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This month, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat, by Dave Shelton, is still The Children's Book Review's best selling middle grade book. And we're very happy to add the very popular Kid President’s Guide to Being Awesome and The Terrible Two to our selection from the nationwide best selling middle grade books, as they appear on The New York Times.

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Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series is this month's best selling kids series from The Children's Book Review's affiliate store.

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This month, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat, by Dave Shelton, is still The Children's Book Review's best selling middle grade book. And we're very happy to add Brown Girl Dreaming to our selection from the nationwide best selling middle grade books.

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This month our best selling picture book from our affiliate store is the lively board book Peek-a-Zoo!, by Nina Laden.

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There are no changes this month to our best selling kids series list. The Marvel Heroes of Reading line of early readers remains the best selling series from our affiliate store.

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Reader's Digest's What I Like About Me is our best selling picture book from our affiliate store this month. As per usual, we've shared our hand selected titles of the most popular picture books from the nationwide best selling picture books.

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post by Heather Ryerson

Dasha Tolstikova’s lively, frenetic illustrations have a heart-warming naiveté that appeals to children and adults alike. It’s no wonder she seems to have her foxy paws in everything from children’s books to graphic memoirs and editorial pieces for The New Yorker and The New York Times. Tolstikova’s first picture book The Jacket (2014, written by Kirsten Hall) has received a lot of attention recently, including editor’s choice in The Sunday Book Review in The New York Times. Tolstikova earned her MFA (Illustration as Visual Essay) from the School of Visual Arts in 2012. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and is part of the studio collective Brushwick Studio.

Check out Dasha’s portfolio »

 

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Best Selling Books for Kids: This month, our best selling kids series is The Marvel Heroes of Reading line of early readers.

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This month, Secrets of a Christmas Box, a fantasy novel where the Christmas Tree ornaments come to life once the family go to bed, is The Children's Book Review's best selling middle grade book.

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This month, everything remains the same on our hand-picked list from the Best Selling Young Adult list—including The Children's Book Review's number one best selling young adult book is The Children's Homer: The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy.

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Yesterday, a day of challenges and breakthroughs, I read just two things, briefly. The first was the James Wood essay in the October 20 New Yorker, "No time for lies," about the Australian novelist, Elizabeth Harrower.

I feel the need to share the entire first paragraph. If you are skimming, please read, at least, the last line.

The Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower, who is eighty-six and lives in Sydney, has been decidedly opaque about why she withdrew her fifth novel, "In Certain Circles" (Text), some months prior to its publication, in 1971. Her mother, to whom she was very close, had died suddenly the year before. Harrower told Susan Wyndham, who interviewed her a few months ago in the Sydney Morning Herald, that she was absolutely "frozen" by the bereavement. She also claims to remember very little about her novel—"That sounds quite interesting, but I don't think I'll read it"�and adds that she has been "very good at closing doors and ending things.... What was going on in my head or my life at the time? Fortunately, whatever it was I've forgotten." Elsewhere, Harrower has cast doubt on the novel's quality: "It was well written because once you can write, you can write a good book. But there are a lot of dead novels out in the world that don't need to be written."

I don't know what these words do to you, but I am filled with melancholy as I read them. I am thinking about all the times we writers question our own work and purpose. How often we wonder if we are done in, or perhaps diluted. How greatly we fear this fate, of producing well-written dead novels. Bully for Elizabeth Harrower for being brave enough to name the fear. To care about the quality of the work she yields. To recognize that merely well written isn't good enough.

The second article I read yesterday was written by Alexandra Alter for The New York Times—an update on Anna Todd, the twenty-five-year-old erotica writer who "found inspiration in Harry Styles, the tousle-haired heartthrob from the British boy band One Direction." Todd shared her tale on Wattpad. Simon & Schuster has paid her a sweet six figures for the right to rebroadcast the Styles erotica under its Gallery imprint. The whole will be coming soon to a theater near you, thanks to Paramount Pictures.

Here is Todd, as reported by Alter, describing her process:

Then she found her calling — in the unlikely form of a baby-faced pop star. Ms. Todd started out as a reader on Wattpad in 2012, and quickly found herself spending several hours a day reading serialized fictional stories about One Direction. Last spring, she started writing her own story. “It took over my life,” she said.

With her husband’s support, Ms. Todd quit her job working at a makeup store counter to write full time. She updated “After” with a new chapter every day to meet readers’ demands and tapped out much of the book on her cellphone. She wrote for five hours a day and spent three hours trading messages with readers on Wattpad, Twitter and Instagram and drew on those comments to help her shape the story.

“The only way I know how to write is socially and getting immediate feedback on my phone,” she said.

One established, well-respected novelist pondering whether a book is alive enough, choosing to live quietly, without fanfare. A debut novelist tapping out a book on a phone based on a band, building a story according to Wattpad comments.

