Scott: Whatcha doing?
Me: Oh, just a little housekeeping.
Scott: Who are you and what have you done with my wife?
Me: No, I mean in my sidebars.
Scott: Aha. It all becomes so clear!
Seems like every year as the calendar rolls over, I feel the need to do a little pruning and sprucing here on the blog. For those of you who read me mainly in a feed reader, here’s what’s new: a trio of booklists in the righthand sidebar. One is my running list of 2010 Cybils finalists for the Cybils Shortlist Reading Challenge I mentioned yesterday; one will be an ongoing record of our family read-alouds, including picture books read to the small fry; and the third is my own 2011 booklog. All three of these lists are imported from my Delicious account, if you’d rather peek at them there. The pertinent Delicious tags are cybilschallenge, rillabooks, and booklog, respectively.
This is also the time of year when I take a look at how I’m using social media and try to streamline a bit. I enjoy poking around various platforms to see what they’ve got to offer, but of course for practical use it’s best to keep things simple. I tend to layer and layer and layer and then chuck it all and start afresh. (Jane teased me the other day about my profound devotion to the fresh start, the clean slate. She is so right.)
So—this year I’ve decided I’m tired of having my shareworthy links scattered between Google Reader Shared Items and Delicious. I’ll just stick with Delicious. That means shareworthy links and booklogs are on Delicious now. One-stop shopping.
I’ll keep using Tumblr to record stuff I read online that I don’t necessarily want to share but do want to be able to find again myself. That worked really well for me in 2010.
I’m kind of in love with TeuxDeux, a clean, uncluttered, week-at-a-glance to-do list. You can easily drag tasks from one day to the next or click to cross them out when they’ve been accomplished.
Where else to find me: Twitter. My Facebook author page. And here.
Okay, I knew I wouldn’t last long before I came up with some kind of reading plan for the year…what’s a nice clean slate for if not to write on it?
See, I just had a fun idea: now that the eagerly-awaited 2010 Cybils shortlists have been announced, how about a Cybils Shortlist Reading Challenge?
If I’m counting correctly, there are a total of 76 books shortlisted across the 11 categories. (The odds of my having counted correctly, mind you, are slim. Feel free to correct me.) That means if you haven’t read any of them—and you’ve probably already read at least a few—you could read all 76 titles by tackling six or seven books a month. Many of these books are picture book and early readers, remember, so seven is a totally attainable number.
Of course those of us who served on a first-round panel (or who read lots of new books) will have a head start. I haven’t yet counted how many shortlisters I’ve read in total, but I did see several books I enjoyed on the lists already. I think I might only have to read four or five shortlisters a month to complete the challenge.
If you’re game, please chime in in the comments!
Serving on the YA fiction panel was a joy and (speaking of) a challenge. I gave up fall gardening—and here in San Diego, that’s one of our best garden seasons—in order to keep up with my reading responsibilities. (People are always asking me how I find so much time to read, and there’s your answer. Something’s gotta give. My ‘something’ usually has more to do with cooking and floor-scrubbing, but those are things that gotta give during ordinary times, and a stint on a first-round Cybils panel is not an ordinary time.) My fellow panelists are wonderfully insightful readers, women with wit and wisdom. We enjoyed our three months of book discussions so much, in fact, that when it was all over, we decided to keep this good thing going via monthly book-clubbish conversations. Maybe some of these other-category titles will provide some of the fuel for our sparky talks.
I hope to write more about our panel—and our selections—in the days to come, but for now if you’d like a peek behind the scenes, here’s a writeup by Kelly Jensen of Stacked.
“Being a part of this panel was some of the most fun I’ve had in a long time. It was completely exhausting and at times emotionally draining, but after three months of reading wildly, it all came down to a 4.5 hour discussion the day after Christmas.”
Kelly, Amanda, Ami, Cheryl, Jackie, Justina, I loved getting to know you, laugh with you, argue with you, read with you. I look forward to many more lively fights conversations to come. Also: In-and-Out burgers!
Updated—Okay, got my tally! Chagrined to see I’ve only read three of the other shortlisted titles (plus the seven from our panel). They happen to be three of my favorite books of the year, so I’m delighted to see them among the finalists in their respective categories. (SHARK VS TRAIN, SMILE, MIRROR MIRROR, all of which I’ve raved about here this year.)
76 books total
minus the 10 I’ve read =
66 finalists left to read in 2011. Fun!!
Here’s a link to my checklist.
