As you probably already know, journalist and book reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon unleashed a firestorm in the world of teen literature with her recent Wall Street Journal article in which she wrote of the "explicit abuse, violence and depravity" in many of the YA books published these days. The general gist of her argument seems to be that reading violent literature may lead to violence in the reader: "it is ... possible - indeed, likely - that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures."

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Group Messenger for Book Clubs is a new, free, and really easy to use messaging service that takes the hassle out of choosing books, scheduling meetings, and deciding genres or topics.

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London's Southbank Centre is planning a huge "Poetry Parnassus" to coincide with next year's Olympics.

Members of the public are invited to nominate up to 3 poets from any of the 205 Olympic competing nations. The organizers will select one from each country who will be provided with airfare, accommodation and visa so they can attend the event to be held in London in late June/early July 2012.

That a movie of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit is in production has been known for some time, but what I didn't realize is that the plans are for not one but two movies. The first, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey", will open in December 2012 (as will, incidentally, a movie of Life of Pi). The second, "The Hobbit: There and Back Again", will open in December 2013.

It will be interesting to see how the director strings out The Hobbit, a rather short and simple story compared to The Lord of the Rings, into two movies.I'm also intrigued to see how the actors who are reprising their roles from the "Lord of the Rings" (filmed a decade ago) will manage to handle the aging process.

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Let's play word association! If I say dissection what words come to your mind?

If you're anything like me it will be something like "biology lesson" and "yuk". Or, at least that would have been the case until a few months ago when I first encountered Brian Dettmer's three-dimensional book sculptures which he creates by dissecting his way through books to display their inner beauty. Working only with books that are no longer wanted such as old encyclopedias that are headed for the junk heap, Brian, with the help of just a knife, tweezers and a bit of glue and varnish, carves away the layers to reveal the book's inner beauty.

Here are a couple of his works based on single books:

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Talia Carner explains the extraordinary true story that lies behind her soon to be published novel, Jerusalem Maiden...

Rivka was fourteen. A Jerusalem maiden, she was already married, building a home in God's Holy City according to the mitzvah to hasten the messiah's arrival. Alas, Rivka's young husband died, leaving her no longer a virgin but neither a mother. She was doomed to never contribute her share to hastening the messiah's arrival through the good dead of procreation in Jerusalem.

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