1. If you're so inclined I'd really appreciate as many blog mentions and tweets about the wishlists for Navajo & Apache teens as possible. Per the usual for this type of event, the initial wow factor has calmed down and I'm now in full panic mode that no other books will be bought (I know, I just need to settle down but I worry about these things incessantly). In my experience the best thing to do is have a ton of folks mention it all over the place and this way we get more and more people to buy books, a little bit at a time. So, if you have a moment, please pass the word.

I will be, as they say, eternally grateful. (And you can read more about how it all came to pass, here.)

2. This girl puts us all to shame when it comes to donating books, by the way. (38,000?! Wowsers!)

3. Just finished When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin. If you're interested at all in the craziness that hit Zimbabwe a few years back reducing that country to chaos, then I highly recommend this memoir. It's written by a journalist so far less likely to stray off into navel gazing. Fascinating stuff, for sure.

4. Just finished a perfectly serviceable book on the history of policewomen for Booklist. I am, however, now most ready to read something exciting and gripping and of the thrilleresque genre. I have Sarah Moss's Cold Earth - might be cracking that open in a few hours.

5. After finishing Beth Kephart's latest, The Heart is Not a Size, I have decided she is becoming almost her own little sub genre - a writer who creates stories around, and perhaps also for, a particular sort of teenage girl. The one who seems to have it so together but has numerous little worries, and concerns. Not the drama of violence or addiction ala Ellen Hopkins but of quietly going a wee bit unhinged while trying to hold it all together. Not that Georgia goes crazy in the slightest in Heart, but she worries. And in Nothing But Ghosts there was quiet worrying as well. This all strikes me as something that is perhaps more common than anything else among teenagers - the worrying about holding it all together, doing the right thing, not being a disappointment.

Perhaps I see it because it is so familiar to me. (Too much personal information, there, I imagine).

Heart is a lovely read; the review will follow in my June column. (May is SFF).

6. And speaking of the column, I have a new one up this month on MG & YA mysteries. There are many gems in there (well they all are, of course) but I wanted to point out the very overlooked Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell which is creepy in the best way and Year of the Bomb by Ronald Kidd which is Stand By Me in California with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, McCarthyism and Richard Feynman (I'm not making any of that up - it's really all there.) Shadowed was especially good in that it made a ghost come across as both sympathetic and crazy - you want to help the guy and flee for your life at the same time. It also shows how hard it can be to tend to paranormal matters when the adults around you worry more about curfews and such. I loved that bit particularly as all too often authors just make the teen's family oblivious which I think is very lazy writing.

7. Finally, have you heard about the Madame Curie Complex by Julie Des Jardines? From the publisher's blurb:

Exploring the lives of Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, Rosalyn Yalow, Barbara McClintock, Rachel Carson, and the women of the Manhattan Project, Julie Des Jardins considers their personal and professional stories in relation to their male counterparts--Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi--to demonstrate how the gendered culture of science molds the methods, structure, and experience of the work. With lively anecdotes and vivid detail, The Madame Curie Complex reveals how women scientists have often asked different questions, used different methods, come up with different explanations for phenomena in the natural world, and how they have forever transformed a scientist's role.

I am ever hopeful that this one is not deadly dull as it is a subject quite near and dear to my heart (the history of women in science). I'm adding it to the list for reading later this year and look forward to seeing what I can learn.

[Cecil Castellucci is, of course, on the Alchesay High wish list.]