Halloween is upon us once again, and you can count on the Library to help you and your children get into the spirit.

The shelves are abound with Halloween books that are informational, spooky and just plain fun, including my new favorite picture book, Ghosts in the House by Kazuno Kohara. The adorable story about a young witch girl and her haunted house is filled with retro illustrations that make this book not only a wonderful addition to the Halloween genre, but picture books in general.

There are some great Halloween websites out there that are worth checking out. You can access a list of authoritative sites which include games, costume making, safety tips and more by visiting KidSpace @ The Internet Public Library.

The Dunwoody Library, Doraville Library and Wesley Chapel-William C. Brown Library will be hosting Halloween programs this week. Stop by and check out these fun, free programs!

How do you get in the Halloween spirit?

Right now many adults are revisiting (and perhaps introducing their kids to) the 1963 classic Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, thanks largely to the new film adaptation of the book from director Spike Jonze. From the critics salivating over the new film to readers and scholars with fond memories of Sendak’s book, most fans agree that Where The Wild Things Are is impeccable in its celebration of childhood imagination and groundbreaking in its recognition of childhood angst and anger, even. But you can troll the web yourself for in-depth critical analysis of the book–I’ll try to steer clear of all of that.

In my day-to-day library work, I’m often stumbling onto old childhood favorites of mine, books that resonated for one reason or another. Here are a few of the ones that are truly special to me:

Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale by John Steptoe: I remember truly enjoying this book, not for the intriguing Cinderella-esque story alone but also because of Steptoe’s gorgeous and evocative illustrations. The thing that struck me most about the artwork was that it seemed to have so much richness and texture. The illustrations had this quality about them that made me want to reach out and touch the characters.

Miss Nelson is Missing by Harry Allard: To this day, this book reminds me of my 4th grade teacher Miss Armstrong. She was a very sweet lady but my class sort of took her kindness for weakness. Miss Armstrong would have done well to have a raven-haired alter ego like Miss Viola Swamp, with scary make-up and even scarier temperament.

The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats: As a kid growing up in Atlanta, where the snowy days are few and far between, it was a real treat reading about the travails of little Peter in the beautifully snow-covered city.

Also, I’ve found some great adult books that celebrate the works of some of the great authors of children’s literature:

The Art of Maurice Sendak by Selma G. Lanes: This book is a smorgasbord for Sendak fans that features essays on his life, his career and his body of work as an illustrator and author. My favorite things about this book so far are the pages (three foldout pages!) of his brilliant artwork and a facsimile of “Where The Wild Horses Are“, the prototype of what would become the aforementioned Sendak masterpiece.

The Art of Eric Carle: This incredible book reflects upon the life and the art of legendary (and one of my favorite) children’s author Eric Carle. Much like Carle’s stunning book illustrations and artwork, this book is multi-textured and very colorful, an insightful collage of autobiography, essays and tributes from his peers and admirers.

Do you remember your favorite books from childhood? What are the qualities that make these books truly special?

83 years ago today the world was introduced to the whimsical world of author A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne only created two books centered around the Bear of Very Little Brain, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner, but Pooh and friends continue to have many an adventure as Disney has owned the rights to Winnie the Pooh, sans hyphens, since 1961. While Pooh, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit and the rest have since become a sad travesty (in my opinion) of what Milne and illustrator Ernest H. Shepard had created, one just has to open a book to be reminded of how enchanting the original characters of the Hundred Acre Wood were.

Now, for the first time ever, the estate of Milne and Shepard has authorized a sequel to The House At Pooh Corner titled Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. The book has been met with mixed reviews, both good and bad, but it is clear that author David Benedictus and illustrator Mark Burgess are talented and worked hard to keep with the Milne/Shepard style. Unfortunately, since the book was only published last week, the Library does not yet own any copies, but you can read an extract here. I picked up a copy at the bookstore and while I appreciate the negative reviews, I couldn’t help but be pleased with this imaginative addition to the Winnie-the-Pooh collection. But I hate to see what Disney will do with it.

