Sad News for the Berenstain Bears

Sad news for children's lit: Jan Berenstain, co-creator of The Berenstain Bears died on Tuesday at age 88.

Who doesn't have fond memories of those books? I don't know about anyone else but my elementary school library was inundated with them. There were several televised shows made of them, first by NBC and CBS and later by PBS in Canada. When I was working as a nanny, the kids were just glued to those cartoons and strangely enough it was always reruns of the Canadian series.

The first of the books were published in the 60s and over the years the family evolved a bit.

Some of my favorite titles:

I think the more recent ones dealt with more modern issues but the kids I know still like some of these older ones better.

New Lemony Snicket Series

Egmont is publishing a new "autographical" series of books by Lemony Snickett (pen name of David Handler) to be released in 2012. The series will be called the "All the Wrong Questions" series and will contain 4 volumes, the first of which is called "Who Could That Be At This Hour?" to be released this fall. In the U.S. the books will be published by Little Brown.