How to fix BBYA

Liz Burns and Marc Aronson have been keeping an eye on the Best Books for Young Adults drama. That list is going to become strictly YA fiction; the Alex Awards (adult books of potential interest and value to teens) and) list will get bigger, thus picking up the adult book slack; and the new YALSA nonfiction award will publicize its list of nominations, thus theoretically increasing the visibility of nonfiction.

The reason given for the change is that too many books get nominated for BBYA and committee members feel overburdened by the reading. But if I have this right, only one committee member (or YALSA member) needs to nominate a book to get it onto that big list. When I was on BBYA back in dinosaur times, this nomination process produced some true stinkers, books that were only nominated because someone felt bad about not doing something for a book he or she got free in the mail. (Let's hope the nonfiction award contenders are going to be nominated with a bit more rigor if they are going to be publicized as recommended books.) Why not simply increase the number of nominations needed to, say, three? A book that has only one nomination for a choice made by a committee of fifteen is not going to make the list, so why waste everyone's time?

I also worry that the decision is shortsighted. The money in children's publishing right now is in YA fiction, aided by a now-passing boom in the teen population and an adult crossover readership, which will also pass once adult publishing figures out how to make even more money from these readers. At its best, the BBYA list displays the intersection at which YA librarianship is supposed to live: fiction and nonfiction, adult and juvenile, words and pictures (graphic novels are also banished from the new list and relegated to their own.) I think what the new system gives us is a bunch of bitty lists whose individual and collective power will be considerably diminished. It's similar to what happens when you have give out too many awards--whoops, that's another post.

Step away from the bar, ladies

So SLJ is in trouble with some of its readers over their cover photo of some boozin' bloggers. Honestly, you never know what's going to bring in complaints--and Letters to the Editor are far more frequently objections than compliments. As Monica Edinger (first reprobate to the left) points out, you might expect objections to the Sex and the City cast of the cast (all good-lookin' white girls) but who expected this? And too often, when you want to start a discussion--as I did with the Nikki Grimes article about black people and the Caldecott Medal--you get zip.

But here is one of the treasures from our archive, ripped from a subscriber's magazine, label carefully removed (coward), and mailed to me in an anonymous envelope:

Would you trust these people with your kid?

Well, of course, not you, but I'm thinking that even parents who haven't cracked a book in years would think twice about sending their children to a pricey private school without any books in the library. They need to realize, at the least, that college admissions Deciders have a vested interest in validating their own expensive educations and are thus likely to look dimly at applicants who have been told they don't need books.

Speaking as one old fart to another

Somebody asked on the previous post (and I STILL need your questions) what I thought about Nicholas Kristof's recommendations for summer reading. Not much--any list of the Thirteen Best Books is pretty random and thus useless and I have to wonder whether, in including the Hardy Boys, he means the ones he read as a lad (nostalgia time) or the ones currently published (out-and-out lame). I also wonder about his assertion that IQs dip during a summer not spent reading. Does IQ work that way?

Flunk reading, do not go directly to jail.

Apparently some politicos are fond of spouting a factoid (please note correct usage, book reviewers everywhere) that links third-grade reading scores to the formulas states use to estimate their future requirements for prison beds. Not so.

No word yet whether or not Baby Einstein foretells a playdate with Old Sparky.

I didn't see this coming.

Round 2 of the BoB has begun, with Tim Wynne Jones choosing Kingdom on the Waves over Trouble Begins at Eight. The judges do not have all appeared to get my memo: in this round it was supposed to be Kingdom v. Graveyard Book, Chains v. Tender Morsels, Frankie Landau-Banks v. Hunger Games and Graceling v. Nation.

Everybody except jester-under-the-table Jonathan Hunt is being soooo polite. This makes the competition look a lot less random than it actually is. Think about it: the winner will be chosen via a sequence of fifteen decisions that operate under no common principle, leading in the end to a choice that means nothing. (Go, Lois.) While I'm enjoying the judges' explanations, we each employed criteria exclusive to us and to the two books we were comparing. The winning book will be one that four people liked better, for different reasons, than one other book. A few commenters here and elsewhere have sniped that the BoB is really "all about the judges." As far as I can tell, it's not really about anything else.