We’re baa-aaack!

Attention readers: After a rather long hiatus, during which apparently people kept finding and reading our blog, which is awesome and totally unexpected, and after telling ourselves and each other over and over and over again that we really have to restart the blog because we have THINGS TO SAY, but then not going forth with the typing, we are declaring an official re-activation of Underage Reading!  During the long gap since whenever we stopped blogging, and really during the long period before that when we weren’t really blogging about books but maintained the pretense of having a blog about books, sort of, we have read many excellent (and not so excellent) kids’ & YA books (not least the Hunger Games series, about which posts will be forthcoming, as Elizabeth somehow remembers large portions of the lengthy and vehement conversation we had like a year ago when Mockingjay came out). So stay tuned for Underage Reading 2.0 — sometimes sporadic, always emphatic.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth & Emily

Our blog is pretty. Right?

So after Emily put me on the spot by finally doing her part of the Frankie Landau-Banks discussion we’d both been putting off for a million years, I explained my own delinquency in the comments thus:

My post about Frankie’s feminism is coming, but not tomorrow. All of my posts have been delayed somewhat by my being at the Population Association of America annual conference, for which I have created the Largest Demography Poster in the History of Posters or Populations. I don’t believe that this can end well, but I believe it may well be highly amusing.

And because I know you all read this blog for updates on my demographic display activities: Despite a tremendous comedy of errors involving misbooked (me) and canceled (my professor) flights, a realization ten days before the conference that we had failed to book a hotel room (me) or had booked one in the wrong country (professor), and other assorted mishaps culminating in an Amazing Road Trip Adventure, our excessively large poster arrived (only a tiny bit mangled) in Detroit and was bestowed with a poster award.

Now, I am convinced that we won this award because our poster had the best color scheme of the whole conference. I feel strongly about colors, and other people, too, feel strongly about color combinations I pick out, though not always in the way I would like. Here’s a sample snippet from when Emily and I were experimenting with options while setting up our blog:

EMILY: That is the ugliest, clashingest color combination I have ever seen.
ELIZABETH: What do you mean? I wear these colors together all the time!
EMILY: You… often clash.

In the creation of our poster, my professor and I went back and forth on many aspects of the content and design, but the one change I would not countenance was any alteration to our colors. Which stubbornness I felt was entirely vindicated by subsequent award.

And then, after all that, I looked at our blog and realized for the first time that the main visual feature of our poster — purple heading boxes fading from dark to light — is also the main visual feature of Underage Reading. Apparently, while I love all the colors, I do have a favorite. I do think our blog suffers, however, from lack of the green and orange accents that made our poster a winner.

Additionally: Emily and I realized too late that our blog’s purple-and-gray are also the colors of our high school. The less said about that, the better.

A really nice profile from Lenore, who’s always worth reading

Hey you guys!

Lenore made Underage Reading the latest blog featured in Presenting Lenore’s Well Worth Watching series. Check it out!

Lenore is also the promulgator of the coolest award icons

Best blog compliment ever?

From a friend of the blog who may choose to identify him/herself in the comments, or remain anonymous, as s/he sees fit:

Keep up the good work with the blog. Today I printed out a couple of posts and read them while pooping. I can’t think of a higher compliment than that.

Top that, suckas.

Underage Reading

We are two friends in our mid-twenties writing about books for children and teenagers. (You can read more about us, but wouldn’t you rather just read about the books?)

Neither of us has ever lacked an opinion on anything, and certainly neither of us has ever hesitated to share said opinions with anyone who will listen. And we both love kids’ books. Really, the remarkable thing is that it took us this long to start a blog on the topic — because, after all, we have Things to Say!

And we will, in fact, be saying them daily over the next couple weeks as we get going, so don’t think this is the last you’ve heard from us. If you, you know, come back.