for e-mails for further information, such as when they release new titles.  “The King of Kahel” by Tierno Monenembo will be their debut title; and can be pre-ordered.  It’ll be interesting to see whether this venture becomes successful!

Well, this is the second week of summer vacation.  With kids at home I’m behind on all aspects of blogging — I haven’t responded to comments left on my recent blog posts, or caught up on all the Armchair BEA posts, or caught up reading the blogs I follow –many of which have BEA and BBC posts up that I want to read.  The kids have been ramping up their social lives and also trying to hit the outdoor pool as much as possible — plus, of course, last weekend was Memorial Day weekend.  My youngest (9 years old) is too young for me to just drop them off and then come back, so I stay poolside.  Not necessarily a bad thing; I get some reading done that way!  Since the pool opened last Friday, my poolside reading has been “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot (purchased).  This book has been getting many positive reviews, and I can see why.  The writing is smooth enough that it is good poolside reading for me.

I also have reviews of finished books I need to catch up on — I’m going to try to do that this week!  How is it that this week is halfway done, though?!

Okay, now the announcement that you have all been waiting for!  Who won the give-away of my ARC copy of Josh Berk’s book, “The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin” that I offered during Armchair BEA last week?

I still haven’t figured out how to do screen captures, so my iPhone came to the rescue again.  This picture shows that Number 7 out of ten entries is:

Jen of Teach Mentor Texts !  This is great.  I met her when I interviewed her  for Armchair BEA; and she works with hearing-impaired kids!  She said in the comment section:

“One of the middle schools I work at has hosted a few author visits and they do such a great job. If they know an author is coming, they make sure all the students read one book by the author – it’s called, “One School, One book”. It is such a cool experience for all the kids to have read the book and then to get to hear the author speak. They have had visits from Terry Trueman after reading “Stuck In Neutral” about a boy with severe cerebral palsy, Gordon Korman after reading “Schooled” about a boy who was raised on a hippie commune but then gets forced into a normal middle school life where he struggles to fit in, and, just recently, Dave Cullen (this one was last minute so the students had not read his book “Columbine” but he did talk about all his research and what was uncovered in the book). I think it would be great for them to read Berk’s book and to get to meet him! …plus I could meet him, too!”

Well, hopefully one day soon Josh Berk will make a trip out to Illinois to visit the schools where she works!

 The books that Jen mentions in her comment all look interesting — I already want to read “Columbine”, since I currently live in Colorado but not when the horrible events happened.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to stop by and leave comments for the give-away!  All the suggestions were very good for where Josh Berk could go for author signings.

Any interesting book-related news you have recently heard about?  Books that are currently on your radar?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 12:35 PM and is filed under Young Adult, blogging, books, give-away, interview, reading, websites to check out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.