Book Links Jan. 2009 (vol. 18, no. 3)

Web Connections for January 2009

The Web sites listed below were verified at the time of publication, but please check that they remain valid before using them in an educational setting.

Book ’Em: Mysteries Too Good to Get Away

• An online database of Edgar Award winners is available on the MWA Web site that allows users to search past winners and nominees by category and year. 
• Special Event: MWA: Reads is a program that Joan Lowery Nixon started as Kids Love a Mystery to encourage children and teens to read and write mysteries, fostering literacy, deductive reasoning, and critical thinking skills. The program encourages students, parents, teachers, and librarians to sponsor the Joan Lowery Nixon Award mystery writing contest, established in 2007. Contact MWAReads@mysterywriters.org to request materials for MWA: Reads.

Voices in My Head: Through the Headphones, Clearly

• The January column’s downloadable PDF is Francisca Goldsmith’s “Ten Audiobooks for Teens New to North American English.”

Pronunciation Guides for Personal and Commercial names

• Voice of America’s name pronunciation guide features a quick and easy sound file search.
• Inogolo has English pronunciations of the names of people, places, and stuff. This site has sound files that can take awhile to load. Also see Inogolo’s “Name Web search.”
• From the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (These are not sound files, but they have easy-to-follow phonetic guides): “The ABC Book,” a pronunciation guide to commercial names.
• Also see “Say How? A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures.”
• TeachingBooks.net features sound files recorded by various children‘s books authors and illustrators that instruct listeners on how to pronounce their names.

Place Name Pronunciation Guides

• Many place names on the Merriam-Webster OnLine Web site have sound files.
• Columbia Gazetteer of the World Online is a subscription database with sound files that may be available through your public or academic library.

Earphone English

• An article called “How Earphones English Started” is available at Audio Bookshelf.
• Visit Earphone English’s Web site to find out more about the club.

Guidelines for Audiobook Discussion Groups

Consider modeling audiobook discussion on the following award guidelines:

• Odyssey Award Criteria
• Amazing Audiobooks Criteria

Audiobook Lexicon

• For Mary Burkey’s audiobook lexicon, see AudioFile magazine’s “Talking the Talk: An Audiobook Lexicon.”