ARC heaven

Yikes!  I jet across the country from New England to California and abandon blogging for more than a week.  With suitcases laden with ARCS (causing both suitcases to inch over the magical 50 lb mark for Southwest), I made the loooong journey from Hartford to Oakland on one of the rainiest stormiest days they've seen in awhile.  A reroute, 4 hours in the Nashville airport, and several books later, I made it.

I've been tackling my stack of ARCS.  Conquered so far:

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Very LeFreak by Rachel Cohn

Juggling Fire by Joanne Bell

Real books:

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle (I somehow had never read this?!?!)

The Secret Year by Jennifer Hubbard

I'm still plodding through "Under the Dome" thanks to scary book-induced bad dreams.  Sheesh, what am I, 12?  Anyway, my favorites?  Probably Will Grayson x 2 and Very LeFreak.  I knew I'd like WG since I'm a John Green and David Levithan fan, though I'll have to say, I was blown away by the writing in what I'm assuming at the DL sections.  He had such a knack for getting into that Will Grayson's character and making me totally believe and feel for the guy.  Not having read any Rachel Cohn before (I guess I need to, now), I didn't know what to expect for VLF, but I found the book to really ring true.  Granted, I read it as a bit of a satire -- it's too exaggerated to really feel like the book is very realistic at times, but I still felt like I had a lot in common with Very, a college freshman technology addict who goes to rehab for her addictions.  As I'm waking up every morning, I grab my iPod and check Facebook, Twitter, and email before getting out of bed.  Definitely wasn't doing that a year ago.  Maybe I'm just ramping up?

Okay, time for some ping pong.  Not virtual, the real thing.  I promise.

You can't win 'em all

Well, I wasn't even close with my Printz predictions (1 of 5).  I guess it could've been worse.  I forgot to post my Newbery predictions, but I think those would've been better.  I'm very happy to see When You Reach Me win the award, and for Calpurnia Tate and Claudette Colvin to be honor titles, as those were among my favorites for this year.  I have to say that the Newbery selections this year were a little more predictable, with When You Reach Me standing out as a major contender basically before it even came out.  That said, there seemed to be some backlash, online, for Calpurnia Tate, but I was so happy to see it get an honor I have have squealed at the awards announcement.  And yes, I was there in person.  And no, I was not alone in my squealing.  Gosh, librarians can get really worked up over these things.  People went crazy when Jerry Pinkney won the Caldecott for the Lion and the Mouse.

Back to the Printz, though, I think I'm not alone in finding out that my predictions were pretty far off the actual winners.  That said, I've got some reading to catch up on from this year's group.  I'd read the winner (as I have all things Libba Bray), but still haven't read John Barnes's Tales Of The Madmen Underground, Adam Rapp's Punkzilla, and Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist.  As usual, I think the Printz award jury picked some titles out of relative obscurity (none of the 4 and 5 starred review titles made the list, like, Fire, Wintergirls, and Marcelo) and I can't wait to read them.  

Of course, I'm also officially on the BBYA committee BFYA committee starting now (since ALA Midwinter is over) so I'm pretty sure I've got my work cut out for me.

Award predictions

After much hemming and hawing, here are my predictions for this year's Printz award (Newbery will be up in a few days).  Now, these aren't necessarily my picks for the award, but rather my educated guesses as to which books will be honored by this year's committee.  I'm going to be honest and say that every year, the committee picks a book that most people didn't see coming, so I'll be surprised if this year's any different.  Also, how good was I at predicting last year's list?  (So modest, too!)

And here they are.  I predict...

