Still, it's a pity that Neil had to xvyy bss Obq'f qbt before they gave him a medal. But maybe that was meant as a kind of parody/reference.

Way to go, Neil!*

* Ambiguity about what I'm congratulating him for is intentional.

"Newbery, not Newbury. Also FUCK!!!! I won the FUCKING NEWBERY THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME. I thank you. "

(I suspect that was shortly after he'd actually gained consciousness, instead of just waking up.)

He says on his blog that he didn't swear when he was told, but he also says that his agent's first question was "you didn't star swearing, did you?"

As near as I can tell, according to quantum physics, this means that I am entangled with either Phil Harris or Grahame Coats. I'm not sure which, nor am I sure it would make a great deal of difference.

But now I have to read it. Newbery Medals are perfectly good excuses to put off more boring reading - I mean, The Graveyard Book is practically academic now. Right? Right?

But seriously - this is wonderful news! I'm so happy for Neil.

Now I'm reading Prince Of Stories, an overview of his work assembled by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette. So far, it looks like pretty good! (Warning: Massive and thorough spoilers!)

That's exactly what I thought. Neil has said many times that he would like to be/expects to be remembered through his children's books, which will then lead people to his other work. When I heard that The Graveyard Book had won the Newbery, I knew that he had just joined the ranks of the immortals.

Incidentally, Roald Dahl played a similar role for me - after reading all of his books in the kids' section, I somehow discovered that he had books in the adult side too, and checked them out (both literally and figuratively). I don't think that I suffered any severe repercussions, but "Switch Bitch" and "My Uncle Oswald" are not really books for nine-year-olds, however precocious.

I'm afraid I didn't have that kind of self-restraint. Alas. I tried, but I ate everything from chapter 4 onward in a single morning between the hours of about 4 and 8 AM. (John had to be to work in downtown Denver for 5, which meant a horrifically early morning for the whole household, all two humans and two cats of us.)

I was excited to hear Neil read chapter 7 (part two) here in Boulder, and I'm so glad that the entire tour is available to posterity. Hearing Neil read makes me gently, wistfully envious of his kids.

It's picky, only lets you use it for some letters, which means e.g. &xuml; doesn't work, so I can show what it looks like all put together.

(For those who don't know, the Newbery slants younger -- most winners are middle-grade novels for older elementary school students -- while the Prinz is specifically for young adult novels. Both are awarded by the American Library Association. The Prinz is not yet as prestigious as the Newbery, but it's still Big.)

---L.

(I see someone else has said this already while I was composing it...)

(And Henry Kaiser, a long-term reader and cognoscento of SF as well as being a cool musician, is up for an Oscar this year, with Werner Herzog in the long-form documentary!)

I know I already said in the Open Thread, but the Graveyard Book I didn't so much care for - it just wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. And I'd read Neverwhere to my kid before GB, as far as general scariness and theminesss goes. (Um, not much before, not NOW or anything, just generally before.) I think I read there are different editions in the UK for adult/young readers - anyone know which the US version is (or if it's entirely different)?

And hey, Mo Willems won a Geisel award! I love his books. (But I haven't seen that one yet.)

Is there a similar code for combining macron, or combining dot (as if you were dotting an I, but for other letters, as used in older Irish texts)?

See the combining diacritical marks chart for a generous list. Unfortunately I don't know how to give it hexadecimal values, so one still has to covert the entities to decimal manually.

There are four 'h' sounds: h, ḥ, ḫ, and ẖ. Likewise t and ṯ, d and ḏ (or ṯ, ḏ and ḫ for newer, single-character versions). Some older texts also use ı̉, but nowadays that's usually just j or i. Likewise ḳ has become q And the ayin is ʿ. So if only I knew how to do the 'aleph' that looks like a 3 broken in the middle, I'd be done. Last I heard that just wasn't encoded. :(

Well, that, and my browser doesn't space most of those correctly in italic.

Right now the ɓ, which should be a hooked b, is just a box. It's actually an ingressive mouth-air consonant in Hausa, which is like totally cool.

And once people discover his work because of the medal, then they can try all his other work and pick their own favorites.

It's full of win.

With this and Coraline coming out, he must be having a good time. As well he should.

