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Links of Note: March 22, 2014

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Pictured above: the displays I did in our teen area for women’s history month. Rather than stick to historical novels about females, I thought it’d be more fun to do a display of books featuring great girl characters. When I went back the day after I took this picture, I saw it had been nicely picked at, which makes me so happy.

I promised that I’d do a roundup of links other people had written that fit into the “About the Girls” series, and I’m going to put those in this biweekly roundup. If I missed something, leave a comment and let me know. This is going to be long, so prepare a couple cups of coffee or tea and settle in. First, the general links of note:

  • Jeanne wrote a really thought-provoking post about the DFTBA scandal, too. Read this post, read the updated post she links to, and definitely read the comments. 
  • I know I’ve shared this before but I’m sharing again because I love this series. Sarah Thompson’s still running her fantastic “So you want to read middle grade?” If you’re like me and know nothing about middle grade or if you’re a huge fan, this series of guest posts are excellent. 
  • Jennifer Rummel wrote a really excellent post for The Hub this week that traces British women’s history through YA fiction. Check it out. 
  • I often forget what a wonderful resource Pinterest can be for readers. One of the best Pinterest accounts out there, Lee & Low’s, is one you have to have on your radar if you’re looking for diversity in your collections, in your reading, or in your reader’s advisory. This is a goldmine. 
  • Matthew Jackson, who has written for us a few times, has an excellent column up at Blastr talking about 21 YA novels that pack a genre punch. This is especially for those readers — adults — who are skeptical about how well-written YA fiction can be. 

So I’d made a call for people to feel free and write about girls in YA any time during our series and I’d round them up. I am going to miss some posts, so please, alert me to others if I have. And if you’re still so compelled to write on this topic, do let me know when you post, too, and I’ll try to include it in a future link round up.

  • Liz Burns on female friendship in YA fiction, including three books she loved about girl friendships and she asks for input on more (with suggestions in the comments). 
  • I had a teacher in touch with me about how she used two of last week’s posts about unlikable female characters to spark a discussion in her classroom as it related to the book they were currently reading. She was even kind enough to share with me the classroom verbatim, and this discussion — with teenagers — is so fascinating and exciting and I hope it elicits other similar conversations with teen readers. 

Sarah Andersen is working on something with her students and their reaction/interaction with gender and reading and I cannot wait until she shares more about it. That feels like such a tease of a sentence, but she’s been polling her female students about their reading lives and experiences and influences to see what, how, and where gender and what they’ve been taught may impact them. This should be fascinating.

My posts elsewhere:

  • I was out of town when last week’s Book Fetish ran on Book Riot, but here it is. There’s something here for your Harry Potter fans and your fans of making cookies. 
  • I rounded up the things I wrote in relation to being on the Printz ballot, including a new guest post at Abby the Librarian about more favorite Printz honor titles, over on my Tumblr. 

Kelly’s Top Five Posts of 2013: A Look Back

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Kimberly hit on a lot of what I have to say about 2013 when it comes to blogging. We reached over a million hits, continued a couple of old series, kicked off new ones, and we passed our fourth year blogging together. In addition to all of those exciting — and big — milestones, 2013 was, I think, our strongest year when it came to writing and blogging more generally. I think for the first time for me, this blog felt like a real outlet and place to explore new ideas. Some of them began as small ideas and exploded into much bigger things when I wrote them out, while others I thought were bigger stayed small and confined to the blog. It was such a different year for blogging more broadly, too, which I plan on talking a bit more about next week sometime.

As Kim said, we thought it would be worthwhile to talk about some of our individual favorite posts from the past year. Here are five of my top picks, in no particular order:

Female Sexuality in YA Fiction

After writing this post back in June about female sexuality in YA, I’ve not stopped thinking about this topic. And I’m not just thinking about it as more books publish that tackle the subject, but I’m thinking about it in terms of backlist, too. A few people pointed me to older titles that explore female sexuality in some capacity, and I am really looking forward to reading them and thinking about how far — or not far — YA fiction has come in how it approaches girls and sexuality.

