Betsy Bird's Blog, page 178

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Middle Grade Novels

The penultimate list! I’m so excited! This year I did a bit better than in 2017 in terms of reading middle grade fiction. Thanks to a system of following starred reviews, the recommendations of readers I trust, blogs, Twitter, Mock Newbery lists, the whole kerschmozzle, here are the 2018 books that I think are great. But, as with every year, I should say that one person can only read so much. This is just a tiny sampling of what came out. There were a lot of wonderful books I missed. If you’d...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Fiction Reprints

My 7-year-old daughter wondered what precisely constituted a “fiction reprint” when I told her about today’s list. After she asked, I found myself scrambling to make a concise definition. Simply put, these are books (chapter books, mostly) written for older children that either have new editions with new illustrators, or were out-of-print and are now back. Phew! Bit of a mouthful, that. In any case, these are some of the most difficult to celebrate, and this list cannot be considered a true r...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Nonfiction Chapter Books

Now this is interesting. I don’t really know, until I get to the end of the year, how well I balanced my reading of older works of children’s nonfiction. Are they all biographies? Animal books? A mix? Is there anything here that doesn’t slot into either of those two categories? Yes yes and yes. I should clarify before we begin that calling these “Chapter Books” is a bit misleading. Think of them, instead, as works of Nonfiction for slightly older children in the 9-12 year-old range. Or, in th...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Nonfiction Picture Books

At last! It’s finally time to list the last Top Five lists of the year. This is the first of the biggies, my friends. These are the picture book nonfiction titles that truly stole my heart in 2018. The cream of the crop. The apples of my eye. The metaphors in my aphorisms.

Please bear in mind that you will see a bit of duplication on this list from the previous ones. While the other lists have broken my reading list down into different categories, these are the books that, all told, I truly b...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Unique Biographies

Precision of Language Alert! What precisely do I mean when I say today’s list consists of “unique biographies”? What exactly makes a biography unique? Did the author write everything in pig latin? Is the character’s timeline backwards? What gives?

To my mind a “unique biography” is a biography of a person who may never have had a bio about them before. We know the usual biographical suspects. Walk into any school classroom or library and there they are. Your Abraham Lincolns, Rosa Parks, Thom...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Transcendent Holiday Picture Books

Merry Christmas! And what a lovely day it is. But why should we designate today’s list to only a single, solitary holiday when there are so many that had such lovely books out this year? This is one of my favorite lists of the month, so it only seems fitting to post it today. Here are the books based on different holidays that I’d feel perfectly happy reading all year long, they’re so good.

 

2018 Transcendent Holiday Picture Books

All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah by Emily Jenkins, ill. Paul O....

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems

“I can always be called upon to remember a Snurp”.

Merry Christmas! Let’s celebrate with a book that has absolutely nothing to do with the day in question whatsonever. So I know you’re all wondering what elements Kate chose to focus on with this book. Would she like it more than Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus? Less? Well, I’ll sum it up for you. We discuss at length the proper way to wash a pure white bra, the genetic dominance of a character’s eyes (or lack thereof), and the proper way t...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Science and Nature Books

There is a hidden war in the world of children’s books that few discuss. Every year we see ALA award works of nonfiction. And every year someone out there, it might be me, it might be you, counts to see how many of those books are Biographies and how many are about other concepts like Science or Nature. I don’t have to tell you that often Biographies wipe the floor with the other Nonfiction topics. Why? Not sure. If I could speculate I’d say that a lot librarians on award committees are like...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 American History

You might wonder where I get these list topics. I mean, American History? Why not International History too? Or Women’s History for that matter? The reason in this particular case is that many of these lists are based on the various award committees I serve on. For a couple years I was on the New York Historical Society’s Children’s History Book Prize. It was great fun, and gave me a taste for these particular types of books. Since then, I keep an eye on U.S. History when it crops up, and I c...

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Fictionalized Nonfiction

It’s the contradictions of the profession that sometimes yield the most interesting discussions. You may, in the past, have heard me refer, without irony, to our current era as the New Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Not just in terms of diversity and equity, but also in terms of sheer creativity. While artists have tried for years to present children’s literature in new and exciting ways, we’ve never seen them indulged by their publishers on quite this scale. And who is one of the benef...