The Mystery Writers of America announced the 2012 Edgar Award winners this week: The winners of the juvenile and young adult categories are, respectively, Icefall by Matthew J. Kirby (Scholastic, 2011) and The Silence of Murder by Dandi Daley Mackall (Random House Children’s Books-Knopf BFYR, 2011). The nominees in the juvenile category also included Horton Halfpott by Tom Angleberger, It Happened on a Train by Mac Barnett, Vanished by Sheela Chari, and The Wizard of Dark Street by Shawn Thomas Odyssey. The young adult nominees also included Shelter by Harlan Coben, The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson, The Girl is Murder by Kathryn Miller Haines, and Kill You Last by Todd Strasser. The full list of 2012 nominees and winners is available on the Edgar Awards website.
The Library of Congress has digitized a number of its rare classic books, including children’s books. The LOC’s Teaching blog has a new post this week highlighting a selection of its digitized classics that can be enjoyed by parents and children as well as by educators in classrooms and libraries. Two of the children’s books looked particularly fun to me: Baseball ABC (1912), an illustrated ABC book that focuses entirely on baseball, and The Rocket Book (1912), an illustrated book that gives glimpses of life in 20 apartments as a rocket travels through each one after “Fritz, the Janitor’s bad kid/Went snooping in the basement.” As you might expect, Fritz’s discovery of a rocket results in him immediately lighting the fuse.
Yale University Press has just released its first set of books in a new lecture-based series, writes Jennifer Howard over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Yale professors are turning their best Open Yale Courses into books, which are available in traditional print as well as electronic formats. The first set of titles was released this month. If you’re looking to freshen up your own course content and lectures, you could certainly do worse than getting the information from Yale. As a side note, I highly recommend following Jennifer Howard (the piece’s author) on twitter. She’s a blast: @JenHoward
NPR’s list of paperback bestsellers this week has a book you might want to check out, if you’re feeling bored or in need a good giggle: Richard Benson’s F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers (Chronicle Books, 2011). The book has spent 45 weeks on the NPR Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List, where it currently ranks No. 12. My favorite answer came in response to a test question asking for three ways to reduce heat loss in your home. Which the student answered with “1. Thermal underwear, 2. Move to Hawaii, and 3. Close the door.”