Fairy tales have been popular in cultures around the world for longer than we know. These stories are a source of enchantment for young children and remain embedded in our own childhood memories. And while I can always pore over great re-tellings of The Three Little Pigs or Sleeping Beauty, sometimes it’s fun to change it up a bit. Fractured fairy tales are re-tellings of these familiar stories but with character, plot, setting and point of view twists. This makes for some of the wittiest, most humorous books out there today for children.
Here are some of my favorites:

Waking Beauty by Leah Wilcox

The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka

The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas

Fractured fairy tales are not only fun, but educational as well. Many teachers are now incorporating these stories into their curriculum to teach children compare and contrast skills, point of view, creative writing and more.

Looking for something a little more in depth? No worries, there are fractured fairy tales for tweens and teens in novel form.

Beastly by Alex Flinn

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley

Ask your librarian for more recommended titles.

Whatever your taste in books, if you’ve spent much time in a library or bookstore over the past 20 years it’s likely you’ve at least heard of Neil Gaiman. A successful author in a variety of different genres (including science fiction, fantasy, and horror, as well as graphic novels, books for children, and screenplays for television and film), he has been the recipient of numerous awards, most notably the Nebula, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards, as well as the 2009 Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book (which also won the Hugo for best book and Locus award for best YA novel). He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and two of his books (Stardust and Coraline) have been adapted into major motion pictures (we carry both adaptations in the DCPL catalog, and they can be located here, and here, respectively).

The website Shelfari (a literary oriented social networking site which allows members to build a virtual bookshelf to display books they’ve read) recently posted an article on Neil Gaiman and his personal library. The idea was, as stated by the author of the piece, “you can learn a lot about someone by seeing what’s on his or her bookshelf…[so] we thought it would be fun to take a look at what’s on the bookshelves of some of our favorite authors.”

Mr. Gaiman’s home library is impressive, both in terms of quantity and quality. A perusal of his bookshelves reveals a man with an eclectic and varied taste, exactly what one would expect from such a talented and wide-ranging author.

If you are interested in learning more about Neil Gaiman, his website offers a wealth of information about his life, work, and current activities. You can also check out his author profile on Shelfari or follow him on Twitter. And for those who have never read anything by him but are looking for a good place to start, allow me to recommend a couple of my favorites:

The Sandman graphic novel series is, in a word, brilliant. It has been critically acclaimed, being one of very few comics to ever make it onto the NY Times bestseller list as well as have been selected as one of Entertainment Weekly’s “100 best reads from 1983 to 2008“.  Although DCPL doesn’t carry the entire series, we do carry the first collection of issues I read, entitled The Doll’s House, which is a fine place to start exploring the series, as well as its  follow up installments: Dream Country and Season of Mists.

American Gods was awarded the Hugo and Nebula awards (among others) and tells the story of Shadow, an ex-con who learns upon his release from prison that both his wife and best friend died the previous day in a car accident, leaving him with no one to come home to. Offered a job as a bodyguard by a mysterious man named Wednesday, Shadow travels with him around the country, slowly learning of a weird and dangerous world he never knew existed, and the Gods, old and new, that inhabit it.

Check them both out. You won’t be disappointed.

September is Celebrate Roald Dahl Month (well, according to the Roald Dahl website, at least) as September 13 marked what would have been his 93rd birthday. Dahl is known for his quirky and imaginative books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. A few of his books have been adapted into animated and live action films and love or hate these movie remakes, there is another one on its way.

Fantastic Mr. Fox has been made into a stop-motion animated feature film written and produced by my all-time favorite filmmaker, Wes Anderson of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums fame. The film enlists an all-star cast and I have to say, it looks pretty great. You can watch the trailer here. Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of my favorite Dahl books and it will definitely require a reread before the movie comes out.

By the way, here is an interesting fact that you may or may not know: Roald Dahl wrote the screenplays for both of Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and James Bond You Only Live Twice. You can read more fun facts in the Roald Dahl biography, D is for Dahl: A Gloriumptous A-Z Guide to the World of Roald Dahl.

On Friday, August 28, the award winning children’s program Reading Rainbow aired its final episode. It marked the end of an era. For the past 26 years, host LeVar Burton has introduced countless children worldwide to the joys of reading. In that time the show has been the recipient of over 250 awards, including 26 Emmys (ten for “Outstanding Children’s Series”), a Peabody, and nine Parent’s Choice Awards. While the show stopped producing new episodes in 2006, PBS had continued to air reruns until last month, when lack of funding made it impossible for them to renew the show’s broadcast rights. This unfortunate happenstance is at least partially due to a paradigm shift in children’s literacy work which asserts that the focus should be on teaching the mechanics of reading instead of attempting to foster a love of books, as Reading Rainbow did (See the NPR article for more on this).

