MotherReader: Book Is the New Cool! I’m going to start using this slang, and my kids are either going to think I’m book —or nuts.

Online Christmas Party 2008 Hosted by Lilliput Station. I think I’m planning to join in just as soon as I can catch my breath. But don’t wait for me. Check it out.

Epi Kardia blog has a book give-away and a series of so-far excellent articles on giving books for Christmas.

Joseph Bottum on chidren’s classics. I can’t say I completely agree with him. Little Women is “stale” and “a little creepy”? Winnie the Pooh, that philosophical genius, “consigned to the waste bin”?
Never. Still, Mr. Bottum does recommend some authors, old and new, that you may never have read or considered. And such recommendation are always welcome here at Semicolon.

I’ve been thinking a lot about giving books as gifts and about helping people to find the right book at the right time and about working in a library or a bookstore. I don’t work in either one right now, and I may never do so again. (I was a librarian in a former life.) However, part of what I want to do with this blog is to help people find that book, the one they were looking for and didn’t know it. I do think that connecting reader to book is really, well, really book, and I’d like to do it well and more often. It’s a good feeling to see someone enjoying a book that I recommended.