2013 Best Books for Teens submissions
After nearly four months of reading, I’ve made my way through all the books submitted for the 2013 Best Books for Teens Awards from the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. There were close to 30 entries and all of them fine young adult novels. Now that the reading is done, the hard part begins. It’s decision time.
And when you get a group of book lovers, teachers and librarians together to pick a winner, things can get messy.
Many Judges, Many Winners
Okay, maybe not messy, but the discussions can definitely get lively. Last year, I had the honour of choosing the Best Books for Kids, for middle grade novels. It was the same process as this time around.
We were shipped a selection of books submitted to the CCBC by publishers. We had a few months to read the books. Then, we met at the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s offices to pick a selection of the best, including a few that we thought stood out and were given “Starred Selection” status. This year, because of schedules, we’re meeting virtually via Google Hangouts.
I’m really excited for this meeting because there are definitely a couple of titles that I am ready to champion to get on the list. While I can’t tell you which ones those are, I can say that it’s a lot of fun to sit down with fellow book fans and talk about the merits of particular titles. I also like that there isn’t a single “winner” for this award. Too often, a single prize contest shines all the light on one book while leaving other, just a worthy titles, languishing in the “Runner Up” category when those books are equally deserving winners themselves.
Better Judges for Best Books?
As a teacher as well as a writer, I’m always wondering how we can include young people into these book awards programs. The CCBC does an amazing job recognizing the achievements of Canadian children’s books through its many generous awards. However, I really like the way the OLA’s Tree Awards puts kids in the centre of the award-giving by making them the judges who pick the winners. For me, this really hits the mark as an inclusive and equitable way to give kids a voice in a medium that is specifically for them. That said, it would be also great to have the kids as part of the selection process to choose the Tree Nominees.
Update: Since posting this, the amazing Rachel Seigel, who organizes the CCBC Best Book judging (and runs Reading Timbits, a great book blog AND is the K-12 buyer at wholesaler S&B Books here in Canada) shared with me a great post she wrote over at Publishing Crawl, about putting kids in charge of choosing the book winners.
This part really jumped out at me:
One of my favourite aspects of awards such as these is that the lists are not specifically created with curriculum in mind, but to represent a variety of cultures, genres and authors, and with kids’ reading interests in mind. The winners reflect not the choices that adults would make, but the books that the kids have chosen, and they’re not necessarily the most popular or commercial books. Whether they realize it or not, kids are learning to think critically about what they are reading, improving their reading skills, and most importantly, enjoying reading- and what could be better than that?
I couldn’t agree more and it’s something that all teachers and teacher-librarians hope their students take away from their time reading books (and other texts) in school.
Since starting to judge the Best Books Awards, I’ve been thinking about ways that a Best Books Award, chosen by kids could be run in my school. Perhaps there already is something like this and I missed something in my exhaustive my 5 minute duckduckgo search on the subject. I guess the “Battle of the Books” competitions is close to what I’m thinking about. However, these tend to focus on picking a single “winner” as opposed to a recommended list of winning titles. Somewhere in there is a happy medium. I think I’ll add that to my list of “Projects to Try Out in My School Library” in the coming months.
What about you? Have you run a Best Books style program in your class or library? I would love to hear how it worked or other suggestions you have to get kids involved in the book recommendation process.
Leave a comment below and share your wisdom!
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Thanks!
Liam
Hi Liam,
I’m going to have to grab Rachel’s blog post for use in my research paper on the impact of student choice in reading programs. I used to be on the Silver Birch selection committee and it was a very heated conference call at times! I agree with you and Rachel that the winners aren’t always the most-finely crafted works of literature, but ones that readers like. I remember when Edo von Belkom’s book “Wolf Pack” won the prize – some adults rolled their eyes at the kid horror title but the kids loved it. As for getting kids on the nomination committees, I say, why not? The only challenge will be ensuring the youth committee members can read all the potential books.
I have read a Best Books type of program with a school in Winnipeg (Acadia Jr. H.S.) via Skype. Each student would have a minute to address the group to promote a book they’ve read (in our case, it was the Ontario Red Maple program and the Manitoba Young Readers Choice program) and the students ranked on a wiki which book they were most intrigued to read.
Hey Diana – I’m glad Rachel’s post will be useful for your research. It’s an important perspective. I think many adults, parents and educators have to come to terms with the fact that not all kids are going to go for the more ‘literary’ books. They’d rather have the lighter, faster reads. If you look at the best sellers on Amazon, it’s clear adult readers are no different.
I know many of my students found some last year’s Silver Birch books “too boring” and bailed halfway through. I didn’t blame them. All fine books, but not something the kids I teach are going to go for – even the keen readers in the Silver Birch clubs.