Each Friday, we share a handful of links we found interesting, provocative, funny — or just plain cool. We call it In Our Feeds. Have a good weekend!
The holiday we’ve all been waiting for is finally here - Happy Halloween, OOM readers! We here at OOM have been celebrating all month long, and here’s a quick recap of the Halloween-related posts we put together leading up to the big day!
- Our librarian Deimosa dug through the stacks and found these great vintage Scholastic stories. (Check out those covers!)
- Stephanie interviewed author Katie Alender about her new thriller, Famous Last Words, and her writing process.
- Stephanie also put together a list of spooky Halloween books for all age groups!
With Halloween capping off the week, it’s no surprise R.L. Stine and his spooky stories popped up all across the Web! Here’s a quick roundup:
- On his Twitter account, Stine wrote an entire scary story in just 15 tweets entitled, “What’s In My Sandwich?”
- The blog The Hairpin picked the top three villains from Stine’s Fear Street series while Jezebel revisited Fear Street’s Cheerleaders: The Last Evil for their Halloween YA Throwback Book Club! (Heads up – these two blogs may contain adult language and themes.)
- And just yesterday, Stine took over our social media accounts for the third year in a row!
We had another big visitor this week – Taylor Swift stopped by for a webcast to talk to kids about the power of reading! Check out this interview Taylor gave to the AP about her passion for reading and find out what book recommendations she got from our in-studio guests!
And before we get too far into this post, I’d be remiss if I didn’t let you know that just today, J.K Rowling released a new Harry Potter short story about Dolores Umbridge on Pottermore! (Luckily, you can read the full thing right here.)
There was another big holiday happening this week: did you know October 29th was National Cat Day? The Internet sure did, and we found some great articles to share with you highlighting some awesome felines. Now, you may have seen a bodega cat, but have you met a library cat? Brittany found a great bunch of cats that live in libraries across the country. (One even has her own merchandise for sale!) Many of them have their own Facebook pages or blogs documenting their services at the libraries they call home, so check them out! And that’s not all – Buzzfeed has a hilarious gif collection of cats who think they’re librarians!
Hermoine’s cat Crookshanks would approve of this article Lia found: a 163-year old hotel in London has converted some of its rooms to be completely harry Potter-themed! One is family-sized while the other is more suited to couples, and they also include personalized wizarding packages! Now even Muggles can experience a night in a wizard’s chamber, an opportunity otherwise found only at Hogwarts!
In more Harry Potter-related fun, Megan and Michael found this adorable spoof by Sesame Street‘s Cookie Monster starring as Furry Potter in Furry Potter and the Goblet of – what else? – Cookies. I bet if it were a Goblet of Cookies in the books, a lot more Hogwarts students than just Fred and George Weasley would try to sneak their names in!
Cookie Monster isn’t the only one finding inspiration from a YA series – check out this list of YA books, and the great looks they’ve inspired! Could you put together a look based on your favorite book?
And here are some more fun links!
Books that inspired great musicals (h/t Nadia)
Literary Starbucks
5 Punctuation Marks That Look Nothing Like They Used To
POLL: What Was Actually The Most Stereotypical Thing For A ’90s Kid?
