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

While in a public library this week, I saw a representative of the US Census Bureau manning a desk set up as a questionnaire assistance center to make sure everyone had received and returned the census form and to answer any questions. The neighborhood was one with a very racially and ethnically mixed population. I [...]

Somebody finally made a movie out of How to Train Your Dragon (2003), the wildly inventive novel by Cressida Cowell. It’s the story of a “smallish Viking with a longish name,” Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, and his rather offbeat adventures in dragon-training and sea-monster-slaying. Here’s the trailer:   The book is, as grown-up Hiccup tells [...]

War Dances has earned Sherman Alexie the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner award. The other four nominees will receive $5,000. Read more about Alexie’s win at the official website.

So FlashForward, the ABC series based on the 1999 Robert J. Sawyer novel, is back, after a hiatus that probably made most of us forget the show ever existed. There’s nothing tragically wrong with the show, but there’s nothing especially right about it, either. I understand why ABC had to make some of the changes [...]

Australian Paul Murphy is a freelance producer who creates three to four book trailers per month. He’s also an avid reader of Book Trailer Thursday, and he contacted me recently to show off his latest work, a teaser for Mo Hayder’s fifth Jack Caffrey thriller, Gone. We get all kinds of self-promotion here at Booklist, [...]

I was so pumped up about that Forbes article this morning that I forgot to post the exciting news that author David Almond from the United Kingdom and illustrator Jutta Bauer from Germany are the winners of the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen Award, sponsored by the International Board on Books for Young People. The news [...]

Just read an excellent article on the importance of librarians in Forbes. Don’t miss Mark Moran’s Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google if you haven’t already seen it.

You’ve probably heard that Guillermo del Toro, the director of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, is making a movie out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic, The Hobbit (1937). You might not know that somebody already made a movie out of the book. Rankin/Bass, the studio that brought us the Christmas classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty [...]

In my twenties, not long out of college, I was approached by a middle-aged black woman about joining the National Council of Negro Women. Proud of myself as a young black woman, I wasn’t interested in joining a group of middle-aged Negro women. I’d forgotten that particular bit of callowness until I read Jesus, Jobs, [...]

If you haven’t seen Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, do it right away. Seriously: turn off your computer and go see the movie. And then come right back, because I have a few things to say about it. A lot of us fondly remember Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as children’s stories. But [...]