Newbery Report, Part 1 of 3

Part 1 of 3 about the Newbery Award. Absolutely everything should have an assumed “In my opinion” affixed. Any information about the award is taken from the ALA website, except for a few things that I've picked up from people I know who have been on the Newbery Committee. If I've misunderstood and/or misinterpreted what they've talked about, that, of course, is my own fault.

You can find a full list of Newbery winners and Newbery Honor books here.

ABOUT ME, AND ABOUT THE AWARD

Q: Who are you to be criticizing classic and award-winning books?

A: No one. I'm just a reader of children's books; I have strong opinions, and sort of old-fashioned ideas about what makes good writing. I tend to be more interested in books about girls. I didn't read any new-to-me Newberys that I liked as well as my favorites from when I was a kid—for one thing, I think I really had read some of the best ones, and for another, it's easier to overlook flaws when you're a kid—so I have a strong bias there. I don't pretend that I could do a better job than any of these writers. I just read 'em.

Q: Why did you decide to read all the Newbery winners?

A: I reread a lot and don't read as many new-to-me books as I could. I thought this would get me to read a lot of different kinds of books that I'd never ordinarily pick up, like books about boys or animals (or boys AND animals), or books with dull-sounding titles.

Q: Hadn't you already read a lot of them?

A: No. To my surprise, I'd only read twelve of them as a child, and I read seven more as an adult before I began the project. A lot of them had titles and covers that were not appealing to me, which led me to believe that most Newberys were not that good; that made me even less likely to pick them up, no matter what the title or the cover.

Q: Did you read all the Honor books, too, or just the winners?

A: No, just the winners. It never crossed my mind to try to read all the Honor books, too, but apparently it has crossed a lot of other minds, because several people have asked me this.

Q: Are you going to read all the Honor books now?

A: Not really. I'm far more likely to pick up a random Honor book now than I used to be, but I don't intend to read all of them. To be honest, I don't think all of them are probably worth reading, especially the older ones—check out some of those titles.

Q: Should I read all the Newbery winners, too?

A: Only if you are compulsive about finishing things, or, like me, you need a shove to make you read other kinds of books. Quite a few of them are not that great.

Q: How are Newbery books chosen?

A: From what I understand (anyone chime in if you know more than me), there's a committee every year, formed from members of the American Library Association (ALA). ALA members can suggest each other for the committee, and I assume you can apply, but I don't think they take outside suggestions. They try to get members from a variety of library types. The members of the committee read a lot of books, then get together, discuss, and vote. Because of the nature of the process, sometimes the “wrong” book gets chosen. Really good books, by their very nature, usually have something that makes some people dislike them. I get the impression that sometimes the winning book is something of a compromise, and that's why it might seem like the Honor books are better than the winners (more on that later).

Q: What is the Newbery awarded for?

A: The most distinguished contribution to children's literature that year.

Q: Isn't it supposed to be, like, a story? What's with the medieval poetry and biography of Lincoln?

A: No, any genre is acceptable, in theory.

Q: Don't you think some of the books are inappropriate for children?

A: No. Books suitable for children up to age 14 are eligible for the Newbery Medal. That doesn't mean every book is suitable for every child, and several of them might not be appropriate for your ten-year-old—they might have been written for your young teenager. It's up to you, as always.

Q: What are the criteria for the award? Some of these books are dumb.

A: ALA defines “distinguished” as: marked by eminence and distinction: noted for significant achievement; marked by excellence in quality; marked by conspicuous excellence or eminence; individually distinct. The elements the committee is supposed to look at are: interpretation of the theme or concept; presentation of information including accuracy, clarity, and organization; development of a plot; delineation of characters; delineation of setting; appropriateness of style. These criteria are not going to be relevant to every genre, but if it applies to the genre, it's supposed to be distinguished.

Q: What are the REAL criteria?

A: I would add innovativeness, exoticness, seriousness of message, potential appeal to boys. We'll get to that later.

Q: What is NOT supposed to be considered?

A: How good an author's other books are; “didactic intent”; popularity. This does not attempt to be any kind of kids' choice award.

Q: What's your personal opinion of what a Newbery book should be?

A: The writing should be terrific. I don't like books where the author's voice breaks into the character's. I like the books to feel really authentic, like I totally believe that these are the thoughts and observations of the characters. Any message should be worked into the story so thoroughly that you don't realize you're being preached at—you don't realize it until later, or you feel like you're learning along with the characters. No effort should be made to wring sympathy from the reader. I don't think Newbery books need to appeal to everyone, but their appeal should not be too narrow. If I have a problem with something in the book—whether it's in the writing or the content—I make no excuses for “but it's written for kids, and kids would never notice that”--excellence should be honored. They should be enjoyable to read. And preferably, they should be at least a little bit funny.

