Lots of things I've been meaning to post about (plus some news). Here we go:

Jenny D. has a cover shot of her ARC for The Explosionist, a book I'm eagerly looking forward to.

Kazu Kibuishi and the rest of the crew who have brought us four volumes of the Flight anthologies are getting ready for the release of Flight Explorer, an all ages collection. Kazu talked to Newsarama about it recently:

KK: Aside from Phil's, Rad's, Matthew's, Bannister's, and my stories, the material was actually created for Flight 4. When I had more than enough good material to make one book, I decided it would be a good idea to push the all-ages stories into a new book made with younger kids in mind. No one created material with the purpose of making all-ages content. They just happened to want to create this kind of material, and it was a good fit, so I diverted the stories into a new book.

This is the sort of story that makes me want to subscribe to The Believer. I'm hoping I can still grab a copy of the January issue when I'm at the super duper huge B&N in Seattle tomorrow. Here's a snippet:

Unlike some of Bellevue’s patients, Warburg was not un malade imaginaire. He was totally mad. Convinced that the cooking staff was serving him the flesh of his own family, he became a vegetarian. His schizophrenia was reflected not only in the fears that plagued his mealtimes but also in the rhythm of his daily life. Though lucid and sociable in the afternoon and evening, he began each day in a wildly primal state. As a rule, his mornings were filled with bouts of energetic roaring. Warburg’s doctor encouraged visitors to come see him, though he carefully specified that afternoons were best. A colleague of Warburg’s arrived one day shortly before noon. Entering the elegantly appointed Bellevue, he heard the distant echoes of a wild kingdom. Half an hour later, Warburg greeted him, impeccably attired and as refined and cordial as ever. After a few minutes he took his guest aside and with an air of great amusement confided, “My dear friend, did you hear all that roaring? Well, you would never guess. But that was me!” Warburg then smiled brightly and the two men embarked on a lively discussion of fifteenth-century Florentine art.

I have two - count them TWO - starred reviews in the current issue of Booklist. This makes me very happy.

One man's trash is another guy's incredibly valuable books. (How come I never find these kinds of boxes?)

The new issue of Bookslut is up with a lot of articles and reviews that I really need to read. My column is all about kids who have had a rough time - Long May She Reign, King of the Pygmies, Quantum July, After Tupac and D. Foster and Total Constant Order. My "Cool Read" is an awesome book on dinosaurs and the teenager who made a huge discovery just a few years ago (talk about inspiring - he's now a PhD candidate in Paleontology!), Dinomummy.

This is not a political blog but I am quite proud to see Alaska going with Obama (even though it was a caucus which most of us don't seem to understand so I didn't get to vote). I don't hate Hillary (or John McCain) but I do think that we are a nation in serious trouble; we need to show the world that we are committed to fixing what has all gone terribly wrong in the past several years. We're America for God's sake; and torture is not who we are - I don't want to hear semantics, I don't want to hear threats and I don't want to hear long lectures about how these are really really bad people. The Green River Killer was a bad man; Ted Bundy was a bad man, Timothy McVeigh was a bad man, Charles Manson IS a bad man and on and on and on.

We don't torture white American men who do bad things and we shouldn't put foreign Middle Eastern and Arab men on Cuban soil so we can purposely circumvent the Constitution of the United States and then bring in the lawyers to find a legal way around the definition of torture.

There are many reasons why I agree with Barack Obama; his views against our current national policy (both written and unwritten) on torture is only one of them.

"Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them,'' Obama wrote. "Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America's standing in the world, not how you strengthen it.

"When I am president America will once again be the country that stands up to these deplorable tactics. When I am president we won't work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution, we will be straight with the American people and true to our values," said Obama.

Off to Seattle - be sure to nominate your adult titles for teen readers while I'm gone! (And hey - this is not just about novels, I'm looking for history, nature, biography, etc.)

Here's my latest nomination:

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell!