Recent YA blog posts I almost missed

August 7, 2010

I somehow fell behind on Internet stuff and have been working over the last couple weeks to catch up. I still have email to take care of and my Instapaper queue is a complete disaster, but I’ve finally caught up on all of my Google Reader feeds. Here are some things from the last month or two I found especially interesting.

“Life & Death in YA Lit” at Jacket Whys uses Wordle word clouds to pull out common terms in YA book titles and compare them to the common words in summaries of and subject headings those books. Covers featured “dead,” “dark,” “love,” and “life,” but the summaries and subject headings mostly focused on high school with dashes of friendships, certain ages, interpersonal relations, love, family, and the supernatural.

Alicia the LibrariYAn provides four suggestions for people who want to be librarians to teens and tweens.

I wasn’t able to make it to ALA Annual this year, but the blog coverage of the conference was pretty thorough. I was especially bummed to not be able to attend the Printz Award ceremony since Libba Bray won with GOING BOVINE, which she talked about during the Genre Galaxy preconference at last year’s annual. But Stephanie Kuenn covered the Printz speeches for the YALSA blog, so I was at least able to watch Libba’s speech and oh man was it awesome:

Monica of Educating Alice talked about summer reading as leisure reading while also making the case for quality literature during the school year. It was great to see an acknowledgement that all reading is reading, but that experts can still guide kids to well-written books–and teach them how to tell good literature from not-so-good.

I also really loved Sarah’s GreenBeanTeenQueen post about what characters in YA books read. She was disappointed that in so many books, characters who mention how much they like reading or how important it is always seem to be reading “the classics” and not great YA books. And while she admits that there’s nothing wrong with teens reading grownup books, I totally agree that having literate characters not reading YA novels misses a great internal advertising opportunity. Great YA lit should be recognized as great and not always put in second place after what grownups read.

I think there’s still a lot of room for analysis of young adult literature, but there are a couple of bloggers out there who are doing critical readings and writing about youth lit. Debbie Reese tirelessly writes about American Indians in children’s literature (which includes YA lit) and Trisha of the YA YA YAs recently reflected on Asian American narratives she encountered growing up and why they left her dissatisfied. Lee Wind also reviews tons of teen books with queer content at I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell do I read? and sometimes writes longer posts about trends or issues he sees in YA lit. And I am so stoked that Angie Manfredi (who presented part of the session I attended at PLA on queering the library) is now writing Fat Girl, Reading, which approaches youth lit from a fat acceptance and feminist perspective. I’m really looking forward to what Angie has to talk about.

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Tags: authors and illustrators, blogs, book covers, feminism, libba bray, ya lit