Winning the Printz medal.... The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd

With Honors going to:

Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman

The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge

Fire by Kristin Cashore

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

My reasoning: I made a longer list of titles with multiple starred reviews, titles that appeared on Best of 2009 lists for Horn Book, SLJ, and Booklist, and wracked my own brain.  Two of the YA books with the most starred reviews this year are Fire and Marcelo In The Real World.  While Marcelo's received a lot of love, I think it might be like When You Reach Me, where there's almost too much consensus that it should win, and that that starts hurting it's chances.  Of course, I could always be totally wrong.  Charles and Emma has a lot of buzz going for it, and it was a strong year for YA nonfiction, so if that doesn't make it, there were surely be another YA nonfic in it's place, if not two.  Wintergirls received a lot of acclaim, and it's also been awhile since Laurie Halse Anderson has been recognized by the Printz committee.  Year after year of creating outstanding YA fiction -- she's overdue for an honor.  Finally, The Lost Conspiracy and Carbon Diaries.  Both titles appeared on several best of the best lists, and they're written by non-American authors.  In fact, both of them are written by British authors (had to double-check on Hardinge).  Unlike the Newbery, the Printz does not require that the author is an American citizen.  The Printz has a history of recognizing writers from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.  Unless I'm missing something, I didn't pick up any notable books published in the US this year by writers from Australia or New Zealand (please correct me if I'm wrong).  Anyway, I think the committee will go with another sort of under the radar title, so I'm going with Carbon Diaries as the winner!

Looking forward to finding out the winner bright and early on Monday morning at ALA Midwinter in Boston!

Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have by Allen Zadoff

The cover picture and the title say it all.  This is a book about a fat high school male.  And while a lot of the book was about Andrew's weight, it was also about finding your place in high school, whether you're a fat kid, or a former fat kid, or a nerd, or a stellar athlete.  At times this book seemed a bit of a fairytale: the fat kid Andrew plucked out of sophomore obscurity and suddenly on the varsity football team, and everyone seemed a little too nice, like in Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year, but the spectacular way it all fell apart in the end (that's all I'm saying) brought this book back to reality in ways that Kluger's never quite did.  (Not that I found that as a problem with My Most Excellent Year, I liked it very much.  It just wasn't 100% realistic.)  That said, Zadoff's debut YA novel is a really fun guy read that's a pretty honest take on the experience.  There were some things that I wish had been more fully explored, like Andrew's concern for his younger sister's health, and having gone to high school in Worcester, I couldn't believe that Worcester would ever be playing Newton in football before the playoffs.  Still, on a whole, I really liked this book, and it's an easy one to recommend.

Weepy Thursday

How had I missed Suzanne LaFleur's amazing book Love, Aubrey?  This past week I was trolling through my blogs looking for great books from 2009 that I might have missed and I kept coming across this one.  Delighted when it came into the library yesterday, I started it last night just before bed and finished it this morning.  It starts off with eleven year old Aubrey all alone in her house in Virginia, taking care of herself by making cheese and crackers three times a day and watching television.  Her mother left days ago, and there's an allusion to "an accident."  Her grandmother, Gram, worried that no one's been picking up the phone, takes the train down from Vermont and finds her granddaughter all alone.  The two return to Vermont, Aubrey's mother's whereabouts still a mystery, and the reader's given these flashbacks into Aubrey's family's pasts.  Like If I Stay by Gayle Forman, one of my favorite YA books from 2009, this is a book about a girl who has lost most of her family.  In If I Stay, the main character loses her entire immediate family in a car crash.  Aubrey still has her mother... somewhere out there, but it's to the same effect.  Both books are terribly sad reads, the kind you want to gobble up all at once for a good cry, not the kind you'd want to drag out over a week because the sadness is just that palpable.  Audrey finds a really fantastic friend next door to Gram's place in Vermont, Bridget, but their friendship is tinged with sadness because, like Audrey, Bridget has a younger sister, and there are moments between little Mabel and "Bridgie" that clearly just break Audrey's heart.  I don't want to give away any more of what happens in the book, because there are some surprises, but I want to say that it is easily right up there among my favorite middle grade reads of all time.  I can't wait to read whatever Suzanne LaFleur is working on next, I was that touched and spellbound by this book.

