I am going over to the Cybils site many times a day, to excitedly read the nominations for the category I'm involved in--Sci. Fi./ Fantasy.
I realized during the summer, as Cybils season approached, that this was the category I wanted to be part of, and (perhaps foolishly) decided not to focus my reading efforts fantasy-ward (although I cracked on a few, such as The Hunger Games, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Chalice, and a few others). Result: there are lots of books I'm looking forward to reading in the coming months! (but a few that I want to read haven't been nominated yet...so if you haven't nominated one in this category yet, ask yourself--"What would Charlotte like?" (tongue in cheek here, in case that's not obvious).
One thing I that is dawning on me (joke, keep reading) is that I have a lot of reading of non-nominated books to do. For instance, Breaking Dawn is nominated, but I (gulp) haven't read any of the earlier books. I feel as though I have, but it's just not true. There are several others like that--second, third, or even higher in a series. So I have come up with a Plan to help me clearheadedly and calmly navigate the reading waters of the coming fall.
Happily, I am home sick with a cold today. This will help me implement today's part of the Plan:
1. finish reading and writing reviews of all the books that need to be read and have reviews written of them (to do today). Write to all the publishers who sent me books giving them links to all my reviews.
2. check Twilight out of the library (today), read Twilight (today?).
3. clean and remodel house, split and stack 3 cords of wood, go to grocery store, trying not to be a Vector of Disease (my children scold me all the time for not coughing into my armpit, the way they are taught to in school these days. But it's hard to learn new tricks), prepare cheap but nourishing food for my young (and my husband too, unless he's doing the cooking), explain (again) to my 8 year old why I got so cross with him yesterday when he very meanly told my 5 year old that Santa didn't exist (today).
4. check Cybils website again. Re-read list of nominations in sci. fi. fantasy. Read YA nominations, noting which ones we will probably get in our category. Muse about the fact that they had something like 93 nominations in sci.fi/fantasy last year. Decide to make tidy list of our books to post here when the dust clears. Wonder if we will get more nominations than YA gets this year (to do repeatedly).
5. rest.
There's gotta be something wrong with me that I read this post, and went, "93? Pshaw! That's nothing. I thought they said there were going to be a LOT of books."
ReplyDeleteUm, self? 93 is a lot. That's a lot of books.
I've already made a list of all the nominated books, and marked the ones I've already read, and the ones I've been meaning to read.
Anyway. Hi. I'm excited to be on the FSF panel with you!
Nettle
Hi Nettle!
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean--93 seems like nothing, but then they start arriving in the mail, and building up in piles around the house...
Hah! I ALREADY have piles of books around the house--I think I'm going to have to invest in more bookcases, because the ones I have are already full.
ReplyDeleteYou did this last year, right? Did you get a lot of review copies from publishers, or did you have to do most of the scrounging yourself?
Charlotte, I hope that you enjoy basking in the books. Part of me wants to be on a big nominating committee like this, but the other part of me knows that to accomplish #1 on your list would seriously require me to be home sick for 3 months. Yeah. Anyway, I hope that you and Nettle and the others on the team enjoy it. I had my hardest time deciding what to nominate in this category - I had several that I really really liked. (I ended up going with The Other Side of the Island.
ReplyDeleteI did the opposite. I volunteered for the YA panel, then said to myself, "Are you nuts? You better get a head start and read some of those books that are likely to be nominated now. Now!"
ReplyDeleteTrisha
Nettle--we should be getting a large number of the books from the publishers, if all goes well!
ReplyDeleteJen--I wouldn't need three months, but a few weeks sure would be nice...I got one review done today.
However, the house is cleaner (not hard), another wood rack has been filled, and other useful things of that ilk done.
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ReplyDeleteHere's my deleted comment again, with typo. fixed:
ReplyDeleteHi Trisha-- I think yours was the wise choice for YA. I remember last year that toward December I felt saturated YA-wise and badly wanted to read other genres. But I think there's more variety in sci-fi/fantasy??? Also, it turns out that I have read more than I thought (about a third) of the books on our list.
That being said, I am starting to read our nominations Very Seriously now. Twilight was checked out at the library, so I got Runemarks instead.