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Just because we love our Extra Helping readers so much, we're sending out our Best Books list two weeks early. Enjoy!
p.s. Below you will also find just some of the interviews we've done with the "Best Books" authors.
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| The Best Books of 2007 |
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School Library Journal's editors selected these 63 books from the 4500 titles reviewed in our pages this year. In looking over the list, we realized that 2007 saw some of the best and most powerful historical fiction titles in memory, putting human faces on perplexing and painful periods of the past that still resonate today.
The golden age of fantasy continues to flourish and we selected 10 titles that have fresh twists, unusual settings, and deliciously wicked villains. Several of the novels will make your readers laugh out loud, and a couple may break their hearts and provide plenty of fodder for reflection and discussion.
War and poverty and their resultant change in lifestyles also show up in a number of the books. Picture books for the very young were particularly appealing this year, but you'll also find enough to keep a wide audience of early readers happily engaged and informed. A few of the selections cross genres or simply defy pigeonholing in terms of their styles, content, or prospective audiences. We think you'll find plenty of beautiful, thoughtful, and perhaps provocative choices among these fiction and nonfiction selections. We'd love to hear what you have to say about them.—Trev Jones, Book Review Editor
Click here for the complete list.
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| Stranger in a Strange Land: Shaun Tan |
 Your books have tackled colonial imperialism, social apathy, and the nature of depression. The Arrival—a 128-page, wordless graphic novel—explores what it's like be a refugee, adrift in a very unusual world. Why such serious subjects?
I'm not really sure. When I start a book, I'm attracted to very specific imagery, and I'm usually not aware of what the story is about until I'm well into it. Probably it's got something to do with displacement. I've never really felt at home anywhere—at least not since I was a child.
I recently moved from Perth to Melbourne, which is on the other side of [Australia], and I feel exactly the same here as I did in Perth—even though I spent 30 years there. I think growing up in the suburbs may have contributed to that. It's not a place that has any handles that you can attach to.
read more... |
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| Song of Myself: Sherman Alexie |
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 You were born with hydrocephalus (water on the brain), and you grew up poor on the Spokane Indian Reservation with alcoholic parents. How did you learn to read by the time you were three?
Partly it was because my dad was a major genre reader. He read a lot of, like, The Executioner and The Punisher and a lot of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. He was way into the John F. Kennedy assassination; so there were dozens of those books around the house. Even though my dad was a randomly employed, blue-collar alcoholic, he was also very much into reading. And then the other thing was, ironically, because I was so sick and because Indian health service has such great contracts with major health-care providers, I ended up in a lot of therapy—physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy. Because they thought I was going to be mentally disabled, they had me in a lot of educational therapies. So my brain disease and my brain surgery got me the kind of
early childhood education that I never would have gotten otherwise.
read more... |
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| The Fruits of Her Labor: Sara Pennypacker |
 I heard that your greatest ambition as a child was to play shortstop for the Boston Red Sox.
I haven't actually given that up. I had a real narcissistic conviction that I was meant to be discovered. I used to try to play ball as close to the road as I could, so that scouts going by would see me.
You were a serious watercolor painter. Why did you give it up?
After a while, I came to a realization that I needed the world of visual art more than the world of visual art needed me. That was a profound turning point, about 10 years ago.
read more... |
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| Library Department Chair |
New Trier High School
Winnetka, IL
The Library Department Chair is the primary leadership position for a large and comprehensive two-campus high school library program characterized by a high degree of information literacy instruction and teacher collaboration.
To see all positions available through the SLJ Career Center, click here...
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