I Shall Never Again Be Ashamed: "I have found my people!" And they are high-brow publishing folk!

From NYT!!!

The Kids’ Books Are All Right

By PAMELA PAUL

While au fait literary types around town await the buzzed-about new novels from Jonathan Franzen and Nicole Krauss, other former English majors have spent the summer trying to get hold of “Mockingjay,” the third book in Suzanne Collins’s dystopian trilogy, so intensely under wraps that not even reviewers have been allowed a glimpse before its airtight Aug. 24 release. What fate will befall our heroine, Katniss Everdeen? My fellow book club members and I are desperate to know. When will the Capitol fall? And how can Collins possibly top the first two installments, “The Hunger Games” and “Catching Fire”?

Oh, did I mention? “Mockingjay” is for teenagers. I am well into my 30s.

But I am not embarrassed by my, shall we say, immature taste in literature. And I wasn’t much concerned when, barreling through “The Hunger Games” at the hospital after giving birth to my third child, I hardly noticed whether he ate or slept. When will the rebellion begin, I wanted to know. Which suitor will Katniss choose? Nor am I alone. According to David Levithan, editorial director at Scholastic, Collins’s publisher, roughly half of the “Hunger Games” fans on Facebook are full-fledged adults. “The Harry Potter generation has grown up,” he told me.

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Literature of the 21st Century

I really love this author and I haven't heard of any who write young adult literature in the way he does - by providing the reader with an interactive text in print form! Patrick Carman is the author of series such as Skeleton Creek and Trackers which provide the reader with websites to visit with videos to watch or puzzles to solve. The third installment of the Skeleton Creek series, The Crossbones was released yesterday (Wednesday 9/1/10) and book four will be out in the spring!

Aside from the coolness of mixing digital composition with traditional text and using classic literature and film references as passwords to unlock the videos ("pitandpendulum", for instance), I heard from my mentor teacher that the kids are fighting in the library over who gets to check out The Crossbones next and getting their new friends in to the series. Turns out technology isn't totally corrupting our youth, it's making them actually want to read. (And adults, this series is a great guilty-pleasure read as well).

If I ever taught this book again, I would totally take a field trip to visit the "haunted" dredge which is in Sumpter, Oregon. I went this summer, and it was so interesting to walk though the site of this mystery and a piece of preserved history in a historic area of Oregon. Unfortunately, there was no sight of the ghost of Old Joe Bush...