“The Vampire in the Rocket Ship”

by Rachel

Newsflash: lots of teenagers like fantasy & sci-fi! Cedar Falls librarians Yolanda Hood and Kelly Stern were in Des Moines last week giving a talk called “The Vampire in the Rocket Ship” about how fantasy and science fiction have become a lot more accessible to people who don’t necessarily love “high-fantasy.” They had lots of excellent titles to recommend; these are 4 of my favorites:

A Taste for Red by Lewis Harris

A Taste for RedStephanie, aka “Svetlana,” is a goth-clad sixth grader who eats exclusively red foods, sleeps under her bed, and discovers that she can control people with her mind. She’s also convinced that she’s a vampire. Stephanie / Svetlana has a new teacher, Mrs. Larch, and she thinks they might have something in common! For instance, Mrs. Larch has a suspiciously dark wardrobe… But is Mrs. Larch really on her side? Reader beware: this book has one really dark scene with a dead body.

Bayou by Jeremy Love
BayouThis graphic novel is surreal and dark, yet beautiful in its darkness. Lee is a black girl growing up in the Depression-era Deep South. One day, a group of white men sends her down to the swamp to retrieve the body of a boy who has been lynched. She takes her white friend, Lily, with her, but Lily is snatched by a swamp creature! Mistakenly believing that Lee’s father is the one who kidnapped Lily, the villagers take him away. Lee must go into the parallel universe — a swampish Alice in Wonderland — to find a bog man who can help her recover Lily and absolve her father. Due to its dark, heavy nature, this book is perhaps best for older readers.

Rampant by Diana Peterfreund
RampantIn the last few years we’ve all read about wizards, vampires, zombies and werewolves. But get ready for something totally new: unicorns! So there is no good way to talk about this book without making you laugh… In Rampant, unicorns are flesh-eating monsters that can only be killed by virginal women who are descended from Alexander the Great! When Astrid learns the truth about unicorns from her mother, she must raise an army to battle the vicious creatures. The battle scenes are fascinating, nasty, super gory, and also just kinda funny. Recommended for 7th grade and up, depending on how much gore you can handle.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
When You Reach MeThis book has been getting fantastic reviews! Miranda is a sixth grader who obsessively rereads A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle in order to cope with her life as a twelve year-old. But when her best friend Sal gets beat up by the new kid, Marcus, things get super weird and Miranda is forced to start coming out of her shell. Then one day she gets this note: “I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own. I must ask two favors. First, you must write me a letter.” In fantastic Tesseract style, a collapse of the space-time continuum ensues and Miranda must solve the puzzle to find out how Sal and Marcus are mixed up in the mystery.

crazy jumper man (mild language in lyrics)

by gomerman

EPIC Wall Dralion

more crazy things on the web, all you got to do is look

Nightlight : A Parody

by jason

Things can only get so popular before we, as a culture, ridicule it.  First there was Movies In Minutes : Twilight.  Now there is a Mad Magazine-like book parody coming called Nightlight: A Parody.  I’m not totally sure the joke will carry for an entire book, but this is how the publisher describes it :

“Pale and klutzy, Belle arrives in Switchblade, Oregon looking for adventure, or at least an undead classmate. She soon discovers Edwart, a super-hot computer nerd with zero interest in girls. After witnessing a number of strange events–Edwart leaves his tater tots untouched at lunch! Edwart saves her from a flying snowball!–Belle has a dramatic revelation: Edwart is a vampire. But how can she convince Edwart to bite her and transform her into his eternal bride, especially when he seems to find girls so repulsive?”

An excerpt (taken from Abebooks Reading Copy Book Blog) :

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still, he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn’t noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.

A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room—maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman’s idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.

“What is that?” I asked, knowing that whatever it was it wasn’t avian.

“That’s Edwart Mullen,” Lucy said.

Edwart. I had never met a boy named Edwart before. Actually, I had never met any human named Edwart before. It was a funny sounding name. Much funnier than Edward.

As we sat there, gazing at him for what seemed like hours but couldn’t have been more than the entire lunch period, his eyes suddenly flicked toward me, slithering over my face and boring into my heart like fangs. Then in a flash they went back to glowering at that screen.

“He moved here two years ago from Alaska,” she said.

So not only was he pale like me, but he was also an outsider from a state that begins with an “A.” I felt a surge of empathy. I had never felt a connection like this before.

“That boy’s not worth your time,” she said wrongly. “Edwart doesn’t date.”

I smirked inwardly and snorted outwardly. So, I would be his first girlfriend.

