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The ALA Awards have been announced! Click here to watch the video of the announcements.

The Newbery Winner:
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz. Hooray! Laura Amy Schlitz totally deserves this; she's a wonderful writer and very cool person to boot. I interviewed her last year. I did not read Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! for Cybils. (It was nominated in the poetry category.) In fact, I finished reading this just last week. Wow. I read the Newbery winner. Barely, but I did.

The Newbery Honor books:
Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis. Yep, uh-huh, not really a surprise. It doesn't have a ton of kid appeal but the writing is pretty meticulous. It's a very "Newbery-ish" book. Elijah also won the Coretta Scott King Book Award.
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt. YAY! I had a feeling this book would get an Honor (at least) so, while expected, I am very happy for it.
Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson. Don't really know anything about it.

I read 3/4 of the Newbery books! Whoopee!!

Other books I'd read/awards I found interesting:
Reaching for Sun by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer won the Schneider Family Book Award.
The first-ever Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production went to Jazz. A picture book won for best audiobook. I find that amusing. Congratulations to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for getting an Honor in this category.

Alrighty. So, even though three special favorites aren't on the list (Book of a Thousand Days, Leepike Ridge, and Miss Spitfire), I'm okay with the Newbery winners. But none of them were very surprising. There was plenty of pre-awards talk about any one of those books winning.

Therefore, the announcement that made me squeal with utter delight and shock was for the Caldecott Award. Now, I usually don't pay much attention to these winners, since I don't read picture books unless my little cousins are visiting. I was merely sitting back and waiting for the Newbery's to be announced next. Imagine my surprise when the announcer said, "And the winner of the 2008 Caldecott Winner is . . . The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick." !!! Oh! I thought. How . . . obvious! And yet I never even thought of it! How's that for extremely happymaking?! A 500+ page book wins the Caldecott Award. JOY!

My next thought:
I READ BOTH THE NEWBERY AND THE CALDECOTT WINNERS OF THE YEAR. That will probably never ever happen again.

On Monday the Newbery Awards will be announced, along with a plethora of other awards. Go here for details.

I figure with all the middle grade fiction reading I did for Cybils, this is the year that I have the biggest chance of having read the winner. We shall see!

ALA 2008 Awards It's that time of year when the air is buzzing with the excitement of the upcoming ALA awards. The ALA Midwinter conference begins held this weekend in Philadelphia, and the 2008 Newbery and Caldecott winners (among many others) will be announced a week from today. Can't make it? Listen to their live webcast, starting at 7:45 AM on the 14th. As you can imagine, the kidlitosphere