August 30, 2008

Weekends with NPR


Ah, I adore NPR. It's so lovely to have streaming audio and hear those placid voices I've been hearing for years, even though I'm miles from home.

NPR this weekend has quite a few cool things. Anne Trubek, of Oberlin College feels it's time to retire Catcher in the Rye from high school reading lists. Oh, hear, hear. It wasn't contemporary when I was in high school, and though he was perhaps shocking in 1951, I found poor Holden just ...generically whiny. With as many excellent books as have been written in the last ten years, not to mention just this year, surely it's time to reshuffle?

From NPR's Youth Radio: Ebert Elementary School in Denver started the FUNNIEST Book Election last week -- instead of arguing about Democratic contenders (which they did all last year -- it was Obama vs. Clinton on the playground, at high decibel), they're standing behind their favorite books... for sometimes just as lame of reasons as people vote for candidates. "I haven't read any of them," one student confesses.

Also:
The ladies at Jezebel trouble the waters at Terabithia. Don't miss Fine Lines.

Jo Walton hates fantasy. Don't let that World Fantasy Award thing fool you.

And mental_floss has a Quick 10 on winning words in Scrabble. Play some this Labor Day weekend!

2 comments:

Sarah Stevenson said...

Great fun weekend links. I enjoyed Jo Walton's blog post a lot. The Scrabble words were great, too--and some of the comments on that were pretty entertaining.

Sara said...

I'm with that commenter at Jo's post who says the multi-volume-ness of fantasy puts her off. That's the number one reason I don't read fantasy as much as I used to. Closure, people, I need closure in a book.