I am incredibly excited that Neil Gaiman won a Newbery for The Graveyard Book. Now, if I could just finish reading it.
He read the whole book on his book tour, and the videos have been put up on the kid-friendly extension of his website (www.mousecircus.com). But I just don't have the ability to play the whole thing while I'm at home. I'm an audiobooks in the car sort of girl, or radio in little spurts if I'm playing games, but a whole book while I'm just sitting around makes me a bit restless. I listened to a lot of books when I was knitting a lot, but I don't have any projects on hand right now.
The library has it. I talked them into buying it (and so they have a pre-Newbury first printing), but it's been checked out almost continuously since they ordered it two months ago.
There will be a movie, written and directed by Neil Jordan (whoever he is, I honestly don't recognise anything he's written). Neil Gaiman announced that when he was on the Today show this morning (having no television, I watched the short just now online).
I read Neil Gaiman's blog- he was just in Seattle doing openings for the Coraline movie, and was called away to do a ten minute spot on the Today show in NYC after getting the call yesterday morning that he won the award. That sort of a schedule boggles my tiny little mind, and makes me think that being famous is no fun. And Neil Gaiman isn't particularly famous, not since Sandman (and famous in comics is different than famous in real life) but I expect he's getting more famous and more mainstream, and that makes me happy just from a "now everyone can know about him" point of view.
I mentioned the Coraline movie, it's the new stop motion movie coming out in a couple weeks (February 6th). It's by Henry Sellick who did Nightmare Before Christmas and it looks positively gorgeous. The book is great and disturbing, and if the movie is anything close, I'll be happy. I hope to go see it the first week it's out, as my birthday falls then.
So, hooray for my favourite author.