WTF(Why the flu?)

by gomerman

So this last week, over a fourth of the City High population was out sick due to what some think might be the dreaded “H1N1″ virus. This may be so, seeing as I was a victim to it, and after just a few days of brutal sickness, now I just feel the slightest inkling of sick left over.(and no, i am not just a superhuman freak who has an awesome immune system) Earlier in the school week, we were shown a video on the, “proper techniques” for coughing, which involve some way of getting you to cough into the fabric of your sleeve instead of into your hands.

What is/was your worst experience with an illness, and what happened after you got better from it(assuming you are done with it)

TAG Meeting Minutes 10/6/09

by Rachel

TAG Meeting Minutes
10/6/09
4:30 – 5:30
ICPL Meeting Room B

WHO WAS THERE
Kim, Darian, Shecharya, Naftalia, Jason, Rachel

VOLUNTEER HOURS
So I need to know how many hours you spent on TAG-related activities in September, as well as August. How many hours did you spend at TAG meetings & events, working on podcasts, and writing blog posts? Let me know by this Tuesday (Oct. 13) at the latest. If you don’t tell me how many hours you volunteered, then I can’t give you credit — and that would be sad. :(

“VIDEO GAME SHOWDOWN”
This is happening ideally some Saturday in November from 1-3:00 p.m. Keep your little eyeballs peeled for the official date, coming soon.  We’ll have our November TAG meeting before the tournament, at noon, with pizza. Shecharya has been dubbed the Tournament Master, due to his logistics expertise. There will be prizes! Snacks! And non-video games such as Apples to Apples! I think I also promised Kim that I would bring my cribbage board, so get excited.

HI, NEW MEMBERS!
New members Darian and Naftalia were at Tuesday’s meeting. It was so great to see both of you — you had great ideas for our upcoming events!

PODCASTS / BLOG POSTS
It’s official: Zoe and Shecharya are our Podcast Directors. Kim, David and Darian are our Blog Editors. Keep your eye out for info from them about upcoming podcast / blog projects.

Also, check out the blog for a super write-up by our Scribe, Erin, about the Banned-Books Read In. Emma took photos, which I hope she will share with us on the blog sometime very soon!

FotoFlexer Rules!

by Rachel

FotoFlexer is “the world’s most advanced online image editor.”  OK, so that’s their tagline, but it’s also pretty much true.  It’s completely free, you use it online without having to download or install anything, and I love it.  For anyone who wants to make collages of photos (& text?) that will actually look pretty instead of how they usually look on this blog (i.e. awkward with tons of white space), FotoFlexer is the way to go.  Tons of cool effects (Warhol, night vision, cartoon) and — YEP — *bling* for your photos.

Anyone else know about any other free online tools like this?  Let us know!

Banned Books Read-In Summary.

by Erin

A read-in to celebrate our freedom to read occured Thursday. Some topics included, freaky same book covers (see below),  and mangos/ other citrus friuts. We tried a variaty of banned books including TTYL, The Stupid’s Die, and The Book of Bunny Suicides. (Can you see a pattern here?) So you may be wondering, “Banned books? Why/ How do they ban a book?” Well, it basicly has to do with the content of the book and some parents complain to take it out of school libraries. The content is usually not “age appropriate” according to them like, in Shel Silverstiens book of poems it “encourages children to break dishes insted of washing them.” Cookies and water were present.

“White-Washing” Book Covers

by Rachel

This came up at the Banned Books Read-In last night, so I thought I’d throw a little post up for ya’ll.

So Emma and Erin made the amazing observation that Dirty Laundry by Daniel Ehrenhaft and Leap of Faith by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley have the EXACT SAME picture on the cover, only with the colors photo-shopped a little bit.  Oops!  Funny. . . but why would the authors do that???  As it turns out, most authors have almost no say in what their book cover looks like.  The publisher works with a graphics team to come up with the design, and the author just has to go with whatever they pick.  Cases like these can be pretty hilarious, BUT…

…Sometimes it’s kind of creepy and evil! Check it out: Bloomsbury Children’s Books, USA, recently decided to put this white girl on the cover of a book that is about a black girl “with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.”  Their PR department claims they made this choice because the narrator is “a compulsive liar who may have been lying about her race,” but they actually did it because they think no one will buy a book with a black girl on the cover.  Pretty slimy, huh?  Justine Larbalestier, the author of Liar, was very unhappy with her publisher’s choice, and she wrote an awesome response about the controversy on her blog.  In fact, people were so outraged when they heard about this that the publisher changed its mind and the book cover now looks like this:

The worst part though?  This kind of thing happens all the time.  Urusla Le Guin’s book, Powers, originally had a white model on the cover even though the protagonist is Himalayan!