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I am #70 on Kindle bestsellers on Amazon!!!!!!!! (Sandwiched between “The Prince” and “A Summer Affair”.) Click photo to witness septuagenarian glory.

I had so much fun doing this podcast with former YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) president, the completely delightful Michael Cart, that I barely let him get a word in edgewise. Things we discussed (as broken down by producer Linda Braun):

• Shelf Discovery
• The range of human experience covered in teen novels.
• How teens read and what they get out of reading realistic fiction.
• Books including Secret Lives by Bertha Amos, Jacob Have I Loved, Phyllis Reynold Naylor’s Alice series, and The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp.
• Reasons why novels for girls and women do not receive the respect they deserve.
• Skurnick’s career & the readership of her Jezebel columns.
• The future of print reviewing and the changing world of reading in electronic and print formats.

TIME

Any author who won the affections of Lizzie Skurnick in her girlhood should count her- or himself lucky. Shelf Discovery is a dizzyingly crowded, joyful hodgepodge of book reports. This is potent nostalgia for girlhoods past; the strawberry scent of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers practically wafts off the pages.

TEENREADS

Reading SHELF DISCOVERY is a reintroduction to many of my favorite books and authors. It also allowed me to rediscover myself as a young reader. But the power of the book is not in the nostalgia factor of revisiting books I know and love. Instead, its strength is the dignity it brings to young adult literature and to the act of reading itself. Reading is often viewed as a solitary act. SHELF DISCOVERY is a reminder that reading connects us to other readers and writers, providing a common frame of reference through which we can share our own lives.

You actually have to be the age of the ideal reader of “Shelf Discovery” to understand why being tweeted — even retweeted! — by Kim Wayans is so exciting.

Two things:

• Listen to me on BOB EDWARDS. I say period 600 times.
• Listen to me on TALK OF THE NATION. I do NOT talk about siblings locked in an attic who sleep together. (Oh, whoops — yes I do.)

In further upcoming podcasts, I discuss Neanderthal rape. No, no — YES I DO.

Date: Tuesday, July 28
Time: 7:00 pm
Place: Barnes & Noble Tribeca
Location: 97 Warren Street, NY, NY

Download event

Talked Neanderthal booty and stinging welts on Casteel clan with the wonderful Kim Alexander of XM’s Fiction Nation. Podcast up soon.

(I ripped this off my other blog. I am too old to do Twitter, two blogs, two Facebooks and REAL LIFE, you know! But if you come eat a burger with me, there will be no false replication whatsoever, as long as you let me eat your fries.)

A) I’m going to be on TALK OF THE NATION TOMORROW (thursday) for like NINETEEN HOURS with MEG CABOT talking teen! Please listen.

2.) I was on THE BOB EDWARDS show today and we had a delicious time talking about rereads and teens and The Monkey Wrench Gang et al.

3) Reader’s Digest ran a lovely, strangely prose-poem-y rendering of my intro to Shelf Discovery.

ii) I’m not really supposed to link to nice reviews all over as such, but Teenreads really wrote THE LOVELIEST thing on Amazon and I want to link just to thank them.

2.2) Double X ran an excerpt with my piece on Daughters of Eve, with a headline that will seal the deal in my grand campaign to steer away from blind dates.

7) Michael Orthofer wrote a very respectful and thoughtful review with a strangely melancholy interlude on how much I had neglected the male perspective in the book. Men! I did not neglect the male perspective. I just wasn’t thinking of you at all. So, so different.

I don’t know what you coffee-sniffers did this morning, but I was apparently…ON BOB EDWARDS! So exciting when you don’t know that’s going to happen! Saying things about rereading. Many, many things. Producer Cristy Meiner wrote a lovely essay on the site:

We re-readers are an often mocked group; I can’t even recall how many times my Mom has said to me, “WHY do you re-read books when there are so many books out there you haven’t read?!” I understand the question, I really do, and trust me, I’m doing my best to get through the hundred million or so that I haven’t read yet. But re-reading a favorite book from my youth is the book equivalent to settling down in a hot bubble bath: I relax and my tired brain sighs happily as I step back into a story I know and love.

Listen here.

Would you like to win a free copy? You know you would! Proceed!

First, let me just say how mad I am at this book. Do you have any idea how much it’s added to my to be read pile? I’ve read maybe half of the books covered in Shelf Discovery, but now I have to re-read them, plus read the other half for the first time. Talk about pressure.

Another nice mention about Shelf Discovery in the Chick Manifesto blog…it is indeed my dearest dream that such a flood of eBay buys follows publication that all these books are re-released in handy omnibus editions.

Just a reminder — I will be on Bob Edwards July 22nd and NPR’s Talk of the Nation July 23 and some other Sirius show I cannot remember the name of shortly thereafter.  I even turned down car service in D.C. — which seems virtuous but, given traffic there, I suspect was actually not.

Reader’s Digest has named Shelf Discovery…. a top 5 summer book pick! And excerpted it w/my Good Earth reveries.

My delightful designer, seeing the hash of directions to Maddow show below, informs me of the following:

BTW, you can get iTunes links by right clicking on them and selecting “Copy iTunes Store URL”

And provides URL.

Maybe men DO deserve to get paid more…?