In the comments of the Contenders Announcement we mentioned that we’d decided to go for a different bracket configuration this year and asked you to speculate a bit on what that might be. You came up with some great ideas which we will keep in mi…

It was a fun day here in Seattle as everyone expressed their excitement about the awards. General appreciation about the spread of styles in the Newbery selections, and the seemingly generous five honors for the Caldecott… though if you scan through the earlier decades of the Newbery and Caldecott, you’ll see many years with five [...]

I miss Peter Sieruta. Many of us get excited when the Newbery and Caldecott Awards are announced alongside the other ALA Youth Media Awards at the beginning of the year.  But I say with certainty that there was no blogger out there half as excited as Peter Sieruta.  At Collecting Children’s Books he poured his [...]

Newbery Medal THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN Newbery Honors SPLENDORS AND GLOOMS BOMB THREE TIMES LUCKY Can I just say how pleased I am with this committee?  Really, I think these are awesome choices.  As I mentioned on Battle of the Kids’ Books, I think no other book this year has the combination of accessibility [...]

Trying to liveblog here. This might be an Epic Fail, but doing my best! Lots of good stuff on the Alex list, including Mr. Penumbra, which I started last night on the rec of a teen and am adoring. Schneider skewed young this year, so I have zero intelligent commentary. Stonewall: Yay Drama! Gone, Gone, [...]

. . . If it’s part of a movement. If every day is a building block on the way to something important, and if the attendees are part of a tribe that goes beyond demographics or professional affiliation.  Seth’s Blog: When a Conference Works (and Doesn’t) I spent the weekend downtown at Educon. This January [...]

The results are in, and opening the honor vote to the larger list made for some interesting shifts in some of the votes — although not statistically significant shifts when it comes to the actual Pyrite* honor slate. ALA definitely affected our voter pool (another note for next year, get all the voting done by [...]

…but we don’t know. Roxanne Feldman does (member of the committee) but she’s not telling. She’s snuggling up with her phone and the new Kiki Strike, copyright 2013.

The anticipation of Monday’s announcements is making me giddy and restless.  It’s also making me lose my blogging mojo.  I wrote about potential Newbery books for a third grade audience, but wasn’t happy with it.  Then I wrote about second-guessing the Newbery committee, but decided that wasn’t quite right either. So I’ll just mention that my top four choices are BOMB, CHICKADEE, [...]

It’s Adventure Time! We haven’t run a preview of this comic, which spins wildly off the animated cartoon, in a while, but it seems to be getting a lot of buzz. As always, this issue is written by Ryan North and illustrated by Braden Lamb and Shelli Paroline; we have a five-page preview followed by [...]

ALL THE FANTASY?

There was so much good stuff out there this year.  We steered away from sequels this time around which left BITTERBLUE and DAYS OF BLOOD & STARLIGHT out of the mix.  THE DIVINERS and THE RAVEN BOYS were series starters and it was especially difficult to leave them off knowing we were less likely to pick a second or third book in a series.  And then there’s THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND.

THE GRAPHIC NOVELS?

We had very serious conversations about LITTLE WHITE DUCK and DRAMA.  I think you can make an excellent argument for them–and we could, too.  We just couldn’t agree on what they should replace.

MY FAVORITES?

We turn our list in on December 1st so that SLJ can recruit judges in a timely manner.  This means that some books that we don’t read by then, or that grow in our estimation, don’t make the cut.  If we were making this list now, I don’t think there’s anyway you could convince us that TWELVE KINDS OF ICE and CHICKADEE don’t belong on it.  Of course, those of you who follow Jonathan on Heavy Medal, Monica on educating alice, and Roxanne at her cryptic Fairosa’s Cyber Library or all of us on goodreads would have a sense of our personal favorites that we had to leave behind.

–Commentator Jonathan Hunt