Middle grade needs it’s own category this year because I spent an inordinate amount of time reading the excellent selections of middle grade titles this year. It was a banner year for sure. Today I celebrate middle grade and tomorrow I’ll round out my four posts with the best of young adult.
When I look back at this titles as graphic novels, verse, manga, fiction, and nonfiction, I can’t help but celebrate the range, depth, and breadth of creativity and sensitivity for an age of transition. I should know since I have two thirteen year old boys myself. The message of perseverance; the power of individuality; the adventure; the need to remember the past and explore the future– it’s all here in these titles. If you’ve missed any one of these, you MUST pick it up.
And next up are my favorite children’s books of 2022, again from books actually published in 2022. Tomorrow I will share my favorite middle grade books before finishing up with young adult.
With a few words about these books– mind blowing, that’s all I can say! The skill of the power of an author and illustrator or when they are one person, the skill of reaching into a reader’s soul and pulling out the best (or worst) of the rainbow of human experiences and emotions is worth celebrating. Typically ones that touch me the most are ones that bring out a memory of my own childhood or a shared experience to reflect on as these all do.
The last week of the year is here! I spent last week looking over my reading from this year to pick the best of the best. As always, my lists are books published in 2022, not everything I’d read in 2022 that would make it to my top 10 lists, which makes it a true listicle of the best books of the year.
For 2022, I have four lists I’ll share each day this week, starting with my top 10 adult books. It’ll continue with children’s books, then middle grade, and end with YA.
In a few sentences, I will sum up my top 10 adult books– a mix of fiction and nonfiction in all of the formats that I love from audiobooks to graphic novels. They are books that are escape or slice-of-life, they are true stories that will make you cringe and others that will help to celebrate the good in life. Either way, I can’t help but look over the covers and remember a time, a place, a favorite part that I will take with me from 2022.
… for a colibrarian who works like jelly to peanut butter
… for our library teaching assistant to adds flair from the best signage and organization to her endless energy to keep us running
… for events like our first-ever Open Mic Night last Thursday as a collaboration with a social studies teacher and musician to create a cafe environment where our students could showcase their talents in singing, spoken word, and poetry and our first of two Falcon Library After Dark nighttime fun on a Friday night
… for books to get lost in, go on adventures with, and learn from
… for Sora, Hoopla, Libby, Adobe Digital Editions, and Netgalley Shelf to access books and audiobooks digitally on the go
…. for our brand new library with it’s space, big windows, study rooms, and seating options
… for the opportunity to present to other librarians and teachers about reading and books
… for meetups with former students who have long-since graduated
… for blankets, tea, and slippers to make reading comfortable
Last May, I wrote Pure Happiness at the Con about a busload of high school kids I took to the Saratoga Comic Con in Upstate New York. Well, dear reader, I did it again. This time MORE high school kids– thirty-eight in fact– and this, the day after a day off to spend about six hours attending a jam-packed Con full of cosplay, vendors, food, gaming, and panels. It’s no wonder a few of them fell asleep on the bus ride back.
There are several things to love about the Comic Con: while there’s always a need for more room, it is neatly packed into one section of a convention center to make it easier to keep them in one spot so as I travel around upstairs and downstairs I’ll run into small groups of them (especially the Gaming Room). I even run into graduates who were not only former students, but former club kids too now several years out of the high school enjoying what they loved then too.
The tight timeline to get the permission slips back, make sure teenagers are up and on time for the bus to leave from the high school, and that I have all of them on our return trip are enough to add a few extra grey hairs, but I wouldn’t do it for any other group. This is the same club that convinced me that I should take our Falcons to Japan and while that didn’t come to fruition (thanks, pandemic), I’ll do anything if it makes them happy. On the darkened bus, I was shown things they purchased and pictures of cosplay that they loved all while yawning.
Since I cosplayed Ms. Marvel last year, I figured I would need to up my game this year. I took a poll a few weeks back on whether I should play Alana from Saga or Coco from Witch Hat Atelier, so IYKYK, here I am as Coco in my “work in progress” cosplay (complete with a sylph my son drew on the bottom of my Peter Pan shoes so that if I had my witchy way, I could levitate.
In a convention center full of super fans, I was happy that I had several people recognize me and ask to take my picture– isn’t that the ultimate compliment of a cosplay well played? I know I have more work to add some extras, but for a few weeks of shopping, I think I repped Coco well (and added my brush buddy to boot).
