Archive for the ‘Cybils’ Category
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.
September 30, 2010 @ 7:16 am | Filed under:
Books,
Cybils Regular readers of this blog know I am afflicted with option paralysis when it comes to Choosing the Next Book. For the next three months, that won’t be a problem. Nominations for the Children’s & Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards (CYBILs) begin at midnight Eastern time on October 1st—that’s 9pm tonight for us West Coast folks! I’m a first-round judge for YA Fiction, which means that between now and the end of the year, my reading list will consist of the book you nominate in that category.
We’re kicking off the two-week nomination period with a Twitter party tonight, 12am Eastern time. Follow @cybils on Twitter for more on that! (You do not have to have a Twitter account to follow to the conversation.)
So what am I reading first?
September 23, 2010 @ 11:23 am | Filed under:
Books,
Cybils October 1st is the beginning of the two-week nomination period for this year’s Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards. Watch the CYBILs site for your chance to nominate your favorite books of the past year in every category of children’s & YA publishing—fiction picture books, nonfiction picture books, early readers/chapter books, middle-grade fiction, middle-grade & YA nonfiction, science fiction and fantasy, poetry, graphic novels, and young adult fiction. Those links go to the lists of this year’s judging panels, if you want to see who’ll be reading all the books you nominate. This year, nearly 200 bloggers volunteered for the hundred-odd spots on these panels, which speaks to the increasing influence of these excellent awards.
I’m delighted to have a spot on the 1st-round panel for YA fiction. Our task will be to read all nominated books in our category and narrow them down to a shortlist of, usually, 5-7 titles. You know how I feel about booklists. I adore a shortlist. Picking one winner out of a small group of contenders? Agonizing! But getting to share my enthusiasm for a select handful of books among dozens and dozens of hopefuls? Bliss. So I’m really thrilled to be participating in the CYBILs judging again this year. I served on the 1st-round panel for Fiction Picture Books in 2008, and I loved the whole intense, spirited process. Reading all the nominees (including reading many of them to my younger children), pondering the merits of the books I liked best, and discussing those fine books with the other 1st-round panelists—it was a fantastic experience.
(It’s fun to look back at that shortlist and see how many of those books, especially Big Bad Bunny and A Visitor for Bear are still in regular read-aloud demand here.)
Here are this year’s YA Fiction panelists, rounds 1 and 2, with links to our blogs and Twitter pages:
Panel Organizer: Jackie Parker, Interactive Reader [TW]
Panelists (Round I Judges):
Cherylynne W. Bago, View from Above and Beyond [TW]
Justina Ireland, The YA 5 [TW]
Kelly Jensen, Stacked [TW]
Ami Jones, Three Turtles and Their Pet Librarian [TW]
Jackie Parker (see panel organizer)
Amanda Snow, A Patchwork of Books [TW]
Melissa Wiley, Here in the Bonny Glen [TW]
Round II Judges:
Karen Ballum, Sassy Monkey, BlogHer [TW]
Kathy M. Burnette, The Brain Lair [TW]
Michelle Franz, Galleysmith [TW]
Alice Pope, SCBWI [TW]
Tasha Saecker, Kids Lit [TW]
I’m looking forward to some lively discussions in the months to come—and a whole heckuva lot of reading, of course. Start thinking about your favorite young adult books from the past year and be sure to nominate them between October 1st and 15th. You might want to subscribe to the CYBILs feed or follow @cybils on Twitter for updates.
February 16, 2009 @ 11:21 am | Filed under:
Books,
Cybils 
The winners of the 2009 Cybil Awards have been announced at the Cybils blog. Congratulations to all the winners!
As a member of the first-round judging panel for Fiction Picture Books, I was happy to see that my favorite title from our shortlist, How to Heal a Broken Wing, won in that category.
And I’m tickled to see that the winner of the Nonfiction Middle Grade/Young Adult category is a book by a friend of mine: The Year We Disappeared: A Father-Daughter Memoir by Cylin Busby and John Busby. Cylin and I were lowly editorial assistants together at Random House many years ago. I’m so proud of her. (Good thing I wasn’t a panelist for that category—I’d have had to recuse myself.) I’ve been dying to read her book: I finally have a copy on the way, so more on that later.
While you’re over at the Cybils blog checking out the winners, don’t miss Easy Reader winner Mo Willems’s illustrated thank-you note!
Jumpy Jack and Googily by Meg Rosoff and Sophie Blackall. Henry Holt & Co.
What a charmer this picture book is. Scores very high on the giggle-meter with my gang. Jumpy Jack is a snail of the most nervous sort. As lovably neurotic anthropo-morphizations go, Jack’s right up there with Piglet, friend of Pooh. Fortunately, Jumpy Jack has his best friend Googily to put his mind to rest when the monster-worries creep in. Jack fears monsters are lurking at every turn—monsters with big round eyes and sharp teeth and lolling tongues and possibly even creepy bowler hats. Googily—he’s the amiable fellow in blue you see there—is a little puzzled by Jack’s boogieman complex, but he’s always happy to help soothe his pal’s fears by taking a peek into the corners Jack’s sure are hiding fearsome monsters.
In the end, we find that Googily has a fear of his own—and apparently with better reason than Jumpy Jack! The surprise ending elicited belly laughs from my seven- and two-year-olds.
I really love this sweet and simple picture book. It’s fresh and funny, and the art is enchanting, and the text holds up well to numerous re-readings, which is a quality I very much watch for in a young picture book. If I’m going to have to read it aloud five times a day, it’s got to be readable.
