Book Sense

From her spot behind the counter at Diesel: A Bookstore, in Oakland, California, bookseller Melissa Lion recommends great reading from her current favorite genre, young adult fiction.

When BTW announced the Book Sense 2004 Banned Books Top Ten, we misidentified a nominating bookseller's store location. Bookseller Judy Park -- from Mostly Books in Gig Harbor, Washington -- nominated Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers, edited by Judy Blume.

Banned Books Week is only a week away, and, given the national First Amendment implications of the USA Patriot Act, this year the event is more important than ever.

At the nation's only four-state juncture, in the grand expanse of the West, a 1,850-square-foot bookstore occupies a much larger space in the hearts of residents of, and visitors to, Durango, Colorado. Maria's Bookshop, celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, has purveyed general books and Southwestern art, and has created a sense of community and an atmosphere where quality and service are paramount.

Based on reporting from hundreds of independent bookstores with Book Sense across the U.S. for the four-week period ending September 12, 2004.

Past Category Bestseller lists are available at www.bookweb.org/read/5677.

Attention Media: Please contact Meg Smith at [email protected] for reprint guidelines for your newspaper or magazine.

This week Book Sense announces the 2004 Halloween Top Ten. The list is produced in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers' Get Caught Reading initiative and is based on the nominations of independent booksellers nationwide.

Booksellers in the Book Sense program will be receiving the Halloween Top Ten in the September Red Box.

Chris Van Allsburg's Caldecott Medal-winning The Polar Express (Houghton Mifflin) will come to the big screen this November 10 in an animated adaptation from Warner Bros., starring Tom Hanks.

Book Sense and the A&E Network are partnering in a special campaign to raise funds to support the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation (CRPF) and to promote the A&E original movie The Brooke Ellison Story.

The downloadable PDF flier of October "We Also Recommend" titles, which includes bibliographic information, jacket images, and booksellers' quotations, is now available on BookWeb.org. (To download, click here).

The September Marketing Action Kit includes:

Usually, when an author's book is nominated for an award it is cause for celebration, but for author and eighth-grade English teacher Jordan Sonnenblick -- whose book, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie, was nominated in July 2004 for the Young Adult Library Services Association's (YALSA, a divis

Due to the Labor Day holiday, bestseller-reporting hours will be extended for 24 hours. Reporting will begin at 3:00 p.m. EST on Saturday, September 4, and will end at 3:00 a.m. EST on Wednesday, September 8.

There is still time to nominate titles for the November Book Sense Picks and the Book Sense Fall History Top Ten. The deadline for both lists is Friday, September 3.

To help plan orders, here's a preview of the titles on the October 2004 Book Sense "We Also Recommend…" PDF, which will be posted, along with a file of shelf-talkers, to www.bookweb.org/read/6977 next week.