Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Newbery-Induced Hysteria

(Note: this entry was copied over from my LJ; I see now that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it captures my mood and the unclearness of my thinking at the time, so I'm posting it anyway.)

I know it sounds a little crazy, but I am happy: I just discovered that I never moved Island of the Blue Dolphins over to my Newbery shelf on Goodreads, so my count has been off, and I only have 26 books left to read, not 27. Excellent!

I'm sort of amazed that that happened, but the list is a long one, and even though I tried to compare my list of have-reads to the list of winners before, it's not unusual for me to be off when I count stuff, and I kept forgetting which books I decided to count as "read" and which I hadn't--because there are quite a lot of Newberys that I might have read, or maybe tried to read and never got past the first few pages--anyway, if I couldn't remember it well enough to rate it, I wasn't counting it. But looking at the list of what I have left, I notice that I've done almost none of those so far--so the home stretch is going to involve a lot of books that I'm actually familiar with. Also books from the thirties. I only have one left each from the twenties and the sixties, but for some reason... six from the thirties. Maybe this was a low period for the Newberys--several of them are not actually in the Central Library and I'll have to order them from other places, so I guess that's why I haven't gotten to them.

I am so looking forward to compiling lists and statistics, when I finally finish. I read my last two more quickly than I expected, so I've been stranded with no books over the holiday weekend, but I reread Strawberry Girl and Island of the Blue Dolphins so I could write some comments about them. (I have good momentum going now and didn't want to risk breaking it up with, you know, one of the many non-Newbery books I have waiting to be read.)

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