When I get back home this week, I’m going to work on getting some book reviews written. Help me to decide where to start by telling me which titles interest you the most.

Children’s Books

• Winnie-the-Pooh
• Tuck Everlasting
• Dealing with Dragons
• The View from Saturday
• The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963
• The Egypt Game

Young Adult Books

• The Wednesday Wars
• 37 Things I Love (In No Particular Order)
• Chopsticks
• Ditched: A Love Story
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
• The Future of Us
• Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip
• The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

Adult Books

• The Night Circus
• The Art of Fielding
• The Spellman Files
• The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
• Arcadia
• Pardonable Lies
• The Age of Miracles
• Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
• The Borrower

My life is pretty much work-read-sleep all the time right now, as I fight to keep our living room visible under my piles of Cybils nominees. The good thing is that nothing in the Burrow is going to go flying away should a strong breeze kick up in the apartment anytime soon.

However, we’re not going dark here. I might not be able to stay on top of vacation photo processing and sharing at the moment, but we can talk books. I mean, I’m going to talk books anyway, so you might as well get a bit of a say in it, right?

So, let’s run a couple polls. Today, I’m going to ask you which of the nominees currently littering my coffee table (and the ones I have to pick up at the library tomorrow) I should take with me to Louisiana when I head south on vacation later this week.*

But it’s no fun for you if you have to read summaries of all the books, so let’s forgo that. Instead, let’s break the books down and poll you based on each book’s Very Special Episode issue:

• cancer
• Nazis**
• hmmm… this one is hard to tell from the book jacket. let’s guess it’s dying family member
• murder
• royal scandal
• civil war (European)
• teen death (possibly caused by the protagonist)
• drug dealing and abusive parents
• poverty and disability
• orphans and homosexuality
• homosexuality and snipers
• hmmm… how’d this one get in the running. the worst we get from the jacket is “near tragedy.” ah, wait, now i remember: dyslexia.
• drug-addicted parent
• physical scarring
• hmmm… this one also seems kinda upbeat. let’s say it’s about broken families.
• amnesia
• cancer (again)

To give you some perspective, recent reads have included such Afterschool Special topics as child abduction, Alzheimer’s, homosexuality, and madness.

Tell me in the comments what you’d recommend. Choose well (for me)!

**Actually, don’t pick this one because it was due back to the library today and has holds on it, so I can’t renew it right now.

This week is Banned Book Week.

According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, these were the 100 most frequently banned or challenged books between 2000 and 2009:

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky (more…)

Calling all readers of kiddie and young adult books: The Cybils need your help!

The Cybils are the Children and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards and are the annual prizes to the best in youth literature, as determined by the book blogging community.

We accept nominations in 13 categories:

• Book Apps
• Easy Readers/Short Chapter Books
• Fantasy & Science Fiction: Elementary/Middle Grade & Young Adult
• Fiction Picture Books
• Graphic Novels: Elementary/Middle Grade & Young Adult
• Middle Grade Fiction
• Non-Fiction Picture Books
• Non-Fiction: Middle Grade & Young Adult
• Poetry
• Young Adult Fiction

Which is where you come in. We need nominations. We’re looking for what you consider to be among the best books you’ve read or apps you’ve used in the last year. To be considered, a book/app has to have been published in the U.S. between Oct. 16, 2011, and Oct. 15, 2012. (Online booksellers and sites like Goodreads usually list publication dates, if you’re unsure about whether a title qualifies.)

You can only nominate one title per category, but it’s not necessary to second a nomination that’s already been made, which could be helpful if you’re torn between a couple titles in a single category.

Also, you don’t need to have a blog to nominate a book or app. You just need to have liked it.

I, of course, am particularly interested in your recent young adult fiction titles, but I’ll be interested to see what titles get nominated in the other categories, too.

Nominations opened today and run through Oct. 15.

Thanks for your help!

Today’s Booking through Thursday question was pretty easy:

Quick–what are you reading right now? Would you recommend it? What’s it about?

The book in my bag, which gets the most attention, is The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai, which I picked up at the Politics & Prose membership sale a couple of weeks ago. It’s about a children’s librarian and her interactions with a charming 12-year-old boy (whom everyone assumes is gay) being raised by a fundamentalist mother who has a whole list of things she doesn’t want her son reading. It’s custom-made for a leftie book-lover like me.

The book I’m reading at home, because it’s awkward to carry around is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I got a late start on the Book Riot readalong, but it’s been in my to-be-read pile for a while (thanks again, Jenn!), so I am keeping on keeping on. Also, the first few chapters kind of read like an episode of Inspector Lewis, except told by the entitled college kids who murder one of their own. (I suppose it’s too much to hope for a dishy police sergeant to appear somewhere in its pages…) It’s dense, but I’m liking it so far.

How about you? What are you reading right now?

On Monday, the judges were announced, and I can now tell you that I’ve been selected to be one! I can’t begin to explain how excited I am about this. But let’s say it’s like Christmas morning when you’re standing in front of all your wrapped presents.

I am serving on the young adult fiction panel* (my first choice!), which includes all fiction aimed at older teens except for fantasy and science fiction. That has its own panel.

I’ll be reading the first round nominees (the longlist, if you will), which come from the public starting Oct. 1. (Don’t worry. I’ll remind you.) The chair estimates we’ll each have to tackle 75 books in the next three months, so I’m hoping no one was looking forward to homemade Christmas presents this year. By the end, we’ll have winnowed 200ish books down to a short list (countable on two hands), which we’ll exhaustedly hand off to the second round panel.

I’m particularly excited because the group of people I am working with seem really nice and knowledgeable, and their blogs offer a wide variety of book reviews to peruse. I was aware of several of them, but most are new to me.

These are the folks I’ll be reading with directly:

And these are the people who determine the ultimate winner:

Without a doubt you will hear more about the Cybils in the weeks to come. I can’t wait!

*I know the Cybils site uses my real name, but let’s not go spreading it around, okay? Sprite I have been, and Sprite I remain.