/ / For The Win, Little Brother, News

Canada’s public institutions were very good to me today!

The CBC included Little Brother on its list of 100 Great YA Novels that make you proud to be Canadian.

Not to be outdone, the Toronto Public Library put the book on its Fight The Power: Books For Youth Activists.

As if that wasn’t enough, TPL also put For the Win on its Boy Meets Boo list, featuring “Great books for guys: adventure, humour, fantasy and suspense.”

/ / For The Win, News

Jesse2014 writes:

‘For The Win’ was incredibly exciting and inspiring. It is not the first book of yours that made me feel that way, but it was the difference in motivating me to become a small part of the movement to use gold farming for development and freedom. The kind of stuff you were writing about seems so possible.

So I’ve created a wiki where people might work together to undertake the quest. I wanted to let you know because of your huge role in this already.

My next plan is to help build a free online marketplace where some kind of ‘fair trade’ gold/power-leveling can be exchanged. I’d like to make this website as open and collaborative as possible so that anyone can improve and build on it. Then to help gold farmers get access to computers, games and bandwidth that don’t come with the same requirements of their current bosses – donated for free, that they can use on their own terms.

There will be many challenges on the way but I believe it will be worth it. As you said, we can all lead ourselves.

/ / For The Win, News

Tim “Undercover Economist” Harford’s feature with FiveBooks lists five “unexpected economics” books, including my novel For the Win:

It is for young adults – it’s an adventure-action story, it’s not that complicated. But it’s very well done and conveys a lot of really interesting economic ideas very well. For instance there’s the impact of globalisation, the possibility of bubbles occurring in economic systems, the idea of the race to the bottom, of sweatshops and the role of unionisation. Really key economic ideas.

Of course there are a lot of economic ideas that are not in the book. I would also say that Cory is well to the left of where I am. He thinks trade unions are incredibly important – I’m not so sure. But I was very impressed by the way he could take this novel and convey all these economic ideas without slowing the action down. There have been people who have tried to create works of fiction with an economic message – notably Ayn Rand, who has just had a film made about her work – but Cory has really done it very well. It’s a tremendous and very admirable achievement.

/ / For The Win, News

This week, I was delighted to learn that my novel For the Win was one of three young adult novels selected for the the Kansas National Education Association’s Kansas State Reading Circle list; and then to learn that the Vermont School Library Association, Vermont Library Association and the Vermont Department of Libraries had awarded the state’s Green Mountain Book Award to my novel Little Brother, this being a readers’ choice award for students in grades 9-12. My sincere thanks to the readers, teachers and librarians who’ve chosen my books for these honors — they mean the world to me.