The stress of the beginning of a school year always adds some extra pressure, but planning a field trip ups the ante and a short turnaround time even more so. Luckily there are some fabulous people to assist including a teaching assistant at the high school who runs the Con’s social media and also helps with Japanese Culture Club, though during the Con, she’s busy running panels and taking photos. Then there is a new intern at the school who has been helping out at our club, adding a Pokemon League for some of our students, who was the second chaperone.
There’s always May, however, I’ve got a plan for another field trip– something a little different if I can manage it before the year is out. It wouldn’t require cosplay, but it would include one of my favorite indulgences (and again, a busload of high schoolers!)
Our Falcons came, saw, and conquered the Con. Now, today, Sunday, I rest.
Over the weekend, our large school district experienced a “cyber event” which prompted them to kill the internet for at least three days. Most of us didn’t know until we arrived Monday morning that everything would have to be done without any kind of technology. So after momentary panic, plan B was put in place including the image I’ve been waiting to share on our library’s social media for a while now:
In addition, running an after school club, especially one like my Japanese Culture Club that usually runs about 40 students each week, would look a little different too. But I had fun playing (and losing) a chess match with a newer club member, coloring a page out of a Japanese-inspired coloring book that I keep for club, and doing way more connecting than I normally would. It reminds me of the joy of chill.
I’ll certainly try to channel this chill when I take a busload of them to a Comic Con this weekend. The complete opposite of chill as the adult in charge!
If there ever was a month to label as “mixed bag”, it would have to be October.
This is just a smattering of the books I read either in print, digitally, or audio and they range from a true crime audiobook of two women murdered in the Shenandoah National Park to the GOAT of horror manga, Juji Ito’s Uzumaki. Then there are middle grade fiction titles like Key Player by Kelly Yang and my continued obsession with Spy x Family. All told there were sixty-three books read for the month.
It was a result of several converging events, committees, and activities:
With a conference presentation a few weeks ago, at the beginning of the month I was trying to squeeze in some anticipated titles of 2023 while also reading a few 2022 titles to be ready to talk books.
Sitting on a “Best of” books selection committee for nonfiction so I had a few nonfiction titles that I didn’t know about to read to better argue which were the best!
A little countdown to Halloween on my Instagram, I read a spooky book a day for the last week that included the wacky spirals of Ito’s imagination to reliving the dramatic 1990 movie The Witches based on Roald Dahl’s The Witches which I had never read and decided to listen to the audiobook of today while traveling in the car. Plus I discovered the delightful Ghoulia.
And of course, fitting in the general love of certain series or titles that sit on my endless TBR that I pick up based on length, topic, and format.
November is my birthday month, so I’m planning a few personal reading challenges and organizing my own readathon. Any suggestions?
This past Thursday, I was a featured co-presenter at a conference for school librarians in the area I grew up in. Their one-day event was in its thirty-seventh year and my co-presenter, Stacey Rattner and I had been recruited over the summer to talk about books. With three sessions, we could divide them up or co-present, or both and because we often concurrently present, we chose to co-present all three sessions which was especially useful because many of the librarians in the audience work in small districts where they are the K-12 librarian.
Working with a partner is not new to me. As a high school librarian at a large school, I have always had a colibrarian. I’ve also presented at other conferences with librarians I’ve been on committees with (here’s to my Great Graphic Novels ladies!) and my colibrarian. Collaboration is not easy because you’re meshing two people, two opinions, two styles together. With Stacey, we often joke about how polar opposite we are in life and work yet together as librarian presenters with a passion for books and reading, it works, but we need to get on the same (pun intended) page. This means early morning coffee house meet ups or after dinner ciders.
And there are the countless hours I spend stewing in my head to wrap my head around preparing for a presentation from setting the right tone to celebrating book creators to eliciting collegial conversation. Plus the preparation of aids and tools to present and share.
I am a paper and pencil gal. The first ideas and concepts are always handwritten scribbles and lists. Then there’s days of thinking. Then maybe a Slide or two, then back to mapping it out on paper. I’ve come to love my process and rely on it because there are moments of panic that I’m not “there yet” but I trust the process. And the content embeds itself like a rehearsal for a play, though I have never acted before.
Ultimately, it was a valuable scaffold for this past Thursday’s conference because my co-presenter had a death in the family that didn’t allow her to present and I shared for the both of us. Thus, the entrenched preparation and rehearsal felt like second-nature and provides a level of comfort on the day of the event. I have always said that one of the reasons I say yes to presenting whether it be local, state, or nationally is because I have to learn so much more to feel comfortable sharing which makes me a better librarian overall. (And I have an excuse to read as much as I do).
What kind of process do you have for events or activities you do?
