If it’s Thursday, it’s time to look back at three beautiful things from the past week:

1. The UConn-Notre Dame women’s basketball game was on tv, which prompted Rudi to see when UConn would be in town to play Georgetown. Turns out it was Wednesday. It was great to see some of the Huskies’ newest talent, including spirited play from first-year student Moriah Jefferson. Georgetown’s Sugar Rodgers, who is being talked about for this year’s WNBA draft, was everywhere on the court, keeping the game far closer than I’d expected. (By that I mean UConn only won by 25 or so points.) If this is the last year the Huskies come to town (due to Georgetown’s imminent departure from the Big East), I’m over the moon that we got to see the game.

2. I hit both the Arlington and D.C. libraries to return (most of) the last of my Cybils books. And I took out books that I picked out and that I wanted to read. The first time since September!

3. Russian Christmas was Monday, which marked the end of the holiday gift-giving season between Rudi and me. To celebrate, he gave me Jasper Fforde’s The Last Dragonslayer, which I’d had to put off because of Cybils reading (and which I plan to devour this weekend), and my favorite tiny notebooks, purple and the perfect size for carrying in back pockets, purses, and knitting bags.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

Happy New Year! I hope you rang out all the negative and welcomed in the positive.

We finished the year strong with our annual movie marathon, concluding 2012 with pizza and potential Oscar contenders and friends (the most important of the three). We came home to tea and cupcakes, and as today has progressed we both have dabbled in a variety of things we hope 2013 will possess.

I, for one, am planning to reconnect with my blog. December marked a period filled with hours and hours AND HOURS of reading young adult fiction and any time that used to be spent on other recreational activities had to be reapportioned in order to finish my obligations. That paid off, however, because the Cybils shortlist came out today. I was lucky enough to write the blurb for Endangered, which was a stellar addition to the field of fiction that is science-themed. (I don’t want you to misunderstand if I say it’s science fiction.) The other shortlisted books in our category (young adult realistic fiction) are equally good, and several of them were among the very best of what I read for the year. I highly recommend you check them out. I’ll be diving into the middle grade fiction and the fantasy lists in the next few weeks.

However, those are not the only things I’ll be reading, as my choices are now my own again. Here are a few of the other things I’m excited to read in 2013:

Ten Books I Resolve Want to Read in 2013

1. Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died (the latest Thursday Next installment)
2. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (I know I still have (my signed, hardcover copy of) The Lacuna to read, but I may just skip ahead and come back, as her newest appeals more right now.)
3. Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
4. Bill Bryson’s At Home
5. William Kuhn’s Mrs Queen Takes the Train
6. Jacqueline Winspear’s Messenger of Truth (the 4th Maisie Dobbs novel)
7. Laurie King’s A Monstrous Regiment of Women (the 2nd Mary Russell book)
8. Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey
9. William Alexander’s Goblin Secrets
10. The Odyssey (this is the year!)

(Hat tip to raidergirl3 for sharing today’s topic and to Broke and Bookish for hosting.)

I will share some summaries of and thoughts about my Cybils reading (and the 2012 reading that preceded it way back when), as well as my own personal top ten list, in the days to come. Please do stop back.

Merry Christmas! I am a day late with my entry for this year’s Virtual Advent Tour. I offer my sincere apologies to hosts Marg and Kailana and to readers who came looking yesterday and found the blog closed and boarded up tight. I had good intentions, but you know how far that gets you.

For this year’s entry, I thought I’d offer you a quick review of one of the nominees in the realistic young adult fiction category for the Cybils Awards, which I’m helping to judge. The book takes place during the weeks surrounding Christmas:

Winter Town by Stephen Emond

From the jacket: “Every winter, straitlaced, Ivy League-bound Evan looks forward to a visit from Lucy, his childhood best friend who moved away after her parents’ divorce. But when Lucy arrives this year, she’s changed. The former ‘girl next door’ now has choppy black hair, a nose stud, and an scowl. But Evan knows that somewhere beneath the Goth exterior, Old Lucy still exists, and he’s determined to find her … even if it means pissing her off.”

My take: Every Christmas, Evan Owens’ predictable life brightens. That’s because his best friend, Lucy Brown, who moved away a few years back when her parents divorced, returns to town to spend the holidays with her dad. It used to be that he was just excited to see her because they were such good friends, co-authoring a comic together and sharing long, meandering walks. But this year, the Christmas of his senior year, Evan is eager to see Lucy even more than usual, thinking that in the past year he may have come to have other, more romantic feelings about his childhood chum.

So it’s a little bit of a shock when the Lucy who comes to the door has pierced her nose, chopped off her hair and dyed it an ugly shade of black, and seems to be sporting an equally unpleasant attitude toward life and — a bit — toward him. He sees glimpses of his old friend beneath the surface, but she’s definitely buried behind this new girl, who seems to be trouble with a capital T.

Lucy is equally frustrated with Evan, who seems content to coast passively toward the exact life his parents are leading, following his father’s map toward a successful adulthood. Lucy questions whether such a safe life is really worth living and how it is that Evan can be so talented at art without seeming to display any passion for it. Beset by problems back home, she had hoped to find the easy comfort that being in the presence of her best friend had always brought her, but this year Evan just doesn’t seem to be enough to tame the turbulence in her head.

