School Library Journal review

School Library Journal declares itself “the world’s largest reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children and teens”. School Library Journal is a companion to Library Journal, and a sibling publication of Publisher’s Weekly, all of which are under the management of Reed Elsevier Inc.

While School Library Journal does review books for teens, much of the material in this publication is focused towards children. Limiting the articles to purely articles about teens does not leave a large amount of materials; SLJ focuses much of its attention on K – 8. However, despite the focus on children, the material that SLJ does publish on teens is particularly interesting, and would be very useful to teen librarians.

One such article was “Do You Speak Digital?: Harvard's John Palfrey Explores What It's Like to Be a Digital Native”. This article provided an interview with John Palfrey, whose new book, Born Digital, suggests a new way of conceiving of today’s youth. One of the strengths of SLJ is in these types of professional development pieces, especially the technology-focused professional development piece.

SLJ is additionally useful for its thorough reviews, which provide extensive description of the titles reviews. Inconveniently these reviews are all located under “Grade 5 and Up”; it may have been useful for them to be collocated under “Teens”, though most of SLJ’s reviews do indicate an age range.
Perhaps the most major problem with School Library Journal, however, is the RSS feeds, or lack thereof. Subscribing to the multiple RSS feeds of SLJ is very inconvenient, and there is often overlap between the different feeds, which leads to duplicate posts in one’s RSS feed reader.

Overall, SLJ has extremely useful content. It is somewhat unfortunate, though, that there are some obstacles to accessing it, such as the lack of collocation of the reviews of teen books, and the inconvenient RSS feed functions.

Teen Genreflecting Review

Diana Tixier-Herald’s Teen Genreflecting is a useful reader’s advisory resource that does not underestimate the intellectual potential of teens. Tixier-Herald provides an overview of all of the genres of literature: Historical Novels; Science Fiction; Fantasy; Mystery, Suspense and Horror; Adventure; Contemporary; and Romance. Each category is broken down much further into its subgenres, and titles are recommended for each subgenre.

An interesting introduction gives an overview of the importance of encouraging teens to read for pleasure, and the benefits of linking teens to materials of their own interest, including comic books and graphic novels. Tixier-Herald also explains her intention behind Teen Genreflecting; which is not to give a comprehensive guide to particular authors, but to facilitate thorough understandings of the genres that do exist, and their appeal to teens.

The scope of Teen Genreflecting is very broad, and encompasses much of the world of publications for teens. It is a useful tool for librarians who may be completely unaware of the variety of materials available for teens, or for adult readers’ advisors who may be looking to teen collections to recommend cross-over titles for their patrons.

Most titles recommended by Tixier-Herald are accompanied by a one or two line plot description; however, this is often not sufficient enough to assess the book’s appeal to teens. The Genreflecting approach may not benefit teen readers’ advisory in the same way that it benefits adults’ readers’ advisory, since many of the most popular teen titles blend genres together. Additionally, Tixier-Herald does not mention publication dates in her annotations. She justifies this in the introduction by suggesting that good genre fiction is timeless; however, some teen readers may disagree and want to read more recent titles.

In my own research during this course, I have found Teen Genreflecting to be a relatively useful resource; however, it is best accompanied by The Teen Reader’s Advisor by RoseMary Honnold. The two books used in conjunction with each other provide a very complete picture of teen materials: where The Teen Reader’s Advisor could use more thorough investigations of the genres, Teen Genreflecting steps in, and where Teen Genreflecting could use more discussion of appeal, The Teen Reader’s Advisor fills the gap.

New Yorker Cartoon

Plus an interesting blog post here.

The Puzzle of Boys

"[Niobe Way has] been interviewing teenage boys about their friendships, and what she's found is remarkable. While it's common wisdom that teenage boys either can't express or don't possess strong feelings about their friends, Way has discovered that boys in their early teens can be downright sentimental when discussing their friendships. When asked what they liked about their best friends, boys frequently said: "They won't laugh at me when I talk about serious things." What has emerged from her research is a portrait of emotionally intelligent boys who care about more than sports and cars. Such an observation might not sound revolutionary, but what boys told her and her fellow researchers during lengthy, probing interviews runs counter to the often one-dimensional portrayal of boys in popular culture. "They were resisting norms of masculinity," she says.

Note the past tense. At some point in high school, that expressiveness vanishes, replaced with a more defensive, closed-off posture, perhaps as boys give in to messages about what it means to be a man. Still, her research undermines the stereotype that boys are somehow incapable of discussing their feelings. "And yet," she says, "this notion of this emotionally illiterate, sex-obsessed, sports-playing boy just keeps getting spit out again and again."

Touchy-feely talk about friendships may seem disconnected from boys' academic woes, but Way insists they're pieces of the same puzzle. "If you don't understand the experience of boyhood," she says, "you'll never understand the achievement gaps.""

"The Puzzle of Boys", a very interesting article in The Chronicle.

Why Breaking Dawn Must Be Made Into a Movie

“I will not rest until I have seen a movie in which a werewolf falls in love with a baby. Hell, once I’ve seen a werewolf fall in love with a baby I may quit movie watching - I will have seen the ultimate culmination of a century of cinema.”

Watch out for the strong language in this blog post - but otherwise totally hilarious.

'Twilight,' the love that dare not speak its shame

"It's embarrassing, to love something you wish you hated." Exactly how I felt Thursday night, at the opening showing of New Moon.

Article in the Washington Post.

YALSA blog review

I have subscribed to the YALSA blog for approximately the last 3 months, and I have found it fairly interesting. “Fairly” is an important qualifier – while I think it is a particularly useful professional resource, I do not read YALSA’s blog when I am doing my own leisure reading. Considering my leisure blog reading involves multiple book and library blogs, that is a bit of a critique. YALSA’s blog posts are often overly informative, or simply too long, and not visually broken up very well.

However, though YALSA’s blog has little appeal to those outside of professionals working with teens, it functions extremely well as a professional blog. It would keep a YA librarian well-informed; for example, I had no idea that WWE had a reading program that my library could participate in. These kind of notices of corporate sponsorships, or grants that libraries can apply for, are the types of things that would be quite easy to miss in one’s everyday work, but when they are amalgamated by the YALSA blog, it is quite easy to stay up-to-date.

Another useful aspect of YALSA is using it to stay on top of teen trends. An October post discussed whether or not teens use Twitter (they don’t), and what that means for the future of social media. There has been significant discussion over what is the appropriate use of social media, and which ones appeal to teens (Facebook), and how to apply this type of advertising / publicity in one’s own library.

Something I do not find useful in the YALSA blogs are the book reviews. These reviews are overly long, tend to be fairly boring, and do not compare with some of the reviews written by popular bloggers. When a YALSA book review appears in my Google Reader, I simply scroll past it – these reviews are not written in an interesting enough voice for me to make it through the lengthy plot summaries.

What I do really enjoy about the YALSA blog is the “personal” posts by certain YA librarians. Recently, there have been a few posts on the Twilight craze, and how individual public or school libraries have dealt with the “Edward and Bella” problem. In October, there was an interesting post about the organization and layout of a particular school library, and potential problems that teens run into in this library in trying to find the books they are looking for. These types of posts promote a professional enthusiasm and camaraderie among YA librarians, which makes the profession more dynamic and appealing.