A book a day

Back in November, I learned I was appointed to the BBYA committee for the next year, and possibly the two years after that.  I squealed walking down State Street while reading the email on my phone, and then, over the next several weeks, told everyone I knew that my life was going to change in 2010, in a couple big ways.

1.  I would be mailed roughly 1,000 books a year, from publishers, to consider for the BBYA list.

2.  The amount of books I read would at least double, or more likely, triple.

Wow.  And wow.  Since I'm in the process of moving across the country... to a place even I don't know yet, this is kind of crazy and exciting.  As in, I need to make sure we have some place to put all those books (say, a spare bedroom for the first time in my life).  And one of those really big Ikea bookshelves.  And yes, I already have ideas for how to organize the books.  Several.  Ideas.

I won't start serving on the committee until after the ALA Midwinter Conference (in mid/late January), so I've got a little time left to savor the books I wanted to read that weren't published in Sept. 2009 - December 2010 (the period I'll be responsible for), nevermind books that are written for, well grown-ups and children.

I figured I'd prep myself for the increase of reading by, well, increasing my reading.  With funemployment kicking in, I plan to shoot for a book a day.  Just to get in the habit of reading more and more.  

With four days into the month of January, I've finished four books.  (Pretty good since it's only noon and I can probably finish another today.)  They are:

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Shark Girl by Kelly Bingham

Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick

and

Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks by Lauren Myracle

None of them are eligible for BBYA, but they were books I had around and/or had been meaning to read.

As much as everyone out there seemed to love Eat, Pray, Love, I have to admit, I was just a little bit underwhelmed.  Yes, it was interesting and well-written, and I enjoyed the travel-writing aspect of it, but I also found it a little self-indulgent.  That said, I still enjoyed it and can't wait to see the movie, but I thought it had the potential to be a book that, you know, moved me.  And it fell short of that.

Shark Girl was one of the Rebecca Caudill nominees that I never quite managed to want to read when it was actually in the library.  A novel-in-verse from the perspective of a girl who lost her arm to a shark, I thought it captured so well the range of emotional responses that a teenage girl would have going through that.  I came away from it admiring Jane's resilience and her utter disinterest in becoming pitied.  I can see it really resonating with teen girls, and I loved how it could be read by such a large age group.  I could see curious 5th and 6th graders getting a lot out of it, as well as high schoolers looking for a quick read (since that's the nature of most novels-in-verse).

My friend Janet gave me a copy of Freak the Mighty sometime in the last year or two but I only now had the urge to read it.  What had I been waiting for?  In short: I loved it.  It's the kind of book where you're just clamoring to read the next page and also biting the inside of your cheek because you know it's going to have a sad ending.  The pairing of an oversized hulk of kid with learning disabilities (Max) and brilliant but physically disabled kid (Kevin - Freak), which somehow makes both of them stronger and more able, is so moving.  But what I loved most about the book was the voice of Max.  The way Rodman Philbrick wrote the book, I was so thoroughly convinced of who Max was from the first page.  He absolutely captured the voice of a kid like that, and it really made the book that much better than the story alone.

And then there's Peace, Love, and Babyducks.  Sometimes, you just need a quick, fun, light read, and that's exactly what Lauren Myracle offers up with her latest YA book about two sisters with one year separating them.  Now, I don't have a sister (except my parent's cat, who I call my sister...) but after reading this book, I felt relieved I don't have a sister!  Carly's a sophomore and her little sister Anna is a freshman, which means they have to share the same high school.  The thing is, little sister's looking a lot more grown-up than older sister (read: over the summer, the boob fairy came) and these new developments have thrown everything up in the air.  As usual, Myracle is spot-on with the way she captures the intricacies of female friendships, and as far as I could tell (again, not having sisterly experience), she pretty much nailed the whole sister experience.  Also, I appreciated that she set the book in Georgia, as I don't think I've ever read a book set in contemporary Georgia.  All in all, a fun read.