Two decades after the release of the first Goosebumps book, Jen Doll checks in with R. L. Stine.
Goosebumps Turns Twenty
Against Captain Underpants
Renaissance Learning has released its annual report on what children are reading. The NYDaily News books blog takes offense at some of the more popular books named in the report, suggesting that kids and teens deserve to be challenged by better literature. The Huffington Post mines through the report to discover that American teenagers on average are still reading at or near the level of fifth graders.
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Thursday Links
An illustration of why Cliffs Notes are never a substitute for the real thing.The Britannica Blog looks at "fun facts" about the 1,000 most popularly held books in libraries around the world, including this item: "Which author has the most works on the OCLC Top 1000 list? William Shakespeare (with 37 works). He is followed by Charles Dickens (16 works) and John Grisham (13 works)." Here's the full list where The Bible comes in at #1, the Census at #2, and Mother Goose at #3 (in 2,036 different versions and editions.) (via)Powell's is making a series of short documentaries about writers that will supplement and stand in for book tours. From the New York Times: "The British author Ian McEwan is the star of the first film, which is planned to run 23 minutes and will feature snippets from an on-camera interview with Mr. McEwan, as well as commentary from peers, fans and critics." The film is being put out to coincide with the release of his new novel, On Chesil Beach. (via)
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“I see their politics as a response to a challenge they both face”
Page-Turner interviewed Dinaw Mengestu, who has a story in the latest issue of the New Yorker (paywall), and whose forthcoming book All Our Names was highlighted by yours truly in our Great Book Preview.
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Needs More Pigs
The archives of the British Library have been digitized, and among many other gems is this rejection of George Orwell's Animal Farm by none other than T.S. Eliot, himself: “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
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Quite the Crossover Artist
Before Dr. Seuss penned the Lorax who spoke for the trees, he drew ads for Standard Oil, General Electric, and a host of other large corporations who spoke for a considerably different constituency. This great collection of advertising artwork from Theodore Seuss Geisel courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.
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