Thursday Links

Here’s some of this week’s news in YA:

Want to get jiggy with Generation Y? Here’s the current slang according to Trend Central, and it’s totally cosmic, dude. Okay, I’ll stop now. Honestly, I’d never heard of any of these, but that might have something to do with the fact that I’m old.

And on a side-note: what’ll happen when we run out of alphabet? What comes after Generation Z—do we start back at A? Imagine the pressure on those kids…

Anyway, on that same topic, Liz Funk (who doesn’t want that name?) blogs at YPulse about the botched depiction of teen life on TV and in books, suggesting the writers should get more teen input. Seems like a great point (and her examples are really good, so read that blog.)

I thought this was cool: you can invent a gadget for Alex Rider! Penguin and MAKE magazine are partnering in this contest to promote the November 17 release of the next Alex Rider book, Crocodile Tears. Check out this article in PW, including an interesting short interview with author Anthony Horowitz.

Stephenie Meyer is on Oprah this Friday, for you fans.

Kindle for PC is now available. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but plan to soon. Those Kindles and Nooks are cool, but a little pricey considering they’re just for reading (you can buy a lot of books with $200), so I’ll be interested how Kindle works on my trusty laptop. I’ll let you know.

And Cushing Academy is ready to embrace technology completely. They even spent $10k on 18 e-readers—how come that math makes no sense to me? But I’ll be interested to see how this works out; schools seem like prime candidates for e-books to me.

The Toronto Star talks about what it means to be Jewish to young people. Interesting stuff.

And on a final unrelated note: my local TV station reports that Utah is the happiest state in America. I have to say, I’m still not moving there…