But beyond that, I appreciate the way the plot plays with the idea that people can create monsters in their minds, terrifying specters composed of stereotypes, while being oblivious to the fact that the generalizations they are throwing around so carelessly might very well include real people they know and love.
Grace for President by Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by LeUyen Pham. Hyperion.
We pulled this from our Cybils to-be-read stack yesterday because of the title, and I wish I’d read it a little sooner so I could have shared it with you in time for you to hit the library before Election Day. Grace for President is an appealing story about young Grace’s presidential race—in which votes are counted Electoral College-style. The book offers a simple and easy-to-understand look at the Electoral College in action.
The race begins when Grace learns, to her astonishment, that there has never been a “girl president.” Her classmates snicker when she declares that she shall be the first, but her teacher takes her seriously and suggests a campaign for class president. Two classes, actually: her opponent is a charismatic boy from the room next door.
Their campaign is lively and, paralleling real life, somewhat all-consuming for a time. As voting day approaches, it becomes clear that the boys have an edge on the electoral map, and Grace’s rival, Thomas, seems assured of victory…but could it be that the young man representing Wyoming is a swing state?
All three of my big girls enjoyed the book—Jane and Rose for its look at how the Electoral College works, Beanie for the fun story and the charming art, especially the surprise addition to Mount Rushmore at the end.
…you start getting worried letters from kindhearted readers who want to make sure you aren’t back in the hospital or something. No worries; we are all well; I’ve just not been feeling very talky. Am spending a lot of time working in the yard—our mini-butterfly garden is really coming along, particularly the hundred billion weed seeds which were apparently lying dormant in that dry, dry soil until we oblingly began to water them. Now Beanie and Rose and I are out there every day, ruthlessly yanking up wee baby weedlings by the dozen. Ah, the blissful peace of gardening…
And I’ve had lots of Wonderboy stuff to occupy me: preparing for his IEP meeting tomorrow (yes, on Election Day, because I am a glutton for punishment, I guess), working some new PT exercises into his daily routine, reading Mother Goose on demand a hundred times a day…have I mentioned that he is awfully fond of the two Rosemary Wells/Iona Opie Mother Goose collections? As in, he wants them read and/or sung cover to cover approximately once every hour? Rilla, of course, approves wholeheartedly—except she wants it known that they are HER Mudda Doose books, and hers alone, contradictory evidence in the form of inside-front-cover inscriptions to Jane and Rose notwithstanding.
Speaking of reading, I’ve been kept quite busy, of course, with my ever-growing stack of Cybils picture book nominees. I think we have about 35 of them checked out from the library right now, and at least 20 more have arrived via post as review copies from publishers. I don’t know where I’m going to put them all. We are plumb out of shelf space. But reading them is fun, for sure. Ask Beanie. She’s way ahead of me. I’ve read about a dozen nominees so far, and I think she is upwards of thirty.
I am posting mini-reviews at Twitter, by the way, if you’d like a peek. More like mini-summaries, I guess I should say: these are my plot notes to help me keep the 175 nominees straight. I am finding I quite enjoy the challenge of boiling a summary down to 140 characters. You know brevity really IS a challenge for me, ahem.
Speaking of Twitter, you can always look for me there if you’re worried because of bloggity silence…the link above goes to bonnyglencybils, but my main Twitter profile is just plain bonnyglen. I often post short (duh, it’s Twitter) notes during the day about what’s going on around the house. I really love being able to look back, later, at these microglimpses of our days. They are like candid snapshots, the kind no one knows are being taken, the kind you linger over in the photo album because they are so filled with rich detail of what was really happening. Not that my tweets are necessarily “filled with rich detail,” detail being exactly what is hard to squeeze into a 140-character box, but I’m just going to assume you know what I mean. And sometimes a tweet does capture a detail you wouldn’t have been likely to record in any other medium.
October 23, 2008 @ 1:22 pm | Filed under:
Cybils UPDATED: Make that 186 books. That’s the final tally, after a number of titles were shifted over from Nonfiction Picture Books to our category.
That’s how many titles were nominated in the Cybils Fiction Picture Book category, and how many I need to read in the next six weeks or so.
Two. That’s how many I’ve read so far. Neither one was a standout.
I am keeping my Library Elf hopping these days. Slowly I’m making my way through the Cybils database, clicking back and forth to my library catalog to see which nominees are in our local system, reserving all I can find.
It’s fun to observe which books catch the kids’ attention. Reading and discussing the nominees is something of a family affair, as most things are around here. Beanie has read more of the nominees than I have, so far. Guess I’d better get back to my databasing, so I can catch up.
October 7, 2008 @ 6:45 am | Filed under:
Cybils Oh my gosh, I’m getting excited. As you know, I’m a first-round judge for the Fiction Picture Book category in the Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards. The nominations are pouring in, and I’ve been perusing the ever-growing list with happy anticipation. My fellow panelists and I will be responsible for reading every book nominated and putting the very best among them on a shortlist for the finals. Then I will go off and have a baby (or so the plan is), and the finals judges will choose winners to announce in February.
So now you know how I plan to spend my third trimester: parked in a comfy spot, reading lovely picture books to my younguns. Beanie in particular is going to enjoy this particular ‘assignment’ of Mom’s. Wonderboy and Rilla too, no doubt. Nominations are open through October 15th, so get on over there and enter your favorite books from 2008 (one nomination per person per category, I believe—oh, and I’ve heard the Easy Reader category is especially in need of suggestions). Beanie is counting on you.
