Newbery and other awards and lists!

The American Library Association recently picked this year's Newbery Award winner. The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, is about a young boy, orphaned and raised by ghosts and werewolves in a graveyard. The book will be here in August with the new school year!

The ALA has many other awards and lists, check out these:
Best Books for Young Adults 2009
2009 Great Graphic Novels
2009 Quick Picks (books just for the fun of it)
2009 Fabulous Films for Young Adults

Check out these lists. If any of the titles sound interesting, please recommend them to the librarian to order for next year!

Alan Gratz's twist on Hamlet

Alan Gatz's new book Something Rotten will be available free, online for the next month. It's an interesting cross of Shakespeare's classic Hamlet, and a modern detective story, written for young adults. Go take a look!

(I heard about this from the Bookshelves of Doom blog; it's a great place to keep up with all sorts of new young adult books!)

2008 Teens' Top 10 nominees

The Young Adult Library Services Association (or YALSA), recently posted their nominees for the Teen's Top 10 list. Sadly we only have two of the nominees in the library right now (don't worry, more are ordered for next year!). You can vote for this year's nominees, or peruse previous lists here. If any of the books look really intersting, let me know and I'll make sure to order them!

The two nominees that we do have? Evil Genius, by Catherine Jinks and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.

Comics galore!

The 2008 Comic Con (a convention for all things comic related) was recently held in San Diego, California. While we're all sad that we didn't get to go, have no fear, the SCCS library will be getting all sorts of new comics and graphic novels this year! Here's a quick taste of what's to come:

Neil Gaiman's Sandman (en español)
Eyeshield 21 (student request)
Bleach (student request)
Dragon Ball Z (dare we call it a classic?)
Nancy Drew, Girl Detective (you love the novels, will you enjoy this format, as well?)

Remember, anytime you have a suggestion or idea for a book you'd like to see in the library, just let us know!

Entertainment Weekly's modern classics

Entertainment Weekly, which reviews movies, books, television and other media, recently published their top 100 list of New Classic Books. The lists consists of "the 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008."

There are some great young adult offerings on the list, for example:

2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)

There are many others that are aimed at adult audiences, but would be great reads for our high school students. Come see which we have in the library!

I've read about a quarter of these, how many have your read?

Favorite reads for British Teens

An article in the Guardian (UK) talks about British teen reading habits. The first entry on the list of favorite things to read is a celebrity gossip magazine, followed by online song lyrics, gaming cheats and info, and blogs and fan fiction. Harry Potter books are the first paper entries on the list, and Anne Frank, Alex Rider and the Narnia series fill out the top ten.

What are your favorite things to read? Do your tastes match those of British teens?

25 Teen Tech activities

The Young Adult Library Services Association is celebrating Teen Tech Week, and offers this list of 25 things teens can do to get more involved in technology in the library.

#9 recommends finding your favorite author on MySpace. Maybe you could look on Facebook, too!

#25 suggests that you start a flickr account; do you remember the earlier post about flickr and picasa?

Veterans Day

Yesterday was Veterans Day in the United States. This holiday is a time for us to "honor all who served" in the military. War has a large presence in the literary world, many classic books have been written about both the glory and the horror of battle. The library has quite of few of these titles, and here are some general recommendations:

For younger readers a picture book called The Blue and the Gray, by Eve Bunting, has two young friends remembering the American Civil War. Good fiction books for adults on the Civil War include Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier and The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara.

Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes is a Newbery-award winning book for middle readers based during the American Revolutionary War. Sarah Bishop, by Scott O'Dell and The Pox Party, by MT Anderson are two other books written about that era.

If you prefer non-fiction works, They Marched into Sunlight, by David Maraniss, is a great read about different fronts in the Vietnam War. This work is recommended for older readers. For middle readers, Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers, is a fiction book about one young man's experience in the same war.

Please come to the library to find other books about war and veterans.

Latin@ books for all!

Here are two great blogs that focus on Latin@ characters and experiences:

Latina YA

Cuentecitos

Check them out and see what they have to say. If you like the sound of any of the books in these blogs, please recommend them to Ms. Hanneman and we can purchase them for next year!

Also, if you're interested in what the library already has, here are a few titles to get you started:

Esperanza Rising, by Pam Ryan (we have it in Spanish and English)
Crazy Mixed-up Spanglish Day, by Marisa Montes
Party Girl, by Lynne Ewing
Honey Blond Chica, by Michele Serros
Haters, by Alisa Valdez-Rodriguez

There are a bunch more titles in the library, come see what we have!

A new Star in our book universe

If you're interested in historical fiction, you should check out a slim volume among our new books, At the Sign of the Star, by Katherine Sturtevant. Based in 17th century England, Meg, the daughter of a London bookseller, would rather spend her time in her father's shop than learning how to cook and sew. She plans on inheriting her father's business one day, until he remarries and puts her future in doubt.

If you like strong girl characters with a bit of rebellion, historical fiction or want to read about London in the 17th century, this would be a great book for you. There is also a sequel called A True and Faithful Narrative.

Kate DiCamillo's other books!

Kate DiCamillo is the wonderful author who brought us Because of Winn Dixie, a Newbery Honor book. But did you know that she's written a bunch of other books? We have five in our library: The Tale of the Despereaux (the 2004 Newbery Winner), Mercy Watson to the Rescue (an easy fiction book), The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, and the book I want to discuss today, The Tiger Rising.

The Tiger Rising is a young adult book about a a boy who has recently lost his mother to cancer and has moved with his father to a new town in Florida. The boy, Rob, has a difficult time in the new school, dealing with bullies and adults who look the other way, but things begin to get better when he discovers a caged tiger and makes friends with another new student, Sistine. Her plan to free the tiger helps Ben work through his repressed sadness about his mother, and confront his father's inability to discuss his late wife. In its spare 116 pages, the book has beautifully described characters such as Rob's father, a "prophetess," Willie Mae, and his father's boss, Beauchamp.

Asteroids hitting the moon? That's a new one!

If you've been in the library recently you probably already know that the new books are here! Last year we ordered over 500 new titles and they just arrived at the end of August. I've already had the chance to read a couple, and here's what I think (so far).

My favorite is Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer. (You can click on that link to see what Amazon thinks about the book.) The premise is that an extremely dense asteroid hits the moon, causing it to change its orbit and effecting all sorts of things on earth. First, because the moon controls tides, tsunamis start to wipe out all coastal cities (think Rio or Miami!). Next the gravitational pull messes with volcanoes and earthquakes (ask Mr. Kadow about the science behind this, it's fascinating!). This starts off a chain reaction that puts our heroine, Miranda, and her family in a battle of survival in their new environment. Oh, and it's written as a series of journal entries from 16-year-old Miranda's point of view. Can you imagine if the temperature in Santa Cruz dropped 50 degrees? Where would you get your fruits and vegetables? How would you keep warm? What would you do to survive? It's a great book, I highly recommend it!

There are a bunch of other good reads, but that's long enough for one post!

(posted by Ms. Hanneman)