I stumbled across this video from Active Dad UK while searching for links to free ebooks for kids (their aunts and uncles got them Kindles for Christmas). In addition to providing descriptions to free ebook sites, Active Dad also included this video ...

This year, the celebrated children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth turned 50. It’s a fantastic story about a boy named Milo “who didn’t know what to do with himself — not just sometimes, but always.” It’s a book about being bored and uninterested, and discovering a whole new way of looking ...

For those of you who wouldn’t know, the Guardian Reading Group began with Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic, Fahrenheit 451, by readers’ choice. That’s a great, revolutionary choice (so they said), that will especially appeal to us geek people in love with classical sci-fi, and to us parents looking for books to ...

There are book geeks and there are music geeks, but because songwriting itself is such a literary endeavor there is also a lot of cross-pollination between these two distinct tribes. Interestingly enough, the biggest geeks are very often the songwriters themselves. Nerd music as we know it today is the product ...

Sequels. Some are bad. Some are worse. But some match the quality and excitement of the first, perhaps even surpassing it. The sequel to 2009’s A Whole Nother Story, Another Whole Nother Story is everything a sequel should be. It carries on the storyline, and improves on the first book. Picking ...

Meet the downside to great works of literature being in the public domain: A sanitized version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is in the offing. This new version, edited by a man named Alan Gribben who is actually a scholar of Mark Twain’s work, will remove the “n-word” and ...

While reading Neatherlands by Joesph O’Neil last night I got choked up and had to fight back tears. I get like that when the theme of broken relationships, particularly marital, comes up. After a separation where one character lived in New York and the other lived in London, the main character finds ...

Pen and ink. Black and white. Cross-hatching. These are definitely not lost arts. At least not in David Macaulay’s hands. This beautifully drawn, carefully written tale is a slight departure from everything else I’ve seen by the amazing David Macaulay. Rome Antics still contains plenty of architectural drawings, but the story ...

I was quickly cruising through my email inbox on Friday morning, making sure there wasn’t something urgent needing my attention, when I came across a link to a New York Times article about how picture books are losing popularity. The subject matter stopped me in my tracks. ...

The Kid Beowulf graphic novel series has a simple, charming concept: Beowulf and Grendel are Secretly twin brothers. Once their secret connection is revealed, in Kid Beowulf and the Blood-Bound Oath, they embark on a romp through classic literature. The second book in the series, Kid Beowulf and ...