The Night of the Living Summer Reading List

Every summer, the middle schoolers at my place of employ have required summer reading. Required, not assigned: they have some choice about which books they read, but they have to read something.

And every June, I put together recommended-books lists, racing the clock before the end of school.

For years, I painstakingly compiled three separate themed lists, one for each grade, keyed to the Humanities curriculum each grade would be studying that year. It was thorough, but exhausting, and frankly I'm not sure how useful it was.

Last year, with thousands of books to weed through and pack up for a summer remodel, I tried something new: an annotated list of a couple dozen "Els's Picks" list for the whole middle school, from entering-6th to entering-8th. They didn't have to choose a book from the list, but if they wanted some guidance, it was there. I tried to range it out with young-ish books, old-ish books, male and female protagonists, different genres, etc. Because it was the first time I'd done a list like that, I went a little wild with it: threw in all kinds of stuff that I just loved, cobbled together some summaries, and tossed it to the kids. This was the result.

Now I'm up against the Summer Reading Wall once again, and realizing I have a problem. Last year's list was the cream of the crop of a lifetime's reading, so how can I possibly top it this time around? I'm thinking that rather than create a whole new Picks list, I'll revise last year's, deleting a few titles that aren't so incredibly compelling in retrospect and adding some new ones.
On the other hand, I've been reading teen/YA fiction at a furious rate this year, and might just have enough to support a brand-new list, supplemented with a few titles that ended up on last year's cutting-room floor.

So far, here's what a list like that would look like, in no particular order:

American Born Chinese
Fly By Night
Hattie Big Sky
Rules
A Drowned Maiden's Hair
Uglies
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Yellow Star
Septimus Heap--Magyk
Changeling
Feed
Persepolis
Runaways
The Weight of the Sky
No More Dead Dogs
Jason's Gold
A Mango-Shaped Space
The Lightning Thief
The Wee Free Men
Rules for Survival
A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life
Monster
Sorcery and Cecelia

I'd like to add a few more, like Heat by Mike Lupica, and a Gilda Joyce book, and The Schwa Was Here, and Vive La Paris, and Twilight, but I haven't actually read those yet so even though I think I'll love them I can't include them in good conscience. Ah, well; maybe next summer.

Now that I look at it, though, it's not a bad list just as it is. (Astute readers might notice a definite Cybils influence--no big surprise.) I might just go with it, if I can slog through the summaries in the next few days.

In Which the Novels of John Green Engender a Moment of Family Togetherness

A slightly reconstructed conversation.

Scene: Els, Spouse, and 6-year-old Child are getting into the car to drive to the airport.

Spouse notices the book-on-CD on the passenger seat.

Spouse (who has just read and enjoyed An Abundance of Katherines on Els's recommendation) *with a touch of envy in voice*: Oooh, I see you're listening to Looking for Alaska!

Els: Well, yes. It's good. But I'm not sure if you'd like it; I just started the fourth disk and I think Something Bad is about to happen.

Spouse: Oh. Okay. But if nothing bad happened, you wouldn't have any plot, would you?

Els: It's funny...now that I think of it, nothing really bad does happen in Katherines. Well, there are two bad things, but they both happen before the book starts. You just find out about them during the time of the book.

Child, *piping up from back seat* : I know one of them! He gets dumped by a bunch of girls named Katherine, right?

Els: Uh, right.

Child: What's the other one?

Els: If I tell you, it'll spoil it for you when you read it in ten years or so.

Child: Please, please tell me! Please! I promise I'll forget it!

Els: You can't promise to forget something!

Child: Pleeeeease, please tell me anyway! What's the other bad thing?

Els: Oh, okay. It's [spoiler revelation that the main characters discover near the end of the book].

Child, *baffled but resigned*: Oh.

Els: See, it's important because it [gives important information about a secondary but crucial character]. Because of [explanation delving into way more detail than necessary about bigger economic and moral issues].

Child: Oh.

Els: Do you really think you'll forget that?

Child: I forgot it already!

Els: What did you forget?

Child *with carefully vacant intonation belied by gleam in eye*: Um...I can't remember!

Kids' Choice Awards, Part 2: Big Kids

Here's part 2 of the Children's Choice Award overview for my state. Part 1 is here.