Done

Why did I think there would be fireworks, or something like what happens when you win at computer solitaire, when I finished all the Newberys?...

No fireworks, but maybe I will dance a jig.

Reports to come tomorrow.

Newbery Grumble

I do not WANT to read Smoky, the Cowhorse. I think I have ten Newbery books left, and I was totally going to finish by the end of summer next week, but now there's no way. It's not all Smoky's fault--it took me way longer to read Tales From Silver Lands and Dobry than it should have, just in the last few weeks--and there have been times during the summer when I took a week or so off.

But Smoky, the Cowhorse is written in DIALECT. It's by an uneducated rancher who took up writing after an injury. It's full of double negatives and spelling mistakes. It's not just dialect in the dialogue, like (if I remember correctly) Huckleberry Finn. No, the whole thing is in dialect.

Beverly Cleary has fond memories of one of her teachers reading this aloud, so I am trying to hear the voice of Beverly Cleary's teacher in my head as I read it. Pretending it's being read aloud makes it slightly more tolerable. Actually, if this was a very short book, it would even be interesting. But it's LONG.

I should be able to finish (with all the books, not just this one) by the end of September, though. Then there will be a REPORT, with STATISTICS. And I have several non-Newbery books in my stack from the library, just waiting to be read, including the sequel to Roller Skates and Hungry Planet, both of which I'm just longing to get my hands on.

Don't you love hearing me complain about things no one's making me do besides myself?

It's pumpkin! Ma made it of green pumpkin!

In my third year of trying, I finally managed to procure a green pumpkin to make green pumpkin pie with.

For those who need background: in The Long Winter, the Ingalls family is surprised by an early freeze, and most of their garden is ruined before much was harvested. But they save what they can--the potatoes are fine, some of the tomatoes are ripe, and Ma makes pickles out of the green ones. And there's a bushel of beans. (They think they have enough food to last through the winter, but they DON'T, and when you reread this you know, and it is all scary foreshadowing.)

A few of the pumpkins are ripe, but most are green. Ma's wheels must be turning, because as soon as Pa leaves to go hunting...

After he had gone, Ma said "Girls, I've thought of a surprise for Pa."
..."What?" they all asked her.
"Hurry and get the work done," Ma said. "And then, Laura, you go to the corn patch and bring me a green pumpkin. [wonder if Ma realizes that growing squash and corn together is an "Indian idea"?] I'm going to make a pie!"
"A pie! But how..." Mary said, and Laura said "A GREEN pumpkin pie? I never heard of such a thing, Ma."'
"Neither did I," said Ma. "But we wouldn't do much if we didn't do things that nobody ever heard of before."'
Laura and Carrie did the dishes properly but in a hurry. Then Laura ran through the cool, misty rain to the corn-patch and lugged back the biggest green pumpkin.


(I used only two pounds of this ten-pound pumpkin.)

"Now what do I do?" [Laura asked].
"You may cut the pumpkin in slices and peel them while I make the piecrust," said Ma. "Then we'll see what we'll see."


(I cut them a bit smaller than that in the end.)

Ma put the crust in the pie pan and covered the bottom with brown sugar and spices. Then she filled the crust with the thin slices of the green pumpkin. She poured half a cup of vinegar over them, put a small piece of butter on top, and laid the top crust over all.
"There," she said, when she had finished crimping the edges.
"I didn't know you could," Carrie breathed, wide-eyed, looking at the pie.
"Well, I don't know yet," Ma said...


(On the advice of the cookbook, since I didn't have any homemade vinegar around, I used hard cider instead--she says this is more similar to what Ma would have had. And I used a third cup, to allow for modern measurements. I couldn't taste any alcohol in the finished pie, and I have an extremely sensitive-to-alcohol palate.)

The pie was baking beautifully. When Ma... opened the oven, the rich smell of baking pie came out. [This was truly an amazing smell; I wish I could have taken a picture of it for all of you. It was richer and somehow more complex than that of either apple or pumpkin pie.] ...Ma turned the pie so that it would brown evenly.
"It's doing nicely," Ma said.
"Oh, won't Pa be surprised!" Carrie cried.
Just before dinner, Ma took the pie from the oven. It was a beautiful pie.


[They hoped to have it for dinner, but Pa doesn't come home, so it has to wait for supper. What a disappointment that must have been. (Mary probably thought it built character.)]

Laura set down the pie.
For an instant Pa did not see it. Then he said "Pie!"
His surprise was even greater than they had expected. Grace and Carrie and even Laura laughed out loud.
"Caroline, however did you manage to make a pie? What kind of pie is it?"
"Taste it and see!" said Ma. She cut a piece and put it on his plate.
Pa cut off the point with his fork and put it in his mouth. "Apple pie! Where in the world did you get apples?"
Carrie could keep still no longer. "It's pumpkin! Ma made it of green pumpkin!"
Pa took another small bite and tasted it carefully. "I'd never have guessed it," he said. "Ma always could beat the nation cooking."...


