Neil Gaiman (yes, that Neil Gaiman) wins...The Newbery Award!

Announced this morning, Neil Gaiman's completely wonderful, creepy, exciting, spellbinding and magical book for young readers (or for anyone who enjoys a good tale, frankly) The Graveyard Book has won the much coveted Newbery Award!

Huzzah!

Here is Neil's reaction to the news.

Happy Birthday MLK

Book Review: Blankets by Craig Thompson

If I could jump up and down and cheer in addition to writing a review of this wonderful book, and as a result, get more people to sit down and read it, I certainly would .

This is not a "comic book" in the sense that most folks take the term to mean (read: poseable action figures, collector's trading cards, movie tie-ins, etc.) There are no multi-powered, spandexed super heroes or super villains in this plot - only the everyday kind, the ones who look just like you and me and pass us in the street everyday.

This is an illustrated or graphic novel (in the official trade lingo) from one of the brightest talents writing and drawing today. A tender and painful story based on Thompson's own life, Blankets is a marriage of words and pictures that will lead you through the complexities of childhood, family, love, hope, despair, time, memory and healing - in no less than 582 black & white pages.

Highly recommended for all us grown-ups looking for great literature in the not-so-obvious form it can sometimes take in the hands of a truly gifted creator.

Hey, check this out...

In the realm of cool links, I think this may have won the gold:

www.jacksonpollock.org/

Book Review: Paper Towns by John Green

Oh how I do love John Green.

Not only does Green populate his works with unforgettable characters and situations, be packs them with persistently challenging ideas, too. And Paper Towns, Green’s 3rd foray into Young Adult lit, is no exception to that rule.

Our tale begins with a ninja. A girl ninja who happens to read Walt Whitman. And one night, she unexpectedly pops up in the middle of the night, at the window of an old childhood friend. And what is said ninja’s name? Margo Roth Spiegelman. And what is our ninja’s game? Namely, to enlist her onetime playmate Quentin, or “Q” for short, into becoming a fellow ninja/sidekick/getaway driver on a series of cleverly plotted all-night-escapades. Quentin, shocked and thrilled by the abrupt reappearance of a girl he hasn’t had contact with for years, suddenly finds himself drawn into the unimaginable twists, turns and tangles that all add up to Margo Roth Spiegelman, our Whitman reading ninja.

An enigma wrapped up inside a mystery, Margo is the kind of girl whose orbit everyone wants to be part of; and, she is also the kind of girl who can disappear from family and friends for days or weeks at a time, leaving only small, seemingly insignificant “clues” behind in her wake.

Part mystery, part nail-biter, and part quest, Paper Towns is ultimately a story about finding yourself lost, finding your way out, and just plain finding yourself in the most unlikely of ways and in the most “consistently misimagined” of places.

Favorite quote, which truly sums up the premise of Paper Towns:

“It is easy to forget the world is full of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”

A fabulous read and very highly recommended.

~Reviewed by L. Payne, The Book Gobbler