Littered with indie references to music and movies, this contemporary novel is told in a narrative format, first from Evan’s perspective, then from Lucy’s. Interspersed between and within chapters are drawings — Evan’s random doodles, Christmassy scenes around town, and episodes of the fantasy comic, Aelysthia, they share. It’s not a graphic novel, but a novel with graphic elements, and the two work well together to set the scene and move the plot forward.

Hurtling at breakneck speed toward adulthood, these two childhood friends might be just what each other needs. But will they discover that the happiness is only possible inside a fantasy realm? Or can they share a journey together off the page as well?

Solidly enjoyable.

Pages: 331

Make sure you stop by yesterday’s prompt blogger, Random Magic Tour — The Coven, for some seasonal tunes.

It was asked last month what the process is for the Cybils, and I never got around to answering. I thought I’d share a brief outline now:

We started out in early October with 191 nominated titles in our young adult fiction (non-fantasy or science fiction) category, which we each went through and marked whether we’d read any of them already. I had read two. Most (everyone else?) had read more.

Each book gets at least two readers from our seven-judge panel. More are allowed, but not mandatory, but you quickly learn to prioritize your reading. We then share amongst ourselves our top reads based on quality and appeal to the intended teen audience. Everyone tries to read all these titles.

You’ve already seen my top 15 and my top 10. (Apparently I was unknowingly breaking rules by sharing these with you. I have made these posts invisible for the time being and may make them public again after our committee’s work is done if it doesn’t seem like it will be problematic.) As I finish reading a new book, I compare it to what I’ve already read and rated. In order to add a new novel to the list, I’ll have to eliminate one from it. And later in the month, I’ll have to narrow down everything I’ve read to a top five. Then we fight amongst ourselves (during the week of Christmas!) to get our list of 5-35 books (it’d only be 35 if no one agreed on any of the titles) down to the ultimate 5-7 titles we hand off to the short list committee, who’ll pick the ultimate winner.

I’m over the 40-book threshold, but with three weeks to go am well below where everyone else is. As such, I’ll be digging in to try to push through with a bunch of books this week.

Cybils nominees on this week’s agenda:

• The List (read yesterday)
• Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone (finishing tonight)
• Code Name Verity (tomorrow’s book, since it’s due back at the library on Thursday

Finish these books, all of which are in progress:

• Fingerprints of You
• The Children and the Wolves
• King Biscuit
• Dodger
• Nothing Special
• Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
• The Wicked and the Just

Begin these books:

• Why We Broke Up
• Shadow on the Mountain
• Graffiti Moon
• Endangered

As always, this list is subject to whim and may change without warning.

We had our second Cybils deadline this weekend, asking us to list our top ten favorite books thus far. (You can see my first deadline results here.) I got mine down to a dozen without a huge amount of pain but then got stuck for a while, mulling which final books to cull over others, trying to explain to Rudi why I was cutting books I’d enjoyed quite a bit for one reason or another. It was hard, and I expect it to get even more challenging in short order.

My top ten were, in no particular order:

• The Storyteller, a haunting, harrowing, modern twist on a fairy tale set in contemporary (or maybe recent) Germany focusing on a young woman who, after pursuing a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, suddenly finds herself caught up in a variety of dramas, one of which may threaten her very safety
• Crazy, an epistolary, post-summer-love exchange between two teens, where one of them slowly goes off the rails
• Boy21, in which a teenage basketball star from a poverty-stricken town must come to terms with what is most important to him and to those around him
• The Fault in Our Stars, a contemporary romance between two kids who have cancer
• Come August, Come Freedom: The Bellows, The Gallows, and The Black General Gabriel, historical fiction of a Virginia slave who led an unsuccessful rebellion for freedom
• How to Save a Life, a contemporary coming-of-age novel about two teen girls whose lives intersect when one of them agrees to give up her impending baby to the other’s mother for adoption
• Pinned, the coming-of-age tale of two classmates, both of whom are struggling to overcome a disability
• Gone, Gone, Gone, a teen romance set in the D.C. suburbs in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the sniper attacks
• DJ Rising, in which a teenage boy struggling to make ends meet at home gets the chance of a lifetime to follow his dream
• The Boy on Cinnamon Street, a contemporary romance involving a girl who’s suffering from PTSD

I would say that all of the books on the list at this point would merit at least 3.5 stars out of 5 and at least one would earn 4.5 stars. Of the group, I’d say my favorites so far have been Pinned, How to Save a Life (my review), The Boy on Cinnamon Street, and The Storyteller.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a roundup of what’s next in my Cybils reading and how the rest of my participation in the panel will pan out (to my understanding thus far). And I should have some more reviews for you beginning later in the week.

The Cybils nominees I’m hoping to finish by Saturday:

It’s not quite as bad as it seems. I’ve started seven of them and one is an audio file on our laptop, which, now that I’m home, I can plug into speakers and listen to while cleaning.

And, obviously, whim — and library due dates — will be allowed to play a role as needed.