Newbery - 12:48PM, 2009/01/26
It’s that time of the year again — the ALA announced their Newbery award winner today, along with a host of other prizes and honors. For the first time in a while the book is one which has probably already sold well, from an author people have heard of: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman.
Does this signal a change on the part of the committee to start selecting books that aren’t pretentious literary crap, as they so often do? Probably not. If you look through the list of books, every 5 or 6 years there’ll be one that kids might actually pick up and read on their own. So it doesn’t become a trend until they’ve picked several of these sorts of books in a row.