Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

HEFTY HEFTY HEFTY! Diarist of a Wimpy Kid Jeff Kinney lands a spot on TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world list (full list). Swish! I like to think of lists like this as the 100 people we would shoot into space if there was some sort of, I don’t know, deadly disease sweeping [...]

Perhaps you have a personal vendetta against Mo Willems. Maybe Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road gives you the hives. Or maybe you’re the one person left on the planet not totally in love with Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Whatever the reason, it’s hard not to have fun second-guessing the ALA Youth Media Awards. That’s why [...]

S. E. Hinton made a relatively rare personal appearance at the L.A. Times Festival of Books this week, and made sure to drop plenty of juicy details during her Q&A (“S. E. Hinton, a.k.a. Your Majesty,” by Cecil Castellucci, Jacket Copy). Mostly Hinton was there to talk about her recent Some of Tim’s Stories, but [...]

The May 1 Booklist Mystery Showcase just went live on Booklist Online. As always, there’s a lot you can read for free, even if you aren’t a subscriber. And non-subscribers who want to see it all can always try a free trial. The subject of our mystery-loving editor Bill Ott’s Hard-Boiled Gazetteer is Latin America, and [...]

A favored award among the books for youth editors was announced today by the Jane Addams Peace Association. Later this week Gillian will devote a post to one of the winners. I’ll keep the subject a surprise for now. In the  meantime, the winners are: Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai, written [...]

The LA Times finally announced the book prize winners: Biography Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, by Paula J. Giddings Current Interest Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Barton Gellman Fiction Home, by Marilynne Robinson Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Finding Nouf, by Zoe Ferraris History Hitler’s [...]

When Judith Krug died on April 11, the children’s and young adult literature communities lost both a tireless supporter and a defender. As the director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom and the founder of Banned Books Week, Judith was on the front lines helping libraries keep books in their collections, everything from Harry Potter to [...]

If you have a few minutes this Friday afternoon, and you like looking at books, you could do a lot worse than browsing the Book Cover Archive: Or if that’s not postmodern enough for you, you could visit kottke.org, where Jason Kottke takes a look at Media Packaging Mashups: This stuff only gets more esoteric. [...]

Is it still National Poetry Month? It is? Good. In a suitably cruel vein, Endpoint, John Updike’s last book of poems (until someone pulls another out of a drawer) talks seriously about the business of dying (“Does Updike’s Last Verse Hit Its Mortal Mark? Plainly.” by Michael Dirda, Washington Post). In “Flying to Florida” Updike reflects [...]

This spring the Booklist youth staff has been busy making videos for Booklist Online, and you can see Ann Brashares, Kate DiCamillo, and Ingrid Law anytime you like on Likely Stories. Now check out Booklist reviewer Kay Weisman’s conversation with the amazingly versatile Avi, whose books range from the best-selling Poppy series to the Newbery Medal winner Crispin to classics [...]