If you loved an unsung 2010 YA book whose characters or author fit one or more of these categories, why not nominate it? You have until midnight GMT on Mon. Mar. 7.

It’s a tournament-style contest, so I’ll be reading two books to decide which advances to the next round — along with my fabulous judging partner, My Library Card Wore Out.

The YA Fantasy & Science Fiction finalists are:

Brain Jack, by Brian Falkner
Guardian of the Dead, by Karen Healey
Plain Kate, by Erin Bow
Pod, by Stephen Wallenfels
Rot & Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry
Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Wager, by Donna Jo Napoli

I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty pleased with myself for successfully gaming the system — I’ve already read Guardian of the Dead, Ship Breaker, and Plain Kate (all of which I loved). Good thing, because now I only need to read 4 more awesome books this month! It is a difficult life I lead.

Confused? The Cybils are the Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards. Here’s how it works:

1. You nominate your favorite books published between Oct. 16, 2009 and Oct. 15, 2010.
2. The Round I judges read like superhuman reading machines and choose 5 or 6 finalists in each category.
3. We Round II judges spend January reading our finalists and choose a winner!

Nominations start October 1, so start thinking about your favorites! I can’t speak for all the Cybils, but I especially love nominations of “under the radar” books that should have gotten more recognition than they did. (My fellow SF&F panelist Charlotte of Charlotte’s Library keeps an amazingly thorough list of new SF&F releases, if you can’t remember what came out this year.)

Shout-out to the rest of the SF&F team:

Panel Organizer: Sheila Ruth, Wands and Worlds

Panelists (Round I Judges), MG/Elementary:
Anamaria Anderson, Books Together
Gwenda Bond, Shaken & Stirred
Cindy Hannikman, Fantasy Book Critic
Aaron Maurer, Coffee for the Brain
Nicole Signoretta, Booked Up
Charlotte Taylor, Charlotte’s Library
Karen Yingling, Ms. Yingling Reads

Panelists (Round I Judges), Teen/YA:
Steve Berman, Guys Lit Wire
Tanita Davis, Finding Wonderland
Leila Roy, Bookshelves of Doom
Sheila Ruth (see panel organizer)
Angie Thompson, Angieville
Hallie Tibbetts, Undusty New Books
Heather Zundel, Secret Adventures of WriterGirl

Round II Judges:

Elementary/Middle
Melissa Baldwin, One Librarian’s Book Reviews
Kate Coombs, Book Aunt
Emily Mitchell, emilyreads
Nancy Tsai, Kidsmomo
Tanya Zavestoski Turek, Books 4 Your Kids

Teen/YA
Emma Carbone, Miss Print
Anne Levy, Cybils
Sam Musher, Parenthetical
Sarah Stevenson, Finding Wonderland
Steph Su, Steph Su Reads

I can’t wait to get started!

I’m still committed to reviewing everything I’ve read, for myself as much as anything — it’s helpful to use my blog as a recommendation engine. To dig myself back out I’ll blow through some speed-reviews over the next week. They won’t be brilliant, but at least I’ll remember what I thought about each book.

As for food, I added that to my blogging rounds because people kept asking me what I was cooking and preserving and how I was using my preserved food and whatnot. I don’t have time to blog everything I cook or preserve, and you’d be bored. So what food stuff do you want to read about (if anything)? Recipes? Preservation? Improvisational meals? Gluten-free baking? Locovoration in a New England winter? The Local Produce Only Project in general? “Shut up and get back to the books” or “Just shut up” are also acceptable answers.

I hope you’ve all been enjoying your summers!

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I am not a poetry reader, as a general rule. But a few poems in, I was sold on this book. If you’re looking for read-aloud poems for children or adolescents (as we frequently are at my school), I can’t recommend this highly enough. For instance:

Are You Worried?

Are you worried you’re not
like everyone else?
Your worries will only worsen
when you find
that the path to conformity
is different for each person.

Or (read this out loud):

Love

She came round the corner and
all of a sudden
I understood it:

all love is sudden.

I think my favorite poem in the book is the epigraph, which wasn’t written by JonArno at all but which captures the spirit of his book perfectly:

we is marchin’

Nature is a copiously
Hopeful cornucopia
Of protoplasmic organisms
Groping for utopia.

–E. Y. “Yip” Harburg

Also reviewed at: Poetry for Children

I’ll admit, I found her book tiresome. The prose is lovely, I guess, but it was a Woman’s Sexual Awakening and Learning to Free Herself From the Yoke of Her Family While Appreciating Her Roots novel. The woman in question just happened to be in high school rather than 40. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this trope, it just happens to be one that bores me.

And then Martha Brooks herself said something in her talk that crystallized for me why:

“Adults, as well as young adults, often become locked in a loop of private despair.”

I am nothing if not familiar with these loops. “Private despair” characterized most of college, in fact (well, except for the “private” part — ah, the early days of the internet over-share). But in my experience, loops of private despair are boring. In the story of my life, my despairs and how I broke out of them aren’t the interesting bit — what matters is what I did after. I don’t want to read about other people’s any more than I want to relive my own.

Also reviewed at: M/C Reviews, Quill and Quire (whose initial snarking about YA lit leads me to suspect that the reviewer prefers adult lit, and therefore it’s not a surprise that she liked this book better than I did), and 1morechapter.com.

What do you think of Loop of Private Despair novels? Do you find them compelling? Why do you think you do or don’t?

I’m super-excited about both of these: they were two of my personal favorites. (I even gave Rapunzel’s Revenge to my friend Kate Diamond as part of her wedding present, a bad-ass redhead for a bad-ass redhead.)

Congratulations to all of the 2008-2009 Cybils winners, and to all the finalists and panelists! I can’t wait for next year.

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