This post would have been done last Thursday, but the school’s homecoming weekend spirit celebrations shortened every class period last Friday, which meant that Ms. Donohue rescheduled classes for tomorrow. It was the right thing to do because talking nonfiction needs the whole 43 minutes. And even that is pushing it.
Here we are, the eve of my favorite booktalk of the school year. I’m really not exaggerating. I can get behind every booktalk done throughout the year, but there are ones that are special, such as this one. AP Language 11th graders do a project using a nonfiction text of their own choosing. No students in all of the classes can repeat the same book. It needs to be robust enough for the requirements of the project, engagingly narrative enough to hold their attention, pertinent to their interests. This means I hustle for my money presenting them with these such books through a whole-class booktalk before giving them time to browse, search, select, and check out. This last third of the class is for one on one readers advisory too. The challenge to find a book for a kid who wasn’t bowled over by anything I had to say in the first two thirds of class is one I’m willing to accept. And nonfiction is my jam.
Who are some of my favorite authors to recommend? I’m glad you asked! Mary Roach, Jon Krakauer, Erik Larson, James L. Swanson, and Candace Fleming.
What are some of my favorite titles to recommend this year? I’m glad you asked! In no particular order (and because my battery is running low): A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein, You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc Tran, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell, and Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge.
I’ll get a good night’s rest tonight because tomorrow you’ll find me fangirling nonfiction in the library.
About a month ago, I started thinking about the amount of time I spent behind the scenes orchestrating my reading. It’s a part-time job, really.
I’m sure it has to do with my reading habits since I tend to mood read which means I always have a large stack of print books, ebooks, and often times even audiobooks ready for my choosing when I finish the previous book. While there are books that have a deadline to be read if I’m on a committee, writing a review for a magazine, or preparing for a class, most often the reading is keeping current on what’s being published, new books by my favorite authors, and visiting older books I hadn’t read at the time but have been recommended or returned to my pile. Of these three needs as an avid reader, I’ll break down what happens behind the scenes.
Keeping current on what’s being published— This means that I spent time reading professional magazines, blogs, social media, and attending curated book buzzes by publishing houses. From there, I’m picking the ones I want to concentrate my energy on because I know it will be useful in our school library, good to recommend to someone, or I want to see what the buzz is all about.
New books by my favorite authors— This means following them on social media and paying attention to those helpful emails that Goodreads sends about new books by previously read authors.
Visiting older books that I hadn’t read at the time but have been recommended or returned to my pile— I tell my graduate students in our YA lit classes that teaching the class is a double-edged sword. They’re hyping ALL THE BOOKS; some of which I haven’t read. And when they make them enticing, I have to add them to my pile again which means I’m revisiting older books that I might have intentionally decided to skip reading, only to regret it now that it’s back on my radar. It’s also looking at lists that come out such as the “end of year” best lists or when I attend a professional development session, or in talking with colleagues or students (whether in my classes or my teens at my high school library).
What comes next after the curation of titles to read is figuring out the best avenue. Here’s what happens at this juncture.
If it’s a new book or upcoming book by a favorite author that means I’m searching on sites like Edelweiss Plus and Netgalley, oftentimes religiously if I’m super excited about a book. Or I’m visiting my local indie bookstore and chatting with my favorite bookseller who might have the galleys. And if there seems to be a glut of titles, I might also spend some time on my local public library’s site reserving copies that are on order knowing that by the time they’re received, processed, and then sent to me, it’ll be weeks.
If it’s a book by my favoritest of favorite authors, it might mean a call to said indie bookstore to preorder it.
And visiting older books means scanning the books digital and print holdings at my public library, looking at quick access sites like Hoopla available through the library, or my own school library. And as those books come in, it’s the exciting trips to the library for pickup which might be one to two that I can walk out with tucked under my arm or lugging a big bag if they all come in at once.
Of course, they have to be read! Managing the books on and off my digital shelves via apps like Libby and Sora when there’s a deadline is as important as adjusting the amount I have at any given time in print too which I build up around vacations and gaps of time I’m able to read. Who am I kidding? There’s always time to read, which is why there are always books coming and going.
It’s a careful curation that to me feels like an orchestration of a symphony managing return dates, read-by timelines, and my exuberance at finally getting to read an anticipated title. As I said, it’s a part-time job in itself and that doesn’t even include the reading time. This careful curation should be talked about more– what kind of process do other avid readers use? How much time would you say you dedicate to the preparation of reading? I’m curious! It’s not that I feel guilty spending the time doing it when I could be reading because I recognize the need and value of culling and organizing the books to read but I do wonder if there are things others do that could help me be more efficient. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes to an active reading life.
Readers Be Advised 