The bookends of my yesterday.

The ironies of publishing.

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This month, The Children's Book Review's number one best selling young adult book is The Children's Homer: The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy—a classic must-read for all Greek mythology fans.

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This month we've seen some changes on the best selling middle grade books list due to the well timed releases of Jason Segel's Nightmares!—a great choice for the upcoming spooky season—and Mike Lupica's Fantasy League (Did somebody say football?).

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Herve Tullet is a picture book hero! His best selling picture book Press Here (Chronicle Books, 2011) has been joined on the best selling picture book list by his incredibly fun Mix it Up!

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Here are some awesome books for your "Little Humans." As usual, we've picked five kids books that we feel represent some of the best new kids stories

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If you're looking for a novel that will linger with you for days, The Children's Book Review's number one best selling young adult book is Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira. Our hand selected titles from the nationwide best selling young adult books, as listed by The New York Times, features titles by super-talents John Green, Ransom Riggs, and Markus Zusak.

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Hot New Releases & Popular Kids Stories Saddle up, readers! With so many amazing children's books releasing it was hard to select just five of the best new kids stories to share with you this month.

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This month we have a blast from the past on top of The Children’s Book Review’s best selling kids series list. Who remembers the Mr. Men and Little Miss books?

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Who is Barack Obama? from the popular Who Was …? series tops The Children’s Book Review’s best selling middle grade books this month. We've also added The Finisher by David Baldacci to our hand selected titles from the nationwide best selling middle grade books, as listed by The New York Times, that also features books by super-talents Kate DiCamillo, Katherine Applegate and R.J. Palacio.

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The New York Times bestselling "Pete the Cat" picture book series tops The Children's Book Review's best selling kids series list. And the list of hand-selected series from the nationwide best selling Children's Series list, as noted by The New York Times, features the same popular dystopian thriller series as last month from the likes of Veronica Roth and Suzanne Collins, the adventurous Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan, and the relatable Diary of a Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney.

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Spring is here, the season of regeneration that brings plenty of flowers with nectar which worker bees gather and convert into honey. The Children's Book Review's best selling picture book for this month is full of information on the wonderful and very much under-appreciated honeybees, The Life and Times of the Honeybee by Charles Micucci.

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Our latest list of current popular middle grade books features Lego books and multiple Newbery award-winning titles. The hand selected titles from the nationwide best selling middle grade books, as listed by The New York Times, feature titles by super-talents Kate DiCamillo, Kevin Henkes, Katherine Applegate and R.J. Palacio.

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How did an 18-year-old college student in Maryland gain the trust of and get access to TV executives and anchors in New York? “By posting 10 or 15 posts a day meant that the industry knew it was a reliable consistent source,” says Brian Stelter, creator of our sister site TVNewser and now a media reporter for the New York Times and author of the just released book “Top of the Morning.”

As he neared graduation, Stelter had to make a choice: work in TV news, or cover it.

• Part I: Stelter on Being Matt Lauer’s “nemesis”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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The New York Times has started a “serendipitous poetry”-themed tumblr blog called ”Times Haiku.”

A team of computer programmers developed a special algorithm that scans the publication’s articles and subsequently generates haikus.

You can read haikus derived from different NYT pieces, including an article on carrot purée, a profile on stand-up comedian Colin Quinn, and a special Q&A with the Game of Thrones TV series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. According to Shelf Life, this blog may continue on even after the end of this month.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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I spent most of this weekend reading a hefty book for review, then running to catch up on corporate work and student papers. Then, for about a half hour, I calmed down and read The New York Times. I found the interview everyone else has likely read by now—the one in which A.L. Kennedy talks to John Williams about The Blue Book, and other such matters.

I found this particular exchange quite nicely juicy. I juxtapose it with a photo I took of my own classroom chalkboard, when I was prepping for the conversation my students and I were about to have about Caroline Knapp's memoir, Drinking: A Love Story. 

You can teach reading. You can teach critique. But you should not, as Kennedy points out here, tell someone, especially an author, what to think.


Have you ever learned anything specific about your craft from reading a critic’s reaction to your work?

From a professional critic, no. I’ve never expected to. In the U.K., the critical culture can be fairly moribund and dominated by an oddly ill-informed set of academic assumptions. There’s less and less space or money for serious criticism. From critics — which is to say, people who look closely at my work and are true and wide-ranging readers — yes, I have. But paying too much attention to external opinion — fashions, theories, trends, friends — puts you a couple of years behind your own timeline, because critics only ever follow. That whole scene can take you away from your center and your voice, while making you self-conscious. It’s a toxic combination. And an adult writer can’t always be expecting this little fantasy undergraduate workshop to tell them what to think. If you’re the author, it’s your decision to find out what you think and what you want to say and then get on with it. If it were a group effort, your name wouldn’t be the only one on the title.

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