When We Talk About “Girl Problems”

Kind of going hand-in-hand with the sexuality post was this one about the notion of “girl problems.” What does it mean to be a girl and how are the problems girls face handled in YA fiction? More than that, how are they responded to by readers? I loved talking about love triangles, as well as talking about the idea of the “every girl” that Sarah Dessen writes about (and that I think Dessen gets unfairly dinged for sometimes, too). I also think this post corresponded quite a bit with what I talked about in terms of “unlikable” female characters, too.

Getting Past the Easy Reach

When you commit something to paper (or blog, as the case may be), it’s harder to ignore your own words since you have to face them if someone calls you out on them. This particular post was one that I needed to write because I needed the reminder of the value of recommending the reads that fit the reader, rather than the reads which are most obvious and easiest to grab. It was this post that really inspired me to want to write the “Beyond the Bestsellers” series at Book Riot, and it’s the post I think those who do reader’s advisory should think about — I’d love to see more people talk about how to move beyond the easy reach.

Fat Isn’t A Disability, But It Is A Book Deal Breaker

The more I think about my favorite posts this year, the more interrelated I see that they are. The long and short of it seems to be that it’s hard to be a girl.

On Book Packagers and Literary Development Companies

This was just a straight-up fun post to write. There are posts you write that you know took you a long time to write because they required a lot of work — I’m looking at the New York Times Bestsellers Posts — and then there are posts you write that you know took a long time because you kept letting yourself fall down new rabbit holes. This was the rabbit hole post.

It was a real blast this year to return to the So You Want to Read YA series, as well as the Contemporary YA Week series. It was equally fun to try out a group read along for Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, as well as giving a series about reader’s advisory a shot, too. Kimberly and I both loved putting together the monthly genre guides, as well as interviewing authors we respect for our monthly Twitterview series. Of course, writing reviews for books that really worked — as well as dissecting what didn’t work within a book that wasn’t a knock out for me — is always enjoyable, too.

One thing I discovered this year and that I’ll talk a bit more about in a future post is how much readership and audience has changed over the last year. When we once knew our readership pretty well, now we’re less aware (and maybe less concerned, too). It’s neat to see where and how people are finding us, and it’s been so great to see not just our content be shared, but it’s enjoyable to reader other people’s responses to our posts via their own blogs, tumblr, Twitter, and other outlets. There’s never a time when I don’t have at least a page worth of post ideas, thanks in big part to those of you who read and think about what it is we have to say.

I’m not a resolutions person, though I do like to set goals (resolutions to me sound too absolute and focus too much on an end result, whereas goals allow for celebrating and feeling accomplishment in the interim steps along the path). In the coming year, it’s my goal to keep writing what I feel like writing and to cover some of the things people have suggested I look at but I thought maybe I didn’t have the time or energy to do. The truth is, that time is there. It’s just a matter of sitting down and putting the effort in to do it — and that’s one of those interim steps along the way I love and look forward to but forget about until I get the chance to reflect upon the value it brings to me.

As always, a huge thank you to our readers, to those who comment or share or encourage us along the way. We’d probably still blog without it, but it’d be a much less enjoyable or inspiring experience. 

Links of Note: November 2, 2013

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This is a cat dressed like Edward Cullen. These pets in literary-inspired costumes are ridiculously amusing. 

Ready for a roundup of all things book, literary, reading, and otherwise worth clicking? I’ve got a mix of all kinds of stuff to share.

  • Remember a few weeks ago that survey about book blogging? The results from that survey are in, and it’s interesting to see how long people have been blogging and what’s made their blogging change. Anyone who blogs goes through times of feast and times of famine, and it’s comforting to look at these results and feel like you’re not alone in those experiences.
  • If you haven’t read Eliot Schrefer’s New York Times piece about the value of YA books, it’s a good one. No confessional or persuasion here. Just reason. 
  • “It’s amazing how many different ways you will hear this kind of sentiment leaving the mouths of a disappointing amount of people. Another book about a girl falling in love. Another book about a girl with trauma. Another book about mean girls. Oh no not another book about a girl that is breathing and alive and on and on and on. Why write them? When is enough enough with these girl stories? I think I was ready for just about anything in terms of push-back relating to the questions I hoped my work was asking about gender expectations and stereotypes relating to girls, but I was not prepared to hear those questions weren’t worth asking in the first place.” Courtney Summers’s excellent post about writing for girls has got me thinking about how we as readers interpret, react to, and invest in stories about girls. There’s a LOT to dig out here. 
  • Elizabeth Wein looks closely at who is buying YA books — is it really as many adults as we’ve made it out to be? 
  • Design*Sponge is one of the blogs I regularly read that has absolutely nothing to do with books (and I LOVE it so much). But recently, they had a really fascinating piece about book covers and what they do or don’t do in today’s world. It’s interesting to read about this from outside the book world. This is nice long-form journalism. 
I’ve had a number of posts over at Book Riot these last couple of weeks, too. I’ve talked about what happens when fans are disappointed by the finale in a book series (without spoilers), I created a downloadable crossword puzzle and reading list to YA zombie lit, the differences between criticism and censorship, and I made a booklist of YA stories set in 24 hours or fewer. 
Have you read anything great in the last couple of weeks I should know about? I’d love to know in the comments! 