The Library has many Reading Rainbow videos available for checking out.   Additionally, the Reading Rainbow section of the PBS kids website is still running and will remain accessible until December 2009.

I was a huge fan of the show as a kid, and though it has been many, many years since I last had the pleasure of viewing it, I still remember the words to the theme song. I bet you do too.

Correction: originally, this post said that the Reading Rainbow series was not available at the Library.  This was a mistake, and has been corrected above.  Thanks to the readers who pointed this out to us!

While the movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is not due to be released for another two months, there are plenty of Wild related things to keep our anticipation at bay and ensure that we will be ready to experience Spike Jonze’s movie to its fullest. If it has been awhile since you’ve read Sendak’s 1964 Caldecott winning book, you can check it out at the Library which has copies in English, Spanish and Chinese. If you haven’t seen the original movie trailer yet, which is pretty awesome, you can do so here.  And lucky us! A new trailer was released a couple of weeks ago, giving us a little bit more insight as to how they’ve taken a 10 sentence book and turned it into a feature-length film.

There are numerous people out there blogging about pretty much everything Wild related, but one of the coolest sites I’ve found is Terrible Yellow Eyes. The blogger was so inspired by Where the Wild Things Are that he set up a site that pays tribute to the book and its author. Artists from all over the world send in their own artistic reproductions of the book and the site is updated frequently.

The movie has been an enormous undertaking which has spanned many years and has involved hundreds of people. Check out Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are blog, We Love You So, to learn how the movie came to be.

And don’t forget to pre-order your Where the Wild Things Are figurines!

Do you have any fun Where the Wild Things Are sites to share?

The original plan was to blog about a perky little book that I’m reading called Against Happiness (it’s actually more life-affirming than it sounds) but the new Harry Potter movie opens today so I’m putting all grown-up high-seriousness aside to revisit J.K Rowling’s captivating tale of a boy wizard with an incredible destiny. If you’re trying to get re-acquainted with the characters and the saga to defeat the evil He Who Must Not Be Named then you should really stop by DCPL for your Harry Potter refresher materials.

Below are a few additional titles that may be of further interest to Potter fans:

A Charmed Life: The Spirituality of Potterworld: I’ve been tempted to read this book because it looks incredibly fascinating but I stopped short when I noticed the chapter called “The Mirror of Erised” and realized that I’d kind of forgotten what that was (it’s been a loooong time since I’ve read these books). But if you’re a true Potter scholar then this may be a great read for you.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide To The World Of  Harry Potter: Too pressed for time to bone up on the series? Here are some great options for you: 1) Just rent the DVDs, I guess. They’ll give you a taste of what all the fuss has been about. 2) You are never too busy for Pottermania! 3) Never mind option #2 and check out The Complete Idiot’s Guide from DCPL. This could be a decent stopgap while you’re waiting in the request queue for the Harry Potter novels to become available.

The Tales of Beedle The Bard: I kind of glossed over the bits about Beedle The Bard during the last book because  I was so anxious to see the showdown between Harry and Lord Blankedy-Blank. But apparently Hermione Granger and Professor Dumbledore (with the help of Ms. Rowling) have compiled Beedle The Bard’s classic wizarding fables into a lovely volume for us Muggles.

Have fun, Potter fans!

I think it’s safe to say that we are in the midst of the dog days of summer, so what better way to escape the heat and wile away the days than with a new book? While I do like to wander the stacks of the library looking for my next read, I have to say that I am more of a list girl. I love finding and perusing various book lists (and there are many out there) for something interesting to read. And yes, I like creating lists as well. If your child is in need of a new book, try checking this list of lists for his/her next great read.

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), put out by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has an extensive list of bibliographies for children and young adults with many different themes, including books to share with babies, recommended mysteries for kids and teens, and books for beginning readers, to name a few.

The American Library Association’s Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) puts out an annual notables list. Check out 2009’s list; there are many great books to be found. They also put out the list of current and past children’s award winners, including the Newbery and Caldecott Awards.

Check out New York Public Library’s list of 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know. Do you know all of them?

YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association has award winners and booklists, including the best in young adult books and books for reluctant readers.