ALA Awards

I was so organized yesterday. Left the house incredibly early in order to make a dent in the morning chaos so that I could sneak back to my desk and watch the webcast of the awards ceremony. Everything went according to plan until I clicked the link and got "WEBCAST FULL" instead of the real deal. No biggie - I got the list soon enough and I did get a lot accomplished with the extra hour at work!

I won't list the winners here -- but if you want a link to such a list, hop over to the ALA press release for the scoop.....

As I have mentioned before, I do live in a land of many potential library books. There are 13 libraries in the area and one of those has 6 branches. I bring this up in relation to the Newbery honorees... only Hattie Big Sky was readily available here. Higher Power of Lucky wasn't in anyone's card catalog until the afternoon of the awards announcement. Penny From Heaven was in ONE library on CD (actual book on order) and Rules was only in one library. It would appear that these altogether worthy titles were not on many radar screens here, either. I have Hattie on my stack, Rules ready for pick-up and the other two on request. Still, it seems odd to me that these were all such dark horses.

The Printz awards get an extra-edgy vibe from selecting a graphic novel as the top winner. I can't get past the cover art of Octavian yet, liked Abundance well enough (though I liked Alaska better) and yes, I will make a fourth attempt to finish Book Thief (again, I was a bigger fan of Messenger...).

No one within 30 miles has a copy of the Batchelder winner, Pull of the Ocean. The King author winner Copper Sun is in my stack. I am always excited by the Sibert winner -- and so appreciate their support of a prize for non-fiction! (And by the way, the Siberts are an amazing family who do SO much to support literacy, books, libraries, schools.... three cheers for them from me!) I am also delighted with the new Theodor Seuss Geisel award for beginning readers -- definitely an overlooked genre that deserves to be spotlighted for the great titles being written!

I zipped over to my old library's webpage last night - a thing I try to avoid as it is always a painful visit - hoping against hope that they would have sustained my legacy and instantly posted the awards on site... but no. Sigh. I sent an email to the webmaster with the ALA release link. I know, I know, but some habits - and serious loves of life - die hard.