Weekend Link Roundup

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I’ve read so many great and provocative things lately, I thought I’d share a bunch of them for the weekend. This post could be subtitled “And then the world discovered YA could be worth learning about after watching The Hunger Games.”


  • The AWL had a post about books that make you cringe to remember reading, written by a host of book-world folks. I’m sharing this one because none of the picks are surprising (really, let’s all hate on Ayn Rand and Jack Kerouac some more), and I’m sharing it because I think the notion of books you’ve read in the past becoming embarrassing to think about is pretty absurd. We all have our phases and we all have our interests at different points, so being embarrassed by them later on seems silly. We read and we grow. The books we read help us figure out who we are.
  • Something I’ve said before out loud was that there are a lot of books that are about someone’s daughter. Looks like I’m not the only one.  The Millions looks at the title trend and even offers up some graphs — who are these the daughters of? How many daughters are floating around? 

  • Not one, but two stories this week about “strong girl characters” in YA/children’s books. First, I stumbled upon this blog post about it, then I was sent this link from The Atlantic Wire. There’s some interesting cross-over in the female leads mentioned and there are some curious missing girls (Frankie Landau Banks!). I can’t help but think both of these lists need to be updated to include books written in the last few years — maybe something worth blogging about down the road. Also, keep your eye on The Atlantic Wire. They’re doing a series of “YA for Adults,” and I’m curious to see what they talk about (also, it reminds me of a little series we’re doing here at STACKED). I’m always interested and skeptical when bigger outlets cover “trendy” topics.
  • Speaking of big outlets covering “trendy” topics, The Huffington Post shared their list of YA books adults would love, and it’s certainly a mix of titles. HuffPo also offered up ten dystopian titles coming out this year (you know, in case you need something after The Hunger Games). Except, a number of these aren’t even dystopian titles, but we won’t go into details since the exposure of YA titles to new readers is good. I mentioned being interested and skeptical when bigger outlets cover trends like YA, right?   
  • Let’s keep this going — what books could become the next screen hit like The Hunger Games? Two articles on this one, including one at IndieWire and one at IGN movies. I absolutely hate how everything has to be “the next ___,” rather than being allowed to stand on its own merits. It’s such a disservice to the work itself and the truth is, we don’t need or necessarily want the same thing repackaged over and over again. Spoiler: I’m writing about this topic over at YALSA’s The Hub blog this week, talking about some of these titles and some that aren’t on these lists, as well as defining what it means when a book’s rights have been optioned.
  • This is probably the best blog post I’ve read in a long time — Stop telling me what to read. Every word here is truth, and so many of the lines I want to plaster all over the place. My favorite is this one, though: “When people dictate what should be read, they often do so from a position of privilege.” I’d go as far as to drop the word “often” and say indeed, they always speak from a position of privilege.
  • I wouldn’t normally post this kind of story but I can’t help myself: James Patterson shares his secrets for selling so many books. This piece is worth reading if for no other reason than it’s really funny. REALLY funny. Best line in the whole piece (on why Patterson thinks his kid books are the best): “I guess they fit right into my wheelhouse. I have a big imagination, a, and b, I think I’m funnier than sh–. And that really lets it loose.” 
  • There are a ton of YA book blogger directories, but this is the first thorough middle grade book blogger directory I’ve seen. Worth checking out! Also passed along to me this week was a blog all about UK YA fiction, so if you’re interested in what’s going on over there, check this out.