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Teen Blog

Reading, Wellington, and whatever else – teenblog@wcl.govt.nz

Month: January 2010

Upcoming Books Part 2

Recently on the teen blog we highlighted some of the upcoming new books you can expect to see this year. I said I’d be back with catalogue links so that you could place some reserves for your favourites, and, diligently (and hopefully correctly) I’ve put them into the post now. So you can reserve away. More will be ordered in due course.

MOAR GLEE!

gleeGood news for Gleeks, Glee : The Music, Volume 2 has arrived amongst our collection. You won’t be able to find it on the shelves though, because lots of you have already reserved it. Jump in the queue and excitedly wait for the most popular music since 1964 – true story, in 2009 the Glee cast had 25 singles in the Billboard hot 100, the most since the Beatles had 31 back then. Just as big really.

nirvanaNirvana’s albums are almost all too old to have a Young Adult card now, and Bleach recently turned 20. To celebrate this occasion, Sub Pop has released Bleach (20th Anniversary Edition). More than just the standard reissued, same old album, but with a new booklet and a couple of token bonus tracks, this one has an entire live concert packaged with it. One that could be rightly considered deserving of a stand alone release. Worthy!

killersAnother nicely packaged package is Live from the Royal Albert Hall by The Killers. You get a career spanning concert performance + behind the scenes doco on the DVD side and an 80 minute chunk of said concert performance on the CD side. No matter where you are you can pretend you’re at a concert! All in all it’s a killer collection, haha.

And if you’d like to hear previews of these CDs they’re all on our bebo page.

Youthspective

Wellington City Council is running a photography competition for 10-18 year-olds in March. You can win a camera, and maybe even get paid for your photos to be added to the Council’s collection of stock images. Paid! Win! Two appealing words. All you need to do is take photos that captures your youthperspective of Wellington.

It runs from Saturday, the 13th of February, to Sunday, the 14th of March. There is a free photography workshop on Saturday, the 13th of February , here, at the Central Library, at 1pm.

There is more information to be found here.

Read More

Rockin’ Robins (well, finches, but I couldn’t think of a finchy pun)

So many new books, not so much with the new CDs. Because you must be hanging out for some music by now, I, Synthesiser Patel, would like to share with you my new favourite song.

Short Short Story Competition Winner

Congratulations to Bronwyn for winning the 2009 Short Short Story competition with her story ‘A Decision Between Two Hands’. Well done. Bronwyn wins the Cirque du Freak prize pack – enjoy!

Listen To These If You Please

Amerie may not have the chart topping success of contemporaries like Beyonce and Rihanna, but she is every bit their equal when it comes to making quality, post-2k R&B. Latest work Love & War continues her strong run of form, earning well-deserved critical plaudits. Also, her full name is Amerie Mi Marie Rogers, which is mildly amusing.

Ministry Of Sound have been busy compiling the dance music, putting it on 3CD sets, then releasing it in little boxes for many years now. Two new little 3CD boxes they’ve just put out are Anthems II, which includes tracks from 1983-2009 and The Annual 2010, which is what they suppose this year will sound like on the inside of dance clubs.

contemporaries

What’s on at the movies in 2010?

Here’s a selection of films that will be coming soon(ish) to a theatre near you.

Fantastic Mr Fox. On now. We posted about the trailer here.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (March). The Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan are super popular in the children’s fiction collection.

 

How to Train Your Dragon, with America Fereira and Gerard Butler (3D – March). From the books about Hiccup and Toothless by Cressida Cowell. I mention this because it’s 3D and it therefore looked cool (when I saw it at Avatar).

 

Alice in Wonderland (3D – March). But is Johnny Depp making the Mad Hatter seem too much like Willie Wonka? Visit the trailer here, and mind the teacups.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (April). Based on the best selling series of books by Jeff Kinney, which are apparently ravingly good and funny. There’s no trailer to be found (by me)!

Toy Story 3 (June/July). Here’s a link to the trailer.

Eclipse (July). The question is, is this the last one, or are they game enough to try and make a film out of Breaking Dawn?

The Last Airbender (July), based on the series Avatar, and directed by M Night Shyamalan (who saw dead people) and starring Jackson Rathbone (Jasper) and Dev Patel. We brought you the trailer here.

Beastly (based on novel by Alex Flinn – see this post about classics remixed) starring Vanessa Hudgens, Neil Patrick Harris, Mary-Kate Olsen and some guy called Alex Pettyfer. Will be at the movies in September, although the trailer says July which is confusing. The trailer:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 1 (November). Then it’s just another six or seven months before the final instalment.

ps The Mortal Engines quartet by Philip Reeve is being made into a movie, with Peter Jackson involved, but that’s not this year.