The Morning RSS - Monday, 8 Jan 2024
A collection of share-worthy items from our morning blog scroll.
Welcome friends and fellow bookies! Happy New Year!!
For Writers & Creators
“Disguised” as an Op-Ed, Alex Clark has a lovely ode to the written word over at the Guardian: We should cherish handwriting: the scribbled, the scrawled, the stubbornly jotted
Our communications lose character when we give up putting pen to paper. It’s hard to imagine an Auden poem celebrating the arrival of the night email ~ Alex Clark
Poetry lovers: do you follow the blogs of the Poetry Sisters? They share an original poem of a selected poetic form each Friday of the year. Learn more at Tanita Davis’ blog {fiction instead of lies}
… and you might consider joining Janet Wong and
for their “think poetry” workshop coming this month.… for the Young Reader in All of Us
Mark your calendars, plan a trip to DC some time soon! The National Building Museum is opening a new long-term multi-generational exhibit called Building Stories. It opens 21 Jan and will be there for 10 years!
In the exhibition visitors will encounter familiar classics and new favorites through hands-on activities, media installations, sketching, reading, and building stories of their own.
It’s curated by Leonard Marcus, and includes “original environments” created by Davic Macaulay and Oliver Jeffers. I could go on, but Betsy Bird has all you need to know right here.
New Books & Book Lists
And so it begins … a new year, more new books. We won’t get them all, but we’ll share what we find that you may not see elsewhere.
As Shifa Safadi explains in the intro, “readers can find healing in words.” Don’t miss her post about the importance of Arab books and a book list of MG books by Arab authors. She also has a link to a Ramadan article and a list of Muslim MG books.
The Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Authors blog also has 12 - you guessed it - MG books to kick off your year: January 2024 New Releases
Off the Shelf has a list of 10 January e-Book Deals “for a year of endless possibilities.” One of the things that we love about Off the Shelf is that theirs is not just a list. They make it easy to choose your format and go directly to that next possible read.
A little self promotion: The 2023 CYBILS Awards finalists have been announced. That’s 98 new books for your TBR. If you don’t know about the CYBILS, highly recommend Amanda MacGregor’s post at Teen Librarian Toolbox [and click the link for Karen’s post, too!]
Book Bans & Censorship
“Rather than focus on those threats [to librarians and book access], perhaps they’re better framed as opportunities. These areas of contention are places where librarians, who are overwhelmingly perceived as trustworthy and worthy of respect, can harness those perceptions to combat mis-, dis-, and malinformation about what they do. ~ Kelly Jensen
Kelly is launching a new series that will offer insights and calls to action based on the results of last fall’s surveys about parental perceptions of libraries, librarians, and book access. Read all about it at
: Data Overwhelmingly Supports Libraries and Library Workers: Book Censorship News, January 5, 2024.Other Bookish Stuff
Is one of your reading goals to try a new genre? Maybe nonfiction? Well, then this
post is for you: How to Start Reading Nonfiction.It’s “heavy medal” season! The Youth Media Awards will be announced shortly, and readers everywhere are creating mock lists of who will win what. This one from Travis Jonkers (aka 100 Scope Notes): 2024 Mock Caldecott Results
According to my sweet husband on 1 Jan, “the CYBILS are blowing up Twitter.” Not quite, but we’re excited to start the year with book joy. It’s the best. ~ Terry