Today is young adult fantasy writer Tamora Pierce’s 53rd birthday. Pierce is most famous for creating young heroines, most memorably, the medieval transvestite, Alanna of Trebond from the series, The Song of the Lioness. The noble-born girl wants to become a knight and goes the way of Hilary Swank a la Boys Don’t Cry (minus…
I’ll admit: I’ve got a thing for self-published fan projects. Nothing shows fannish commitment better than these books, and over the years a wealth of encyclopedic information about our culture has been gathered in such efforts. Once upon a time, there was a whole category of comic books that measured just a couple inches wide…
This day in 1955 brought us the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the last part of The Lord of the Rings series. Had Tolkien been around for recent transformations, or more accurately, annihilations of books into film, he might have perished merely at the thought of his masterpieces being turned into…
Today is Philip Pullman’s birthday, who, sad to say, does not yet share the deserved household name status of his colleague, J.K. Rowling. Mr. Pullman was born in 1946 and penned the brilliant and award-winning series, His Dark Materials. The first of the series, The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights if you read it in…
Today I’ve got three books that either are for kids or look like they should be, so, if any of you are allergic to greasy kids stuff, just move on to the next post. [[[Dinosaurs Across America]]] is the new book by Phil Yeh, who has spent the last two decades promoting literacy and art…
No, you geek, I’m not talking about Bilbo’s birthday of September 22, 2890 of the Third Age, being born to Bungo Baggins and Belladonna Took. That’s tomorrow. But seventy years ago today, George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. of London published the first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in September 1937, illustrated with many black-and-white…
James Oliver Rigney, Jr. , who wrote under the names Robert Jordan and Reagan O’Neal and was best known as the author of the bestselling The Wheel of Time fantasy series, died yesterday from complications from cardiac amyloidosis. He was 58. Jordan also wrote seven Conan novels, which have been kept in print by his…
The New York Times reports that Madeleine L’Engle, award-winning author of more than 60 books, died yesterday in Connecticut of natural causes at the age of 88. Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s science fiction book A Wrinkle in Time, which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book…
The San Francisco Chronicle notices that Neil Gaiman is in the middle stages of a fiendish plan to completely conquer all media. (The New York Times also discovered Gaiman this weekend.) The Los Angeles Times looks at some novels written by comic-book types, starting with Warren Ellis’s Crooked Little Vein. Comic Book Resources chats with…
I was never very interested in reading the Harry Potter books. I found the movies enjoyable but that interest never made me want to read the books. The cries of outrage I heard from hardcore fans after seeing the movies didn’t help matters much. If reading these books made them enjoy the movies less, why…
The Seattle Times reviews Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” series. Slate looks at Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The Agony Column reviews Alan Campbell’s Lye Street, a novella-as-a-book prequel to Scar Night. Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist reviews Jeff Somers’s The Electric Church. Blogcritics has what I think is their sixth review for Harry Potter and the…
Times Online looks back at the British ‘80s craze for Fighting Fantasy. The Millions has a looooong post (no, really, it’s long) about Harry Potter from a children’s librarian’s perspective. Queen guitarist Brian May has gone back to school — to finish his doctorate in astrophysics. That’s a smart move – you always want to…
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