• BookPage is a selection guide, which means we only review books that merit recommendation. Still, we can appreciate a good hatchet job as much as the rest of you, especially one that describes a book with terms like “bizarre,” “hifaultin,” “moany” and “crazed.”
• Fox is planning a TV series adaptation of Reamde, the acclaimed 2011 thriller by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. Deadline reports that brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, the Oscar-winning team behind About a Boy, will direct the Reamde series for Fox. (In a side note, there’s also a TV adaptation in the works for About a Boy, which, like the 2002 movie of the same title, is based on Nick Hornby’s novel. Minnie Driver is reportedly starring in the NBC pilot.)
SYLVIA PLATH
• February 11 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of poet Sylvia Plath. Surprised that she could find no contemporaneous accounts of Plath’s 1963 suicide, Atlantic writer Ashley Fetters decided to investigate.
• The 2012 Cybils Awards were announced Thursday, honoring children’s and teen books that combine “literary merit and kid appeal.” Those sound like just the right standards to us, so not surprisingly we love many of the winners, which include:
Fiction Picture Book: A Home for Bird by Philip C. Stead
Nonfiction Picture Book: Mrs. Harkness and the Panda by Alicia Potter, illustrated by Melissa Sweet
Fantasy & Science Fiction: The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen
Check out the full list of winners, which are chosen by children’s and YA bloggers.
• And last but not least, the NYT spotlights the good, the bad and the ugly in 200 years of Pride and Prejudice covers.
