Although the book has been out for a while, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is getting some publicity again, thanks to the upcoming film based on the book (yes, it was a book first). While we were shopping for some books over at Barnes and Noble’s online store, we noticed the company has posted a video of a recent in-store event, where Pullman talked about how he started writing the book and the filming of the film in England.

You can watch the video here.

Girls aren’t daring enough until they learn how to play with jacks and skip rope, or at least that’s what we gathered from watching this morning’s Today Show. Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, authors of The Daring Book for Girls (a companion to The Daring Book for Boys), talk with Meredith Vieira about what a daring girl is, and apparently it involves a lot of retro activities their moms used to play. “A daring girl wakes up every morning, and says, ‘this is an opportunity for fun and adventure,’” says the authors “She is brave…and she sticks up for herself, or sticks up for others.” (Did these three miss the boat on Girl Power, or what?) But the clip also talks about how girls no longer know how to play as children. Instead they are immersed in a world of cell phones and computers, and “need to learn not to grow up so quickly.” Since it’s Halloween, the authors explain how to tell a ghost story.

Somebody please introduce these people to a T-Mobile Sidekick. Watch the clip here, and listen to the authors on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show below.

Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and Steve Martin teamed up to put together a children’s alphabet book that, from the sounds of their interview this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, should be a good time for parents as well as children.

“The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z” is a book of rhyming couplets–one for each letter of course–written by Martin and playfully illustrated by Chast. M, for example, features a crazed-looking floating fat kid with the couplet “Maniacal Marvin munched many a macaroon, Making his middle a mini hot air balloon.”

You can read more of the couplets, including a couple that didn’t make it in, see illustrations and listen to the interview here.

Al Roker’s Today book club returns from months of dormancy to promote a book that perhaps needs no promotion: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy. The book has all the trappings of a children’s fantasy novel: orphaned English child; ambiguously ominous uncle; giant animal ally, and so on.

The book’s protagonist is Lyra Belacqua, whose pleasantly unfettered life is shattered by the arrival of her uncle, Lord Asriel, who talks crazy talk of a natural phenomenon called “Dust”, and the outlines of a city in the Aurora Borealis that he has surmised is part of an alternative universe. Meanwhile, children have begun to disappear, the victims of “Gobblers”, a bizarre race that uses the kids for terrible experiments. When Lyra’s playmate Roger goes missing, Lyra runs away to find him, heading North into a dangerous land where she’ll meet up with mercenary polar bears, a vagabond troop of gyptians (gypsies), witches and a Texan in a hot air balloon.

Somehow, her uncle is involved.

Sound like your cup of tea? Read the excerpt, and don’t forget to watch the trailer for a movie adaptation staring Nicole Kidman and that hottie Daniel Craig.

Yesterday, Good Morning America welcomed perhaps its most entertaining guest in recent memory: little Elmo! Indeed, the cookbook craze has finally wormed its way onto Sesame Street, and the result is this: C is for Cooking: Recipes from the Street, a batch of healthy, kid-friendly meals from the stars of the longest running kids show in creation. Elmo himself showed up, and with help from some GMA guy, made Elmo’s Baby Turkey Burgers.

It’s not too late to salvage your relationship with the kid! Watch the interview and check out the sample recipes, including one for something called Abby Cadabby’s Magic Golden Zucchini Coins, which I must admit I’m skeptical of.

Then again, I didn’t know Sesame Street was even still on the air…