The Happy Prince on Lookybook

This was on Lookybook in today's post.

Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, retold by Elissa Grodin and illustrated by Laura Stutzman.

It is so beautiful that words fail me. Click through to view it in larger mode on Lookybook. 
 
 

The Happy Prince on Lookybook

This was on Lookybook in today's post.

Words fail me

Meg Cabot in Britain

Nobody told me Meg Cabot was in Britain. How did all those teenagers who turned up in their hundreds for a book signing at Waterstones find out?

It's a conspiracy.

Pictured right: Meg accidentally reveals the end of Princess Diaries 10 while on a school visit in England. Photo MegCabot.com

Anyway, Meg Cabot blogs very entertainingly about turning up in jeans at a black tie affair and measuring up to the wit and wisdom Richard Attenborough AND Anthony Horowitz:

Like I said I’m on my way to Bath now to speak at their 2nd annual book festival which I hope will go well. Or at least better than the speech I had to give last night, which was at a sales conference for some lovely book people who didn’t tell me it was a formal event (the men were in tuxes, the ladies in evening gowns), so of course I wore jeans. They also didn’t tell me the other speaker was Lord Attenborough (you might recall he directed the film Ghandi, among other things, like, oh becoming a lord). He waxed eloquently about his intimate friendship with Princess Diana and the deaths of his daughter and granddaughter in the tsunami whilst I sat at my table thinking, “*&%@! I have to go on after this, and talk about the Princess Diaries? Freaking shoot me now!” Sadly no one obliged.

Fortunately Anthony Horowitz, whom I didn’t even realize I was sitting next to, went on before (HE got the memo about formalwear, somehow), and gave a brilliant talk with many witticisms. Everyone laughed uproariously. Which just made it worse that I had to go after him because I had no speech prepared other than the one in my head which I’d written BEFORE Lord Attenborough, and so when I got up there I tried to change it around a bit to make it more full of pathos and witticisms, a kind of combination of Anthony’s and Lord Attenborough’s, which was of course a disaster. I found myself wondering, midway through as the lights beamed on me, and I was rambling away about Topshop (it’s a store in England kind of like a high end Express–I’m not joking, that’s really what I found myself talking about) what would happen if I just ran away. Or started to cry.

Since I've been posting a lot of random videos anyway, here's a relevant video, featuring Meg Cabot, dressed as a bride, talking about her book Queen of Babble Gets Hitched. It made me think my friend Fiona Dunbar (author of Pink Chameleon) really ought to do a video like this ... but dressed as a chameleon.

And yes. I'm still procrastinating.