We were just as incredulous as you: Tiger Eyes, which is being released simultaneously in select theaters, iTunes, and on demand services on June 7th, is the first big screen adaptation of at Judy Blume book ever. Eventually, it took a script from Blume and directing from her filmmaker son to convince a studio to buy into a small budget adaptation of Tiger Eyes. Even then, after the film wrapped, the deal fell apart, Blume spent a year getting control of the movie back and almost couldn’t find a new distributor, despite a Hollywood-wide obsession with finding the next big phenomenon from Young Adult literature.

Blume and her son Lawrence talked about the process of getting Tiger Eyes made to Entertainment Weekly:

Adapt this, Baz Luhrmann. Actually, adapt Bulgakov’s The Masquerain and Margarita.

No, seriously, I think you’d do a much better job at The Master and Margarita than The Great Gatsby. But I guess if you’re not doing anything else you could look at these works of classic literature with Pokémon in the title.

Yesterday author Maureen Johnson Tweeted about how many times she’s been told by men that they wish her books had “non-girly” covers so they could read them without fear of embarrassment. Her books don’t get “girly” covers because of their content, she explains, but because of her gender: “If you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. Because it’s ‘girly,’ which is somehow inherently different and easier on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it. This idea that there are ‘girl books’ and ‘boy books’… gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints.”

Thus Coverflip was born. The challenge, proposed by Johnson, asks for people to take a well-known book and reimagine what the cover might look like if the author was of a different gender. A few of our favorites—including A Game of Thrones by “Georgette R. Martin” and Stardust by “Nellie Gaiman”—are behind the cut.

From this week’s episode “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS.” Move, Clara! You’re blocking the shelves!

Two more pictures—one of the library, one of a rather intriguing (and possibly spoilery) book in the library—are after the jump. 26 non-library promo pics from the episode can be seen at blastr.

I usually write a post about the American Library Association’s top ten list of the banned, pulled, contested, and challenged books in American libraries every year, because more often than not the list is a lovely illustration of how our society is disproportionately uncomfortable with stories by women and minorities when they actually talk about their experiences as women or minorities.

But this year everything’s pretty equitably awful. In fact, this is the first time since 2008 that male authors on the ALA list have outnumbered their distaff counterparts. Hooray?

This is merely a portion of a diagram of the character relationships in The Count of Monte Cristo that I inexpertly threw together in Microsoft OneNote ages ago for no reason other than that I really kinda like the book a lot.

And the reason why I even read the book is because I saw the shlocky 2002 adaptation that drastically simplified the original plot, and inferred, rightly, that a movie could not contain that many adventure tropes without most of them actually appearing in a very likely much more complicated book. So I’m certainly not against movie adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo in principle. I’m just not sure if this new one is looking like it’s going to have much more to say than the 2002 version.

The new and growing market for eBooks has allowed companies to call into question some of the basic and universal characteristics of reading and owning books. That you can loan them to your friends, for example, or that by purchasing a book you’re also purchasing the ability to read it whenever you want, wherever you want, until you lose it, donate it, give it away, or wear through its well-loved spine.

eBook publishers have, to put it mildly, established that these are qualities of a book that they do not intend to carry over to the new format, which is to a certain extent fine, so long as consumers know what they’re getting into. But the eBook market also has other problems, namely accusations of price fixing, and, due to the combination of software that limits the kind of device a given eBook can be read on and the dominance of the Kindle over the eReader market, bullying tactics. A new lawsuit filed by three independent bookstores is looking to strike at the heart of the problem: the insistance of eReader makers that their books should not be readable on other devices.

Blackberry and Neil Gaiman have been doing a very interesting project lately. With a bit of funding and organization from Blackberry (in exchange for branding the… collaboration? contest? public art project?), Gaiman solicited tweets a little while ago from his followers, asking them twelve questions, one for each month of the year. The author then picked twelve of those responses and used them as the prompts for twelve tiny stories, a Calendar of Tales. Now the collaboration is back to the public again, as folks are invited to make art (and eventually videos) of all kinds in response to his twelve little fictions. Some of the artwork will be featured especially in a limited edition book, but I imagine we’ll be seeing lots and lots of it on the internet as well.

Gaiman’s twelve stories have just been released here (link is to a .pdf!), so if you’re looking for something to peruse over your lunch hour today, you could do worse.

Previously in Neil Gaiman

Crash Course is a great webseries covering broad subjects like World History, Biology, and Ecology with a large mini-series of videos for each one. Their shortest group of videos, on Literature, has just ended, but it’s final episode is full of fascinating information and analysis of quintessential American poet Emily Dickinson.

Also there is a dalek.

These bookmarks by Beth Yates (bethydesigns on Etsy) have me imagining the Doctor, Merlin, Harry Potter, Sherlock, et. al. interrupting your reading time with running commentary.

Sherlock would figure out the ending and spoil it for you two chapters in. If you were reading The Once and Future King Merlin and Arthur would butt in every few pages to insult each other’s characters, and Gwen and pre-evil Morgana would just roll their eyes because they’re better than those two dollopheads five times over. Hermione would relate everything to Hogwarts: A History, Eleven would have a really hard time staying still, and Ten would ruin your books by crying on them.

And worst of all, your shameful secret…

“Is that Twilight?!”