Odds and Ends

I have a bunch of book related thoughts running around in my head so I thought I would just throw them into a post today.

I picked up Janes in Love by Cecil Castellucci at the library the other day. This is the sequel to the graphic novel The Plain Janes. In this installment, the Janes are all crushing on different guys and trying to figure out how to ask them to a dance at school. Their art collective, P.L.A.I.N. is still causing an uproar in the community and Jane applies for a federal grant to make their group legitimate. While I enjoyed this book too, I really liked the first one more. I can’t really put my finger on why I wasn’t quite as fond of this one. It just didn’t strike me quite the same way. If you enjoyed The Plain Janes, you should still pick this one up too. It’s worth the hour (or less) it might take you to get through it.

On another graphic novel note. While we were at story time this week at Barnes and Noble, I noticed a “Comics and Manga” shelving section in the Children’s area. I hadn’t paid any attention to this before, but I looked through the selection while Ella was working on her coloring sheet. There is quite an array of graphic novels for grades 3-7. I was amazed! There are Babysitter’s Club and Nancy Drew mysteries in graphic novel format! There’s a whole series of Amelia’s Notebooks by Marissa Moss that look really fun. Moss also has one called Max’s Logbook for younger male readers (perhaps a nice a follow-up book to the Wimpy Kid series?). I was just really intrigued at the array of graphic novels available to this age group. And what a great thing for reluctant readers! They had a series called Phonics Comics that I’m going to look into for my five year old. She loves to “read” and wants more than anything to be able to read on her own but she’s just not quite there yet. So I think she might really like the Phonics Comics because she can look at the pictures and “read” the story. I also ran across a graphic novelization of Artemis Fowl. I’ve read the first couple in this series and own them all. I requested the graphic novel from the library. I think it will be fun to see what how the story is in a visual format.

Okay enough about graphic novels.

I received my Bookmarks Magazine in the mail yesterday. I always love getting this magazine. I find some time when I can be uninterrupted, sit in my comfy chair with a cup of tea and look through it marking the books I’d like to add to my TBR list. Well, this time I was very disappointed! I had already heard of almost all the general fiction books they were reviewing! I couldn’t believe it, almost all of them were LibraryThing Early Reviewer books, or on other ARC sites. Or I’ve read about them on the many book blogs I have in my Google Reader. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One, I’m really surprised at how knowledgeable I’ve become about the book world just by paying attention to more book blogs than I used to (LOVE my Google Reader!) and by participating in early reviewer programs. I also think this says A LOT about marketing in the book world and what a GIANT part book blogs and book review websites, such as LibraryThing and GoodReads, play in spreading the word about an upcoming book. You can now hear about new books months in advance! In the past, I think many times you didn’t hear about new books coming out except maybe a month or a few weeks in advance. It’s just really interesting to me that we are witnessing an evolution in the book world first hand. I guess I’ll hang in there for a couple more issues of Bookmarks, but I might have to consider letting my subscription go….