This week, the Carnival of Homeschooling is celebrating The Simple Pleasures of Homeschooling thanks to Dana at Principled Discovery.

And Cybils nominations are open today through October 15th. Go over and nominate your favorite children’s and YA books published this year in nine different categories.

Go here for all the Semicolon reviews of children’s and YA fiction published in 2008. I’m hoping to add to these reviews of new children’s and YA books daily from now until the end of November or so. So come back for more.

I have two author celebrations scheduled for October: October 9 is one of the birthdays of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. And October 30 is the birthday of our second president, John Adams. If you would like to write something related to either of these men, be sure to come by Semicolon on the appropriate birthday and link to your post.

This week is Banned Books Week . . . again. You can get my take on the “epidemic” of banned books in the U.S. by reading either of these articles/ blog posts. Suffice it to say that I think the reports of book banning, both by Sarah Palin and by anyone else in the U.S., have been wildly exaggerated and sometimes made up out of whole cloth.

Banned Books Week: Celebrate Freedom.

Banned Books Week: Smokescreen of Hypocrisy by Linda Harvey (2005)

Speaking of Ms. Palin, the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden is tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to it. Go Sarah!