I have such mixed thoughts about the Coraline movie. It was made right in Portland, by painstaking stop-motion animation. You have to respect that. But it could still be a dud.

Sigh.

Sounds like The Graveyard Book would make a lovely gift; though I'd have to read it first, make sure it was appropriate :)

From what I can find, Neil originally started calling it a book for adults that children would like also (date of post is Feb. 24, 2008), but I can't find anything on differing versions for the adult and YA markets. And I remember reading on his blog (but canNOT find now, so it must have been an untagged entry) that the only major differences between the US and UK editions was the Britishization (if you will) of certain terms. E.g., "cot" for "crib" comes to mind, as does "torch" for "flashlight," although now I'm trying to remember if there was a flashlight in Graveyard or am I thinking of Coraline?

Others stronger in Google-fu and the like may be able to tell you more...

Ah, the library currently has all three copies checked out, one on hold, a 24-person hold queueueue, and is acquiring fifteen more. Smart people.

It was a matter of minutes, really, and understandable. In the old days (before Internet) he would have been on the phone with friends.

Jane

I guess it's like seeing Star Wars - it's one movie if your frame of reference is the WW2 movies Lucas picked scenes out of, and another if it isn't.

Congrats to Neil.

> I think I read there are different editions in the UK for adult/young readers - anyone know which the US version is (or if it's entirely different)?

It also looks as if they might be following the Harry Potter route and doing young readers editions and adult editions - though I could just be confusing US vs UK versions here.

Regardles - at one (import, sf specialty) bookshop I've seen an edition with Dave McKean illustrations which are very nice, and at another general bookshop I've seen an edition which has much more of a 'younger readers' look to it which has Chris Riddell illustrations which are just plain wonderful.

Dave McKean:
http://www.thegraveyardbook.com/illustrations/

Chris Riddell:
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2008/05/01/chris-riddells-illustrations-for-the-graveyard-book/

Steve, #55, I didn't like the McKean illos. Not my style, and not very accurate to the book.

Dave McKean - I like his stuff, sometimes. The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish is a favorite in our house, and I liked Neverwhere (and the other movie that was based on his stuff, but I'm blanking on the name). But sometimes I think he's way off the mark, and this was definitely one of them. I should try to find out what the other illustrator did.

Oh, and I did find out about the adult/youth versions - the only difference is the illustrations, and Dave McKean did the adult one, so that seems to be what the US got. (Not counting the localization. Which I'm not really fond of - back when it took 3-5 years for Terry Pratchett books to get published in the US, I had the UK ones imported, and it's been an education for my daughter, who now knows all about pavements and torches and lorries. It's not like he writes in Icelandic! It's not going to cause all the delicate USians to faint if they read the word "lift"! Sheesh.) Wish they had a look inside, but here's the cover of the Chris Riddell version.

Mirrormask?

Which I think I need to reread now.

{{tucks self into bed with book}}

It's a very different voice than his poems.

"Ha! You may think I'm a hardhearted black sock, but underneath this dark woolly exterior is a naked pink foot."

Audible:
http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/products/ProductDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=Yes&productID=BK_HARP_001709

I dont know if it should be unusual that one of the days best story writers should also be one of the days best story readers, or if the skills are complimentary.

I had to resort to a little pushiness, but I got my sister & her family to watch Stardust. They loved it. Last I heard, my nieces watched it again with their grandmother.

I believe the discussion was specifically about those that had design input from Dave McKean, which includes Neverwhere and MirrorMask but not Stardust (not even indirectly, since the original book was illustrated by Charles Vess instead).

And you should definitely watch MirrorMask. How else will you ever learn what you get when you juggle bananas?

One becomes incredibly attractive to many people because of the mass o' peel?

(*) And Mark Hammill, who came in and bought old Superboy comics, but that was on a separate occasion.

As long as you don't monkey around too much...

By slipping that in, you'll make a musa this place.
Gros.

Michel @69, let's all paws.

Not only that, but there's plantain where that came from.

Canada is too small a market to have its own dedicated version of most books, so you pretty much just get to read books in whatever version of the language they were originally published in. There's no reason to believe that little Canadian children are smarter than their American counterparts, and as far as I know, none of them have been traumatized from having read the Harry Potter books in the original English. You just deal.