A New Year’s Link Roundup and A Bright Idea

While Tanita braces herself against a brisk Scottish wind, and while I wait for my library holds to come in (Cybils graphic novels shortlist; woo hoo!) I’ve been accumulating a small collection of interesting links and tidbits from around the Kidlitosphere. Hope you enjoy!

• First, are you ready for the 2012 Comment Challenge? MotherReader and Lee Wind are once again encouraging all of us to spend a month trying to leave five comments per day on blogs around the kidlitosphere and beyond. The jump-starting of our good blogger habits kicks off tomorrow. I’m not sure yet whether, or to what extent, I’ll be able to commit to participating, but I know I’ve already been trying to poke my head up a bit more than usual, and I do plan to continue that good behavior. 🙂 Anyway, if you want to officially sign up, check MotherReader tomorrow.
• Via Leila at Bookshelves of Doom, I found a link to Lizzie Stark’s hilarious post on If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight. For instance, Annie Proulx might’ve written a story that went something like this: “Edward and Jacob defy society’s expectations up in the mountains.” OODLES more in the comments to the original post.
• On Fuse #8, Betsy Bird speculates on which children’s literary conferences she’d attend If She Were a Rich Girl, and I sulk, having discovered several more new conferences I won’t be able to afford to go to. 
• Of course you all know this already, but Walter Dean Myers has been named the next Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and has chosen the platform “Reading Is Not Optional.” Not much to say other than bravo!
• AbeBooks highlights major literary events of 2011, including the death of Ms. Diana Wynne Jones and the demise of Borders.
• And, last but not least, a fascinating story from the intersection of literature and science–after 150 years, a Penn State anthropologist may have deciphered the mysterious cause of death of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Oh, one more thing–and this is especially for all you Cybils Round 1 folks wondering what to do with the ARCs or review copies you might not have space for: the ARCs Float On effort is a searchable database that helps match bloggers with teachers looking to augment their classroom libraries. Why not send your post-Cybils stash to a needy teacher? If that doesn’t work out, ARCs Float On’s host site Reach A Reader has a great list of links to other ways to help and places to donate. Think of it as Boxing Day for books!

*Bright Idea Time* In fact, maybe that’s something the Kidlitosphere should institute…Book Boxing Day, during which bloggers commit to boxing up one average-sized file box of books and donating it to their chosen location–a library, a teacher, even some lucky reader! Look, we get LOTS of books in the mail, and we BUY lots of books on top of that (c’mon, you know you do). Filling (or nearly-filling) a file box per year, or even every other year, shouldn’t be a problem, should it? And it would make a fun blogosphere-wide event. What do you all think? Let me know in the comments. Or let me know if my bright idea is already being implemented somewhere by someone, so I can slink off in embarrassed silence. Thank you kindly!