Amazing finds in Nonfiction

The nonfiction section isn't just for reports! Fiction lovers like me will find lots of interesting things in there--like Jon Scieszka's new memoir, Knucklehead. Full of hilarious stories in short chapters, plus illustrations and drawings, it's a really fun read, especially for boys, who will relate to the madcap stories about living with brothers and goofing off with buddies down the street.

You can also find all the folk and fairy tales in the nonfiction section. One of my favorite children's authors, Margaret Read MacDonald, has books in the folk tale section. She wrote some great picture books like The Squeaky Door, Little Rooster's Diamond Button, and Go to Sleep, Gecko!. Guaranteed fun for 3-6-year-olds. Actually, they're all fun for adults too, in a wonderful Pixar-movie-like way.

If you liked The City of Ember...

...you will definitely like First Light by Rebecca Stead, which is one of the 2010 Rebecca Caudill books. In First Light, a boy named Peter gets a chance to accompany his mother and father to Greenland, where his father studies ice sheets and the effects of global warming. While he is there, he discovers a settlement of people that have been living inside a huge glacier for decades, never seeing the outside world. Half the story is told from Peter's point of view and the other half is told from the point of view of Thea, a girl who lives in the underground settlement.

I've read 9 of the 20 books on the 2010 Rebecca Caudill list so far. Most of them have been ok, and a few of them have been good, but none so far have stood out to me like The Lightning Thief, which was the 2009 winner and also my favorite of the 2009s by far. I'm hoping I'll feel the same way about one of the 2010s as I did about The Lightning Thief.

I Met Rick Riordan!

On Monday night, Rick Riordan came to Champaign Public Library to do a presentation and a book signing. I would have liked to go to the presentation, but the tickets were completely gone only 20 minutes after they became available. The book signing was open to everyone, though, and so I went to that and got one of the library's copies of The Lightning Thief signed. He was good enough to sign my personal copy as well. :)

I'm a big fan of the series--The Lightning Thief was my favorite 2009 Rebecca Caudill, followed closely by Life As We Knew It. One of my favorite things about the series is its refreshing lack of gender stereotypes. The heroes at Camp Half-Blood have personalities that are more directly linked to the god or goddess they descend from than anything else, which makes sense, but I think it would have been easy for Riordan to make sure that Ares had only male children featured in the story, and Aphrodite had only female children in the story. He didn't do that, and I was glad he didn't.

Monarch Award Books

The Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA) has recently released the 2010 Monarch Award list. The award is for a book written for kids in grades K-3. You can view the list here. As I was looking at the list, I was extremely pleased to see that our library already owned 16 of the 20 books on the list. My favorites so far are The Cheese by Margie Palatini and Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watt.

I also wanted to mention that in a couple of weeks we will be doing spring crafts here in the library. There will be a storytime/craft program at 10 a.m. on Saturday, March 21st for children ages 3-6 and another craft for children ages 7+ at 2:30. Please register if you're interested!