The first trailer for Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, based on the book by Rick Riordan was released earlier this week.

Some Hollywood watchers are surprised that there is a sequel, since the first was not judged a financial success in theaters. This time around, director Thor Freudenthal (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) replaces Chris Columbus (the first two Harry Potter movies). The movie opens on August 7.

Official Web Site: PercyJacksonTheMovie.com

The tie-in edition arrives in July:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Two The Sea of Monsters (Movie Tie-In Edition). Rick Riordan
Disney/Hyperion, 9781423160076, 142316007X $7.99 US / $8.99 Can

Signaling hopes for Oscar nominations, Fox Searchlight has set a Dec. 27 limited release for director Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir of the same title. The book recounts Northrup’s struggles to return to his family and his life as a free black man in upstate New York  after being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South.

The new pope is getting the Life pictorial treatment in Pope Francis: The Vicar of Christ, From Saint Peter to Today, (Hachette/Life). A paperback book/magazine edition appears on newsstands this week, with the hardcover releasing on April 16.

A book by the new Pope, previously published in Spanish in 2010, will be released in English on May 7. On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century, (RH/Crown/Image Books) is a record of conversations between the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Rabbi Abraham Skorka, Rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires. According to the Random House press release, the two religious leaders address “such topics as God, fundamentalism, atheism, the Holocaust, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and globalization.”

It will be released simultaneously in print, digital, large print and audio formats. The original Spanish-language version, Sobre el Cielo y la Terra will be published in North America in both trade paperback and eBook by RH/Vintage Espanol.

Also coming from the Image imprint of Random House is a book by Robert Moynihan, the founder of Inside the Vatican magazine, Pray for Me: The Life and Spiritual Vision of Pope Francis, First Pope from the Americas.

Jon Stewart clearly loves Mary Roach, greeting the author on Monday night’s Daily Show with the words, “I like your books!”

Her latest, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (Norton; Tantor Audio), was released on Monday. The interview begins with the question of why your stomach doesn’t digest itself (hint; it’s a trick question).

After the appearance, Gulp rose to #3 on Amazon sales rankings.

Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In, will appear on the show tonight. That appearance is unlike to result in a rise on Amazon’s sales rankings, however. The book has held the #1 spot for most of the last month.

Below is part one of the interview; part two is here (warning: it features nutrient enemas).

Arriving just in time for National Poetry Month (April, if you have been under a rock), is Poems to Learn by Heart, collected by Caroline Kennedy and  illustrated by Jon J. Muth, (Disney/Hyperion, 3/26/13).

Caroline Kennedy thrilled us with an anthology of her family’s favorite poems in A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children, (Disney/Hyperion, 2005). She follows up with a delightful collection of poems that are terrific for memorizing. It includes old favorites like Mary Ann Hoberman’s Brother,

I had a little brother
And I brought him to my mother
And I said I want another
Little brother for a change.

Also included is A.A. Milne’s Disobedience that begins “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby Dupree took great care of his Mother, though he was only three.”

Poems by Langston Hughes, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, join new ones sure to become classics like Jeff Moss’s If Little Red Riding Hood…,  a delightful imagining of how the storybook character would be instructed in the differences between a wolf and grandma by her dad.

We don’t have to wait all year to read poetry but it’s great to have a whole month to celebrate the reading, the sharing, and the writing of poetry. When and where? Everywhere! Try memorizing a verse or two while waiting in line at the grocery store, or a few short ones while waiting for those cookies to come out of the oven. Begin a class visit or a meeting or an assembly with a poem.

Try celebrating my favorite day of the year, national Poem in Your Pocket Day on Thursday, April 18, 2013. The idea is simple: poems are unfolded from pockets throughout the day during events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores. Select a poem you love during National Poetry Month, then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends or on Twitter by using the hashtag #pocketpoem.

At Bank Street College of Education, we would paper the hallways of our school with children’s selections. Let us know your plans, projects, and suggestions for Poem in Your Pocket Day by emailing npm@poets.org.

Need a little help on the poetry front? There is no more practical or current guide than The Poetry Friday Anthology: Poems for the School Year with Connections to the Common Core, by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, an essential purchase.

After the jump, more helpful titles

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Major media is lining up for a book about the CIA by Pulitzer Prize winner and NYT reporter, Mark Mazzetti. Titled The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, it is embargoed until release next Tuesday (probably to give the New York Times the first crack at it).

Covering the hot topic of the day, it examines the use of drone strikes that have been referred to as “surgical” (thus, “the way of the knife“) and the consequences of that policy.

Coverage begins Sunday with a New York Times page one story and the author’s live one-on-one with Bob Scheiffer on CBS’s Face the Nation. On publication day, 4/9, the author is scheduled to appear on NPR’s Morning Edition, CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and PBS’s Charlie Rose Show. Later in the week, comes MSNBC’s Morning Joe and NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, among others. The next week, Mazzetti is scheduled for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In addition, the first serial will appear in the 4/12 issue of the New York Times Magazine (online on 4/9)

“People’s eyes are going to bug out of their heads,” predicts Stephen King, about the CBS series based on his book, Under the Dome, for which he is also executive producer. The series doesn’t begin until June 24, but the “first look” trailer has just been released. The L.A. Times speculates that CBS released the promo early because they are “wisely taking advantage of the apocalyptic mania stoked by Sunday’s season finale of The Walking Dead.”

The producers told a crowd at WonderCon on Saturday that the series may deviate from the book, with King’s blessing, “He told us, ‘Really use the book as a jumping off point. Use the characters, use the themes, but don’t be afraid to go to new places.’ ”

It stars Mike Vogel, Dean Norris, and Rachelle Lefevre.

Tie-in:

Under the Dome, Stephen King
Trade paperback; 9781476735474, 1476735476
On Sale Date: May 14, 2013

It seems that CBS was also wise to go straight to series with this one, keeping it out of the network pilot season pile-up.Vulture writes that networks are dealing with over 100 shows, some scrambling for name actors (Christina Ricci recently walked away from the lead in Girlfriend in a Coma, based on Douglas Coupland’s book, delaying that project as NBC tries to find a replacement).

See our updated round-up of the pilots based on books.

The New Yorker‘s august literary critic James Wood gives Rachel Kushner a rave for her new book, The Flamethrowers, (S&S/Scribner; Brilliance Audio), just don’t be put off by the opeining paragraph which begins “Put aside, for the moment, the long postwar argument between the rival claims of realistic and anti-realistic fiction.”

He calls the book, “scintillatingly alive. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story.”

Equally enthusiastic, but without the academic trappings, is Sherryl Connelly in the New York Daily News; “The Flamethrowers slowly and seductively becomes a novel you just can’t quit.”

Airing just before last night’s premiere of the new season of Game of Thrones was the promo teaser for another HBO book series adaptation, True Blood, season six, which debuts on June 16.

The trailer for Game of Thrones used the voice over, “Will it never end?” This one seems to address that question, warning, “…it is the beginning of the end.”

In a sense it is, since this is the first season without show creator Alan Ball at the helm. Not to worry, however, although HBO has made no official announcement, a casting call has gone out for season seven.

There is a definitive end to the book series, however. Charlaine Harris announced that the upcoming 13th title will be the final one, Dead Ever After (Penguin/Ace Hardcover, May 7).

The new HBO series is based on book six in the series, Definitely Dead. The tie-in edition arrives June 4 (Penguin/Ace, mass mkt pbk).