Omnivoracious: End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup

End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup

by Paul on November 08, 2009

Quick links from around the kid-lit blogosphere:

NYT: Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009. Every year, the New York Times pulls together a list of their ten favorite illustrated kids' books. Adam Gopnik (King in the Window) was one of this year's judges, and the NYT site has a great slideshow of the winners.

Riordan goes to Egypt. The man behind the Percy Jackson and the Olympians phenomenon has announced his next series, due in May 2010: The Kane Chronicles, based on Egyptian mythology, and revolving around (according to Cynopsis Kids) "what happens when a magical accident unleashes the Egyptian gods on the modern world, and siblings Carter and Sadie Kane discover that they are descendants of the greatest Egyptian magicians and thus the only ones who can put things right." Read more details at Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly: Best of 2009. Speaking of PW, they just released their list of Best Children's Books of 2009, 30 titles in all, "from accounts of civil rights heroes, to harrowing (and hopeful) stories about contemporary teenagers, to picture books that perfectly capture friendship, curiosity, or flights of fancy."

Amazon: Best of 2009. Not to miss out on the fun, we also released our best kids' books of the year, as part of our big ol', not-to-be-missed Best of 2009 store. You'll find Top 10 Middle Readers as well as Top 10 Picture Books. (And as Heidi noted in YA Wednesday, you'll also find the Top 10 Books: Teens.)

"Running Wild with Michael Morpurgo." School Library Journal has a new interview with former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo, in which he talks about his upcoming book Running Wild. He also talks about getting kids involved in reading: "If boys don't want to read it's notoriously difficult to make them. The best way to get them interested in books and stories is for parents to read to them and share stories with them at every opportunity and try lots of different genres—classic adventure stories, fantasy, and funny stories. Hopefully, they will soon find something that appeals to them and that they will want to read themselves."

The Horn Book's best new holiday books. The Horn Book has pulled together a helpful list of their top picks for new holiday books, including What’s Coming for Christmas?, A Piñata in a Pine Tree: A Latino Twelve Days of Christmas, and The Gingerbread Pirates. ("On Christmas Eve, a pirate captain gingerbread man (with a toothpick for a peg leg) refuses to accept his crew’s fate on the plate of the season’s most notorious cookie eater, Santa....")