Things have gotten interesting over at Read Roger's on the YA mystery front. I never meant to suggest by throwing some plot ideas out there yesterday that it would be easy for someone to grab one and just start writing. As if the idea is all you need to be writer. (I'm writing book #2 around the idea of "cold weather/airplanes crash". I know it's complicated, believe me.)

I just want to see some more YA mysteries that's all. Sheesh!

In other news I am apparently going to be thin for life simply by writing. I so wish I was making this up. And is it just me or hasn't her 15 minutes expired by now?

I found it a bit disheartening that in listing a few "nonboring" literary blogs over at Galleycat the best they could come up with is the one at Amazon, the one at the NY Times and the one at New York Magazine. (Okay there's one more but still.) Not listing Bookslut is bizarro world to me but more importantly what about independent lit blogs like Jenny D. or Gwenda or - daring to consider blogs for YA or children's books - Finding Wonderland or the 7 Imps? This was a disappointing post, in more ways then one.

Neil Gaiman just dropped a hint about a nonfiction book in the works: "Starting to plan out the coming year. I wrote a proposal for a personal, non-fiction book about travel and myth, and my publisher wants to do it, so now I'm figuring out all the whens and the hows, especially of the travel bits."

Has anyone else seen the anniversary edition of Hatchet? I picked it up in the bookstore yesterday and man is it gorgeous. I love that Gary Paulson is writing comments on various scenes - mistakes he made or why he included something. It's a lovely book and I'm sure my son is (eventually) going to love it.

Claire Messud writes about Boston over at Smithsonian Magazine. (Love this magazine btw.)

I just caught up on this article at the Nantucket Independent about the new Maria Mitchell biography and the questions is poses about women and science. Here's something to think about:

Throughout the book, Bergland examines Mitchell's rise from 1847, when she witnessed the flash of a comet from the roof of the Pacific Bank building where her family lived; to becoming the "computer of Venus" employed by the Nautical Almanac to calculate by math the orbit of that planet; to her hiring as the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College for women; and to the close of the 1800s when women's roles in the sciences were discouraged and Mitchell lamented that she might be the last of the nation's female scientists.

As of 1875, 10 years after Mitchell was appointed to her professorship, the move toward a male scientific role model had gained societal dominance.

Now why on earth did this shift in attitude towards women and science take place? What made anyone think that studying science could be bad for women (and why must it always come down to something sexual)? I wish I knew the tipping point here - if a woman made a discovery or achievement that made some male scholars feel threatened so they went after the gender in general to remove them from competition. So much to think about; the more I read about this book, the more I look forward to reading it.

This poll is hysterical. While I don't doubt that the Bible is important to many people I am sure it is not their favorite book to read. They are giving the answer that sounds best - not the one that reveals too much (like that they love westerns, romances or police procedurals). I also can't figure out why Gone With the Wind would be number 2 for anyone. It's not an easy book to read - it's certainly dated - and it's huge. I don't know anyone who has ever read it - do you? (And I'm from the south and know a ton of true southerners. A lot of them, even older folks, had never even seen the movie!)

A reading update: The Explosionist is one of the smartest YA titles I've read in ages and I enjoyed it a great deal. Review to follow in June. Charles de Lint has a new small collection due out from Sub Press that reads as a modern collection of fairy tales, very cute for younger readers. (The final copy should have nice photo illustrations as well.) Paul Volponi goes inside the Superdome during Katrina in Hurricane Song. It's incredibly intense - review for that one next month at Voices of NOLA. Aaronsohn's Maps has infuriated me in that special way that only books about WWI can. It's compelling, disturbing and devastating. More proof of how politicians almost 100 years ago were so cavalier in their decisions and how the world still pays a price for that. It makes the current world climate that much more terrifying to contemplate. Review in May. And finally The Red Leather Diary is very cool - I wish my grandmother was still alive as she would have loved this one. (More to follow soon.)