Genevieve asked in the comments of the last post why all this year's Picture Book nominees had copyright dates of 2004 or 2005. The simple answer is that the nominees for each year's award are required to have copyright dates of two or three years earlier. There are similar rules for the chapter book awards below.

Basically, this is because books are nominated by teachers and librarians and kids, and they need to have had time to find an audience. Older books aren't eligible because theoretically they had their chance earlier, and (I think) to keep the award feeling fresh (I've often thought of conducting a school-wide "favorite dusty old book" award some year, for which only books published at least 10 years earlier would be eligible, but have never managed to put it together). Also, with the chapter book awards, it helps if at least some of the nominees are available in paperback, as many libraries (including mine) buy multiple copies of each.

All the awards below are given to chapter books or novels, with the occasional nonfiction title thrown in. Unlike the Picture Book award, these are designed for kids who can read the books themselves (though teachers are encouraged to read nominees aloud, too); anyone in the age range who reads two nominees can vote.

Sasquatch Awards, officially for any grade but most of the kids who participate are in grades 2-6. They read at least 2 of the chapter books on the list and vote for their favorite. Votes due in by April 1; haven't heard about next years' list yet. This award tends to skew younger than the better known Young Readers Choice Award, so I'm more comfortable promoting it to 2nd and 3rd graders who are strong readers. I like that this award includes shorter chapter books for kids who aren't necessarily strong readers but are sophisticated enough to enjoy a novel.

Evergreen Young Adult Book Award, for grades 7-12. These are mostly hard-core YA: lots of Serious Issues and swearing and suchlike. This year, the nominees included Runaways, a graphic novel about teens who discover that their parents are supervillains, and Chanda's Secrets, in which a teenage girl in Africa discovers that the AIDS crisis has hit her family, as well as more innocuous titles like Airborn. I loved all three of these and would have had a hard time choosing among them were I a teen in grades 7-12. Though I think I might've gone with Airborn.

The Evergreen people like to make life complicated by setting the deadline for getting ballots in at March 15th, so our school's 7th and 8th graders voted last week. Based on their ballots, I'm predicting The Supernaturalist (which I never did get around to reading) will win.

And last, but far from least, there's the venerable Young Reader's Choice Award, the oldest children's choice book award in the country.

Unlike the other awards, the YRCA is conducted all over the Pacific Northwest: Washington, Oregon, Montana, British Columbia, Alberta, Idaho, and Alaska. This makes it the only international readers' choice award that I know of, and explains the frequent and welcome presence of Canadian nominees on the lists. (The wartime spy story Camp X, for one, has had a continuing fan base in my library ever since it was up for the YRCA a few years ago.)

The YRCA comes in three flavors: Junior (grades 4-6), Intermediate (7th-9th grade) and Senior (grades 10-12). The Intermediate nominees tend to come in a bit younger than the Evergreen Award books, and the Senior a bit older, though there's lots of overlap. Younger kids who read books in the older categories can vote for those awards (at my school it's not unusual for 6th graders to have read more of the Intermediate nominees than the Junior ones), but older kids can't vote younger.

And if that isn't confusing enough, because all these awards are organized by different organizations, it's not uncommon for the same book to be nominated on a couple of different lists (Airborn and The Supernaturalist, for example, are up for YRCA as well as Evergreen this year). The resulting overlaps are sometimes baffling (like last year when The City of Ember was nominated for Sasquatch (grades 2ish-6ish) and also for the Intermediate YRCA (grades 7-9, supposedly), though it's nice for librarians with a limited budget who want to conduct lots of awards.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine is. Now I remember why I'm totally beat every year by Spring Break.

But there's no time to relax; the YRCA has just announced their 2008 nominees. Most of them are new to me, and I have to start reading.

Happy Teens, Happy Tech, Happy Week

The Brookeshelf reports that it is Teen Tech Week, and what do you know-- I inadvertently celebrated by downloading a teen audio book from my local public library this weekend for the first time ever. I feel very hip. And topical.

The book I'm listening to oh-so-topically on my computer is A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, by Dana Reinhardt. So far, so good; I like it (though I'm wondering what the adoption community thinks of it). But I'm only about one-third of the way through it because, although I am hip enough to download an ebook, I am not quite hip enough to have an Ipod. So my laptop gets dragged around the kitchen with me on a stool as I listen and do dishes and make lunches and occasionally trip on the headphone cord. Not earbuds, mind you: big puffy headphones. Because I am just cool like that.