Amazon Daily

The new Horn Book magazine just came out, but darnit if I didn't just get my hands on the previous one! We took Silas to lunch with his great-grandmother yesterday, and Heidi read from the Sep/Oct issue aloud in the car. (I highly recommend the human audiobook to all young families as a way to squeeze in more reading time.) The Horn Book was my pick because I've been wanting to read editor Roger Sutton's interview with Jon Scieszka (the genius behind The Stinky Cheese Man, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, the Time Warp Trio books, etc.).

Scieszka was mostly talking about his crusade-slash-Web-site Guys Read, which is intended to draw attention to boys' literacy. ("Boys often have to read books they don’t really like. They don’t get to choose what they want to read. And what they do like to read, people sometimes tell them is not really reading.") The interview is insightful and often hysterical and I wish it were online to share, but I'll transcribe one particularly entertaining snippet. He's talking here about what happened when a neighbor of his tried to start a boy-friendly book club for his sons that also involved pizza and soccer:

I went to a couple of the meetings, and they were really funny. It was just like a bunch of guys in a bar. Even though they were only eight years old, they were master bullshitters, just throwing out what they knew about, say, Jackie Robinson, when the book under discussion was The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963. They'd go off on these tangents, little eight-year-olds trying to show that they each knew more than the other guy, and nobody was listening to each other at all. That's a different way boys experience books, and part of why they enjoy nonfiction, certainly. There's something about boys amassing expertise and being in charge of that knowledge, whether it's about all the dinosaurs in the world or every kind of truck that there is on the planet.

The interview is great if you can get a hold of it--and it's generated much discussion among parents, educators, librarians, and authors, e.g., on blogs on Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal. --Paul

While the scrumptious editors at the Amazon Kitchen Store have been blogging on Amazon.com for well over a year now, this week marks our move into our new TypePad kitchen, here at www.aldenteblog.com. Though the décor may be a tad bit different, our obsession with food, cooking and recipes, shiny and sparkly new kitchenware, tasty culinary trends and topics, cocktails by the bucketful, gastronomic news of all flavors, and general merrymaking, hasn’t simmered down one bit. Which means that, just like on the Al Dente blog when it lived solely on Amazon, you’ll find us blogging our aprons off, keeping your larder stocked with the latest information the food world has to offer, as well as giving suggestions for mid-week happy hour drinks and what you should be cooking this weekend. So come on, pull your chair up to the Al Dente table--we’re holding a spot for you.

--A.J. Rathbun

For those people who don't have time to mix powder and water, there's "Organic Batter Blaster". It's pancake mix in an aerosol can.

I'm not kidding.

This week, Oni Press releases the latest single-issue comic of the Antony Johnston (writer) / Christopher Mitten (artist) project Wasteland, a Harvey Award nominee for best new series. Set one hundred years after a world-wide catastrophe called The Big Wet, Wasteland follows the adventures of Michael, a desert scavenger. And strange adventures they are--action-packed but also at times contemplative, with all kinds of secrets for readers to discover. It's not just about surviving in a bleak landscape--there are multiple layers to this comic, and multiple mysteries. The drawing style is stark and evocative, with Johnston's writing bringing depth and excitement.

As Johnston said when I contacted him about Wasteland, creating the comic was a challenge: "It was my first ongoing, episodic comic; it has a massive world and back story, all of which had to be worked through and then kept in mind while writing; it was a story I'd wanted to write for more than a decade, so the drive to 'do it right' was very strong." At the same time, Johnston had the most fun "Coming up with the world, the back story, and the big mysteries."

Johnston still gets a thrill receiving finished copies of his work in the mail. "No matter how much of a veteran you might be, if you don't get excited and a little nervous when something is published for the first time, you should probably think about doing something else.

With Wasteland Book 1: Cities in Dust (collecting the first six issues) out this past March and Book 2 (Shades of God) out soon, "the biggest ongoing challenge is juggling the multiple plots and mysteries--making sure they not only fit together, but do so in an interesting and compelling way. If I stop to think about it too much I get the cold sweats, frankly."

Up next for Johnston, in addition to more Wasteland, is the third Alex Rider graphic novel, Skeleton Key, plus Dead Space, a comic prequel to the upcoming videogame, with Ben Templesmith, and a young adult fantasy novel called Blackguard that Johnston hopes to have finished early next year. Visit Johnston's website for more information.