I’ve been reading nonstop these past few weeks, but you wouldn’t know it by the state of my Reading Blog. An entire week since my last entry! My excuse? The Children’s and YA Bloggers’ Literary Awards, aka the CYBILS. I am one of five book-blogging women serving on the Nominating Panel for the MG/YA Non-fiction category. Thirty-seven books were nominated in our category; you can see the full list here.
Participating on a book award selection committee has taught me a few things:
1. There were some stellar MG/YA Non-fiction titles published this year. STELLAR.
2. I am a terrible book critic. Here on my blog I can choose not to write about books I dislike. In the world of book award selection, however, one must articulate one’s negative feelings about books … and speculate on where the author went wrong. BLECH. I found this particularly awkward as I sit here waiting for early reviews of TRACKING TRASH to arrive. Double BLECH.
3. I am quite good at praising books.
4. I prefer to read books willy-nilly, to experience works that stumble into my life accidentally and which change me and my world in quiet and completely unexpected ways. I love exploring the connections between the books I read, the places I find them, the times I read them, and the way these things combine to give a book meaning. Reading books for the express purpose of comparing them and assembling them into order of significance was stunningly difficult.
Anyway, all this rambling is meant to explain the quiet week on my Reading Blog. I’ll be back to reading (and blogging) willy-nilly soon. And I will post the MG/YA CYBIL award finalists as soon as our deliberations are complete.