Blog Archive: February 2009

I'm late to the party, but I still wanted to post a link to the 2008-9 Cybil Award winners. The Cybils are the Children and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards, and I believe this batch marks their third season. In a labor of love, the Cybils panelists and judges read dozens upon dozens of nominated titles, trying to strike a balance between books' literary quality and accessibility/popularity.

I loved and reviewed both the middle-grade fiction winner, The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd, and the young adult fiction winnder, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart. But all the other winners I've read were also top-notch. Definitely take a look!

AL Focus has posted a video of the calls to winners of the 2009 Youth Media Awards, from the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Denver. Hear Terry Pratchett hoot and Laurie Halse Anderson sound like Tessie from Annie ("oh my goodness, oh my goodness"). It's all pretty darn cute.

This month, School Library Journal has a fascinating, if disturbing, article called "A Dirty Little Secret: Self-Censorship."

When parents file formal book challenges in schools and libraries, and grandmas encourage their children not to return library books with "inappropriate content", we hear about it. Not always—but often enough the story hits the press and, thanks to the Internet (yay, Internet!), a local issue becomes a matter of national discussion about censorship and First Amendment rights.

What we don't hear about is the silent censorship that may take place at the collection development level—when librarians choose not to buy certain books based not on concerns about age-appropriateness, literary quality, or budget, but rather on personal hang-ups and/or fears that the books may be challenged by Concerned Citizens. The same goes for booksellers and teachers. And because book challenges are so common, and because they pose such a threat to the parties involved (at the least, stress; at the most, job loss and death threats), the urge to stop something before it starts can be strong.

The article is full of anecdotes and author and librarian viewpoints about self-censorship as it affects books for youth dealing with issues such as sex, sexual orientation, race, and even seemingly (to my mind) innocuous topics such as dead turtles and night terrors.

I've written before about my personal concerns about self-censorship in collection development. In my public library department, one of the biggest concerns is whether a book is too mature for the junior high section, at which point we can usually punt it to the high school section. But I'm relieved to say that, to the best of my knowledge, our purchasing decisions are based almost exclusively on literary quality and age-appropriateness, not personal or societal bugaboos. May we keep it up.

(Via The Longstockings)

At the recent TED conference, Elizabeth Gilbert—author of the international best seller Eat Pray Love—delivered a talk called "A Different Way to Think About Creative Genius." In it, she considers why art (of whatever discipline) is such an emotionally painful pursuit and how we can deal with that.

The talk is nearly twenty minutes long, but I highly recommend spending those twenty minutes to listen, enjoy, and perhaps be inspired. There's no transcript available, but here's a snippet to whet your appetite, on how Western ideas of creativity and genius have changed over time:

[In Ancient Rome] people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons… They believed that a genius was this sort of magical, divine entity who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the House Elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work…

And everyone knew that this was how it functioned, so the ancient artist was protected from certain things like, for example, too much narcissism. If your work was brilliant—couldn’t take all the credit for it. Everyone knew you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed—not entirely your fault. Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame…

And then the Renaissance came, and everything changed.

(Thanks to Joe for cluing me in!)

The Rainbow Project has published its 2009 Rainbow List of highly recommended books for children and teens with GLBTQ characters and content. The annotated bibliography includes 34 books, mostly teen fiction plus a few picture books, middle grade novels, and nonfiction books.

The list includes a number of books I've never even heard of, mostly from smaller presses. So it's definitely worth a peek.

The Rainbow Project is "a joint undertaking of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table and the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association." You can read more about the 2009 list here.

ETA, 2/10/09: The Rainbow Project is blogging this year's nominations. Plus, periodically they'll welcome nominations from readers.

We also welcome nominations from you, so on this blog we will periodically solicit field nominations. A committee member must then second your nomination in order for the book to go on to the formal consideration phase.

Books published in the last six months of 2008 as well as those published in 2009 are eligible. So if there's a deserving book published from July 2008 onward that didn't make the 2009 list, it may make it onto next year's!

(Via Fuse #8)