About goodtoread.org
What?
A reference point for children's and young people's books, giving a brief description of each book, notes on its contents and quality, and other useful information about it such as its publisher, the period it's set in and the series it belongs to. And all cross-linked so you can easily find related books for which there is an entry.
Why?
Why another site about children's books? One answer to this is easy: you can't have too much of a good thing. It's rather like saying: why have more than one sweet shop on the High Street? They all sell much the same things at much the same price, but perhaps you find the people in this one easier, or the display in that one more appealing. There are many websites that give information about children's books, and there are many people with different tastes in websites.
On another level, this website offers a slightly different approach from the majority: it doesn't assume that a well-structured book with a good spread of vocabulary and a certain depth of subject matter is unquestionably a book any child should read. Without our entering into a long discussion, let it be said that some people believe that children and young people should have guidance as to their reading. This may mean recommending a book especially or forbidding a certain book or author (difficult in this day and age) or more realistically, going over the subjects presented in the book to make sure the youngster has benefitted from it and not been harmed.
Of course, if you believe that this is nonsense, that children should be allowed to read anything of a good literary quality, or indeed anything whatsoever, then we hope you will at least find this site useful as a cross-linked reference of books, authors, publishers, themes and dates. Ultimately any site should be a service to those who view it: if one person gains a wider awareness of what's contained in children's books from reading this site, it's been worth putting it up here.
How?
If you're not really interested in technospeak, skip this paragraph. The reviews are submitted as slightly structured text files, easily written in any editor on the planet, from Vi to Word, ideally encoded as UTF8. The list of books is scanned and all the cross references generated. The introduction pages (eg this one) are also pre-processed and inserted into the common framework of header, navigation and footer. All this pushes the processing to the back end so the response time is not lengthened by the need to run scripts. However, that precludes to some extent the possibility of more sophisticated searching, eg "Show me all the books for 10-12-year-olds involving School". It would be possible, but not without extra work. The work is done by a Python program which also spits out the HTML, zips up the source, and uploads it to the hosting server. The appearance of the site relies heavily (read: completely) on CSS, but in such a way that if your browser does not support it (eg Netscape 4) it will degrade gracefully into a perfectly readable and usable, albeit less appealing, set of pages. The site looks best in Palatino and Trebuchet, but the CSS will default to more widely available fonts (eg Arial, Helvetica, Times Roman) and finally to whatever your browser can muster as serif and sans-serif respectively.