A while back I wrote a post about one of my favorite children’s books, Where the Wild Things Are, that I’ve recently updated and posted on Medium. Please check it out if you’re interested. Thanks for visiting One-Minute Book Reviews. Jan
May 7, 2021
November 15, 2011
2011 National Book Awards Predictions – Young People’s Literature
Who will win this year’s National Book Award for young people’s literature?
By Janice Harayda
A swamp of judging conflicts of interest. An orgy of self-congratulation for the publishing industry. A chance to learn about good books you might have missed. The National Book Awards are all of those, and you may see evidence of some of it when they prizes are handed out tomorrow night at Cipriani Wall Street.
During the run-up, I’ve been tweeting micro-reviews of excerpts from finalists’ books and using them to try to predict the winners in every category except poetry, where apparent judging conflicts of interest reduce the odds that my method might work. My fiction and nonfiction predictions appeared earlier this month, and to judge by the finalists’ excerpts, the young people’s literature award should go to Chime or Flesh and Blood So Cheap.
Chime. A folkloric fantasy with the best opening by a mile among National Book Awards YA fiction finalists. Grade: A Based on this excerpt.
Flesh and Blood So Cheap. Vivid nonfiction about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Grade: A Based on this excerpt.
Inside Out and Back Again. Unexciting poetry in a high-degree-of-difficulty novel in verse. Grade: B Based on this excerpt.
My Name Is Not Easy. Too little drama for an excerpt with a gun in the first paragraph Grade: B- Based on this excerpt.
Okay for now. Alexie-ish fun, but maybe more Newbery than National Book Awards. Grade: B Based on this excerpt.
You may also want to read “The National Book Awards Debacle Was an Accident Waiting to Happen — 7 Ways to Restore Credibility to the Prizes.”
Jan (@janiceharayda) will live-tweet the National Book Awards on her Twitter page at 8 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday, Nov. 16. You can follow her comments by clicking on the “Follow” button at right.
© 2011 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
November 18, 2009
‘Even the National Book Awards Can Generate a Judging Scandal’
Interesting reactions to my post yesterday on an apparent conflict of interest on the judging panel for the 2009 National Book Award for young people’s literature. An article by Motoko Rich for the New York Times ArtsBeat blog, in which I am quoted, begins: “It’s not Olympic figure skating, but even the National Book Awards can generate a judging scandal.” And Elizabeth Bird weighs in on the School Library Journal blog, where she wonders: “What should technically be considered a conflict of interest?” The winners of the awards will be announced tonight beginning at about 8 p.m. EST, and the results should appear almost instantaneously on Twitter (@nationalbook) at www.twitter.com/nationalbook. I may have comments about them after 10 p.m. on “Late Night With Jan Harayda.”
October 17, 2009
Why Was the Book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ a Trailblazer? A Classic Reconsidered
Why did Where the Wild Things Are seem revolutionary when it appeared in 1963? What qualities helped it win the 1964 Caldecott Medal? And why has it lasted long enough to inspire a new Spike Jonze movie? A review of the trailblazing children’s book by Maurice Sendak appeared in the “Classic Picture Books Every Child Should Read” series on One-Minute Book Reviews.
February 26, 2009
2009 Delete Key Awards Finalist #3 – Kathi Appelt’s ‘The Underneath’
Delete Key Awards Finalist #3 comes from Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath (Atheneum, 311 pp., $19.99, ages 8 and up), a finalist for the most recent Newbery and National Book Awards, with drawings by David Small:
“The pain she felt was palpable.”
What’s wrong with this sentence? All together now: “Palpable” means you can feel it.
© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
2009 Delete Key Awards Finalist #7– ‘Read All About It!’ by Laura Bush and Jenna Bush
Delete Key Awards Finalist #7 comes from Read All About It (HarperCollins, 32 pp., $17.99, ages 4–6), a picture book by Laura Bush and Jenna Bush, illustrated by Denise Brunkus:
“I say, ‘The library is a boring place! All I will meet there are stinky pages.’”
and
“Miss Toadskin thinks she can gross us out with her science experiments. But I live for that stuff!”
It happens every year! Delete Key Awards finalists try to strengthen weak sentences by adding manic exclamation points! And bad puns! How many 4-year-olds will know that a “page” is someone who reshelves books!
© Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
February 25, 2009
How Badly Can You Write and Get a Book Published in America? Find Out Thursday, Feb. 26, When the Shortlist for the 2009 Delete Key Awards Is Posted
Are you tired of reading about what a hard time publishers are having? Do you wish that somebody would write about what a hard time we, the readers, are having with some of the clinkers they’ve thrown at us?
Stay right here. Tomorrow One-Minute Book Reviews will post the shortlist for the Third Annual Delete Key Awards for the year’s worst writing in books for adults or children. The finalists will be named in random order and numbered in reverse order, from No. 10 through No. 1, at roughly half hour intervals, beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. The full shortlist will be posted by 5 p.m.
Last year John Brockman said on the blog for the Powell’s Books:
“Arguably the second-best online literary award after the TOB’s Rooster [co-sponsored by Powell’s] is the 2008 Delete Key Awards for ‘the year’s worst writing in books,’ awarded by the One-Minute Book Reviews blog.”
Please check back tomorrow to learn the finalists for this year’s booby prizes for clichés, bad grammar, psychobabble, stereotypes, mispunctuation, incoherence, dumbing-down and more.
One-Minute Book Reviews does not accept free books or other promotional materials from editors, publishers, authors, agents or others with ties to the industry.
© 2009 Janice Harayda
www.twitter.com/janiceharayda
February 23, 2009
2009 Delete Key Awards Finalists to Be Announced Feb. 26, Beginning at 10 a.m. – The Year’s Worst Writing in Books for Children and Adults
You think the books you read this year were bad? Find out Thursday how they compare to some of the worst writing publishers have flung at us in the past twelve months. The 2009 Delete Key Awards for the year’s worst writing in books for children and adults will be announced beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Feb. 26 with the full list posted by the end of the day.
This year for the first time visitors to One-Minute Book Reviews can choose one of the finalists – the worst of four lines from Denis Leary’s Why We Suck, all included in a recent poll on this site. You can vote anonymously until 5 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday on the Feb. 21 post.
The winners will be named on March 16 (usually on March 15, which falls on a Sunday this year). To read other posts about the awards, given to authors who don’t use delete keys enough, click on “Delete Key Awards” in the list of categories at right. Thanks for visiting this site.
© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
November 23, 2008
Watch a Slide Show of the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2008
Every year since 1952, the editors of the New York Times Book Review have asked a group of judges to pick the best illustrated children’s books of the year. The 2008 list appeared in the NYTBR on Nov. 9, and if you missed it, you can watch a slide show that includes a picture from each of the 10 honorees here
www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/11/06/books/20081109ILLUSTRATEDBOOKS_index.html.
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
April 16, 2008
J. K. Rowling Will Lose, and Here’s Why
First, these words are being written by someone who thought Hillary Clinton couldn’t win New Hampshire after she got emotional a few days before the primary.
Second, I have no right to be writing about J. K. Rowling’s legal affairs, given that a) I have never finished a Harry Potter novel; b) I don’t usually cover publishing news; and c) my first-hand knowledge of Rowling consists almost entirely of having twice seen her on the street in front of a Tesco supermarket when I was living near her neighborhood in Edinburgh.
Even so, I must say it: Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment will lose their lawsuit against RDR Books, the would-be publisher of a book based on the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site www.hp-lexicon.org, which went to trial this week in a federal court in Manhattan. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and copyright expert, made the best case I’ve read against her claims in an article in Slate in January
www.slate.com/id/2181776/pagenum/all/#page_start. The gist of it is that while Rowling has many rights as an author:
“ … Rowling is overstepping her bounds. She has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn’t. Rowling owns both the original works themselves and any effort to adapt her book or characters to other media—films, computer games, and so on. Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be ‘recast, transformed, or adapted.’ But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she’s suing. The law has never allowed authors to exercise that much control over public discussion of their creations.”
Wu didn’t predict that Rowling would lose, only expressed the view that she should, but that doesn’t need to stop the rest of us, does it?
That’s all I have to say, except that a) the Tesco in EH 8 has excellent white Stilton with apricots and b) I did predict the winner of this year’s Pulitzer for fiction.
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
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