Comments on: Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

By: Jonathan Hunt

Jonathan Hunt — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 17:29:37 +0000

They’re working on stuff right now and won’t let us make changes, but I’ll make this suggestion once they’re done.

By: Alys

Alys — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 17:12:46 +0000

In thinking about how to make the blog easier to navigate, could I suggest moving the “Popular Posts” section below the “Recent Comments” section? I know that the Recent Comments is what I look at first when I come to the site, to see if anything new has been afoot.

By: Laurel

Laurel — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:56:35 +0000

I’ve been reading a lot this fall, in anticipation of Heavy Medal. Excited!

I love IVAN. It’s spare and clean and emotional, but different.

I think the voice in THREE TIMES LUCKYis pretty awesome– teetering on the edge of adorable quirk but really authentic. Impressive.

And the further I get from it, the more I love CROW. Really unusual book in a lot of ways. It’s stuck with me.

Next up for me is the Broken lands. I’m excited to hear people have loved it!

By: MJ

MJ — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:24:35 +0000

I see HOUSE HELD UP BY TREES by Ted Kooser as a worthy contender for the Newbery.

By: It’s the Bomb! | crossreferencing

It’s the Bomb! | crossreferencing — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 15:04:13 +0000

[...] I noticed that several people over at Heavy Medal were talking about this book as a Newbery possibility, and I think it is right up there as a [...]

By: Jonathan Hunt

Jonathan Hunt — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:45:02 +0000

Sondy: Your comments about NO CRYSTAL STAIR continue to irritate me and I’m sure we’ll unpack a lot of this baggage when we get to that specific discussion soon. I can appreciate that the book “keeps you at a distance,” but you have used the phrase “reads like nonfiction” as a pejorative term.

GraceAnne: It’s interesting that you find the audience for SPLENDORS AND GLOOMS to be in the 12-14 range because I felt like it was a juvenile book through and through, a long juvenile book with a smallish audience, but a juvenile book nonetheless.

Wendy/Eric: We know that navigating the blog is getting unwieldy. We had our monthly archives reinstated; they disappeared last year when we added Someday My Printz Will Come and Calling Caldecott. We also tweaked the Popular Post feature so that it would reflect the older posts. We did tag posts on the old blogging platform, but obviously haven’t done it for the past couple years. Another thing for us to discuss.

By: Jenn Longee

Jenn Longee — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:13:20 +0000

I loved NO CRYSTAL STAIR; it gave me a new personal hero. I also found THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN to be exceptional. Another possibility is Frances O’Roark Dowell’s THE SECOND LIFE OF ABIGAIL WALKER. It got two starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers’ Weekly. It also got a strong review from The New York Times, though no reviews yet from SLJ or Booklist.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:39:01 +0000

I agree with Wendy on the difficulty of tracking down a specific (often week or months old) point or opinion within the comments. Is there anyway to add tagging to both the actual blog entries and the individual comments? I imagine an additional sidebar with a hyperlink to each tagged author or title that would bring up every entry or comment containing reference to said author or title. I’m not sure this is feasible but it would potentially make it easier to find that buried reference. Barring that, I think simply putting the titles in all caps does make it slightly easier to scan down the screen for the title you’re looking for.

By: Wendy

Wendy — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:40:39 +0000

Colby, it doesn’t actually matter what ANY of us think–don’t discount your opinion or participation!

That No Crystal Stair reads like non-fiction is one of its strengths. I think that speaks to its integrity as a biography.

I’m kind of troubled by something I noticed last year… this blog is more well-known than it used to be, and judging by the number of different commenters here, it’s going to be even bigger than last year. It seems like it’s getting unwieldy. The comments, in particular, are difficult to keep up with. It’s better now that the last ten recent comments show up in the sidebar, but still problematic. I don’t really know any solution, though. I just hope we can continue to have good, in-depth discussions. It does help that more people are using names or unique handles now, though. The most difficult thing about the blog being huge is that it is SO difficult to find a reference later. Where was it that I explained what I liked and didn’t like about Jefferson’s Sons? (could be in some random post not labeled Jefferson’s Sons!). Where was it that Jonathan said he was enthusiastic about some genre of book? Etc.

By: GraceAnne

GraceAnne — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:22:48 +0000

I am way behind on reading these contenders. I did love Splendors and Glooms, which I thought intricate and absorbing and really dark, but not too dark. I think what got me, though, was that it seemed too old for Newbery. That 12-14 place is a difficult one, and I always cheer for Newbery books that fall younger.