They ate slowly, taking small bites of that sweet spiciness to make it last as long as it could.
That was such a happy supper that Laura wanted it never to end.

The pie was tasty. I wouldn't say that it was as good as apple pie, but of course apples have never been scarce for me; and also, I was using an ordinary Halloween pumpkin, which I got for free from the patch because it would have been too scarred to sell. If I had used a pie pumpkin, I'm guessing it would have been more flavorful. The pumpkin pieces were a little bland and watery--they reminded me of the chayote squash I often had in soups in Guatemala. I was pretty skeptical about the cup of brown sugar the cookbook directed me to put in the bottom of the crust. It filled up about half the pan, and I sort of doubt that Ma would have been able to put that much sugar in. The flavor was good, but I think it would have been fine with less sugar. And as you can see, it was QUITE liquidy after being cut. I think that was probably from the pumpkin, and a tablespoon or two of flour might have improved that. I bet the extra liquid would be good on vanilla ice cream, though I think if you ate a scoop along with your pie, the ice cream would overwhelm its delicate flavors.

I discovered that the pie was even better the next day, so the Ingallses were probably better off having to wait to eat it at supper, anyway.

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.)

Vanity, Thy Name is Cake

Vanity cakes are not at all what I expected.

...Ma made vanity cakes. She made them with beaten eggs and white flour. She dropped them into a kettle of sizzling fat. Each one came up bobbing, and floated til it turned itself over, lifting up its honey-brown, puffy bottom. Then it swelled underneath till it was round, and Ma lifted it out with a fork. She put every one of those cakes in the cupboard. They were for the party.

--On the Banks of Plum Creek

So I had a childish idea of what vanity cakes would look like and taste like, and never really let go of it. I'll try to describe what I pictured: about the size of a baseball, but a little flatter, not a perfect sphere... there's a word for that shape, like a double lens? Completely hollow on the inside, truly like a bubble of pastry, with a very thin "skin", honey-brown but translucent--kind of like if you were able to make a bubble of phyllo dough.

I can SEE these vanity cakes sitting on the cupboard shelf (covered with starry paper) in the house on Plum Creek. I can feel them in my mouth: a big bite that turns out to be mostly air, with a few crackly bits in my mouth.

The trouble? They don't exist.


I don't know why I took it into my head to make vanity cakes yesterday, but I did. And I fully expected them to turn into the pastry balloons described above until they were dropped into the sizzling fat.


The funny thing is, they acted EXACTLY as Laura describes, step by step. It was delightful to watch them drop to the bottom, bob up to the top, and flip themselves over. It's just the end product that is not what I expected (and that, of course, is my own fault, not Laura's).


I sprinkled them with powdered sugar, as recommended in The Little House Cookbook, and ate them hot. They were fairly good (especially considering I don't have the best track record with this cookbook, usually because of similar unrealistic expectations), but perhaps a little tougher than they should be--the dough might have been too stiff. They were a lot like cream puffs--deep-fried cream puffs.

Overall, a successful experiment--though I'm not likely to repeat it, unless my nieces are interested in trying them sometime, or something. The Little House Cookbook scared me off deep-fat-frying for many years, and I don't want them to live with the same fear.

Newbery Burnout

I'm pretty well burned out on Newbery books. I knew this might happen, but I hoped it wouldn't happen soon, because theoretically I'd be reading a whole lot of different genres and styles.

This is not altogether true, as I think I've posted before. But it's somewhat true, and I think that's staved off burnout for quite a while.

Part of the problem is that it's been ages since I read a Newbery that I really liked; I think I haven't rated anything four stars on Goodreads since, like, twelve books ago. Even most of the three-star books are just books I... couldn't really find anything wrong with.

I've read 53. 33 to go.

I've read... 35 since beginning this thing, which, look, I'm more than halfway through the books I actually have to read now.

To break things up a little, I've been rereading the California Diaries, an awesome Babysitters Club spinoff. Except I'm about to read the one where Sunny's mother died of cancer. I was supposed to read that to the CITs that year when we were all reading the California Diaries; I'd read the first two Sunny books to them; but I couldn't wait for them and read this book ahead, and then told them I wouldn't be able to read it because just reading it to myself made me cry too hard, so there was no way I'd be able to read it to impressionable 17-year-olds. (I gave it to them and they took turns reading it to each other, until it developed that some of THEM couldn't read it without crying, so the sturdiest girl took over the reading.)