Amazon Listmania

If you're a regular browser or shopper at Amazon.com, you may have noticed many Listmania lists of Sydney Taylor Book Award winners. The chair of the awards committee usually puts up a list soon after the winners are announced... but some eager readers can't wait that long! "Unofficial" Sydney Taylor Listmania's include:

Sydney Taylor Lives On--In Book Awards, 1993-2004, a list by Sherry York, librarian, reviewer and author from Ruidoso, NM

Lists of Award Winners and Notables from 2006, 2007 and 2008 by Jennifer Wardrip, owner and operator of the site TeensReadToo.com

Sydney Taylor Book Awards 2008 a list by Anatidae Ling, a reader, parent and librarian in Pittsburgh, PA

There's also an All-of-a-Kind Family list by J. Nichols of Arvada, CO

Beyond Sydney Taylor-related items, there are a number of Listmania's for Jewish children's literature and even for music:

Jewish Children's CDs with (at least some) songs in English, a list by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom in Minnesota

My Favorite Jewish Children's Books, a list by Rabbi Fred Greene in Atlanta, GA

Great Jewish Children's Books, a list by Rabbi Phyllis Sommer in Highwood, IL

Jewish Children's Books, Grades 5-10, a list by parent Steven R. Eisen

Children's Books and My Jewish Heritage, a list by Mr. Dave K., a librarian in Boston, MA

Time to go shopping!

Reading Guide for "Confessions"

Confessions of a Closet Catholic by Sarah Darer Littman was the Sydney Taylor Book Award gold medalist for Older Readers in 2006. Despite the funky title, it is totally a Jewish book, featuring a girl who explores her spirituality in a way not often seen in kidlit.

I found a great reading guide for Confessions online. It's by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, author of Reaching for the Sun (a Schneider Family Book Award winner), and writer of over 200 reading guides for other books.

The reading guide includes:

• author interview ("The book is hilarious! How did you develop your comedic writing?")


• comprehension questions ("Who is Bubbe? What happens over the course of the novel to Bubbe?")


• discussion questions (" “I decided if my family was going to make fun of me for trying to be Jewish, I might try something else.” (p. 6) What spurs this decision? Would you be tempted to do the same thing? Why or why not?")


• projects related to different curricular areas ("Music: Listen to at least one piece of music from the religion that you’re assigned. What does it celebrate? What types of instruments are used?")

This reading guide is great for teachers, book clubs, or for helping librarians come up with booktalking materials!

The View from Down Under

Bookawardsonline.com is project born out of Kevin Parker's passion for fine literature. It is his personal goal to publicize books that receive recognition from literary peers and that deserve to be widely read. Kevin lives in Australia, and his web site is international in scope, covering news, longlists, shortlists, winners, and reviews from around the English-speaking world.

Kevin wrote a beautiful article about the Sydney Taylor Book Awards in general and about the 2008 winners at www.bookawardsonline.com/sydneytaylor.html. He also included an extremely cool Amazon widget that displays all the books and allows you to click-and-buy.

The Sydney Taylor Book Award is included amidst such wonderful awards as the Kate Greenaway, the Golden Kite, the Cybils, the Americas, and of course those familiar ALA awards. Thanks so much to Kevin for including us!

Multimedia and the Dybbuk

The Entertainer and the Dybbuk, this year's Sydney Taylor gold medalist in the Older Readers' Category, is getting a lot of techno-attention. Have you noticed the widget at the bottom of our right-hand menu bar? HarperCollins offers a "browse inside" widget for this title!

I also found a very funky audio review of this title at Revish, the book review site. Along with the text of a very nice review by RJ McGill (blogger at 3Rs Reading Den), there's a flash player that reads the review aloud. The thing is, I think it's a robot doing the reading. The words have that unconnected, pre-recorded sound to them, and "dybbuk" is incorrectly pronounced as "DIE-bock." (For the correct pronunciation, click here and then click "Hear it.") Even funkier, the robot has an accent that sounds sort of Scottish to me. And when I clicked on the player, which is provided by ReadSpeaker, it took me to a foreign-language page of the service that, in my ignorance, I'm guessing is a Scandinavian language.

I took a look at ReadSpeaker, and found that it is an online service for speech-enabling website content. What an interesting idea!

The Mission of ReadSpeaker is to make the "miracle of the Internet" accessible for dyslexics, people with learning disabilities, low literacy level, people with English as a second language, elderly with impaired vision and others that like to listen as well as read.

I thought that was pretty cool. Almost as cool as possession by a spirit of the dead!

All-of-a-Kind Audiobook

Listen & Live produces a wide variety of audiobooks, including several titles in the All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor. The unabridged cassette or CD recordings are narrated by Suzanne Toren (pictured on the right), who has appeared on Broadway, on TV (including "Law & Order"), and was named Narrator of the Year for the talking books she created for the visually impaired. You can also get All-of-a-Kind Family as an audio download from Top Audiobook Downloads.

You can even play an audio sample to try it out!

A Message from Ann Koffsky

My Cousin Tamar Lives in Israel by Michelle Shapiro Abraham and illustrated by Ann Koffsky was named a 2008 Notable Children's Book of Jewish Content by the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. Illustrator Ann Koffsky (who I interviewed in December 2007 for my podcast, The Book of Life) emailed me to tell me she just got a little bit more famous!

Hi, Heidi!

I've been enjoying following your blog. I feel very connected and clued in on the Jewish book world!

I noticed you've been keeping track of some of the Sydney Taylor articles, so I thought I would add this one to your list.

My local tiny paper did a piece on me that you can see here: www.thejewishstar.com.

All the best!

Ann

Ann D. Koffsky Illustration

www.annkoffsky.com

Blog Carnival of Children's Book Awards

We're on Wizards Wireless! This blog hosted a Carnival of Children's Books this month on the theme of children's book awards, and our post "Chocolate Babies" was included.

What is a blog carnival, you ask? Here's a good definition from the blog Chicken Spaghetti:

A "carnival" takes place at one blog; it is a conglomeration of links (from many different blogs) to posts on a certain theme. Children's books and reading are the focus of the Carnival of Children's Literature. Carnivals generally include one post from each blog who wants to join in.

The carnival at Wizards Wireless had posts about the Cybils (an award whose winners are chosen by kidlit bloggers) and ALA's awards (ye olde Newbery, Caldecott, etc.). Our post was included in the category "Other Awards," which also linked to awards focusing on African-American literature, ethnic diversity, Librarian's Choice lists, the Rebecca Caudill Young Readers Award (selected by kids in Illinois), the Gryphon Award for transitional books, state/regional awards, and a post from the author of To Fly, The Story of the Wright Brothers, about the experience of winning a Boston Globe/Horn Book honor. The Carnival also has links for "Books Worthy of Awards," "Thoughts About Awards" and "Blogger Awards."

Thanks for including us, Wizards Wireless!