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.

Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver

From the jacket: “Liesl lives in a tiny attic bedroom, locked away by her cruel stepmother. Her only friends are the shadows and the mice — until one night a ghost appears from the darkness. It is Po, who comes from the Other Side. Both Liesl and Po are lonely, but together they are less alone. That same night, an alchemist’s apprentice, Will, bungles an important delivery…. Will’s mistake has tremendous consequences for Liesl and Po, and it draws the three of them together on an extraordinary journey.”

My take: A charmingly well-told tale of a little orphan girl who has been locked in the attic by her evil stepmother. Visited suddenly one night by two ghosts — a child, Po, and its companion cat/dog named Bundle — Liesl exchanges a drawing for Po’s seeking out her recently deceased father on the Other Side. When it (Po is genderless, for such things are unimportant on the Other Side) returns with a message, Liesl must make the decision to escape the safety of the known misery that is her attic room and voyage forth into a dark and dreary world (the sun hasn’t shone for nearly five years) to complete her father’s last wish.

Will, lonely apprentice to the city alchemist, is often sent out on late-night errands by his master. While out, he makes a point to stop outside Liesl’s window to watch her draw, feeling in some way that she might be as lonely as he is. When his pause outside her house one night causes Will to reorganize his errands to the mortician and city’s Lady Premiere, he sets in motion a chain of events that will change all of their lives forever.

This middle grade fantasy novel was a joy to read from start to end. Death is anything but friendless here. I love that Po is gender neutral and that Bundle is species neutral. I love that ghosts are grumpy about the reputation they have in the human world for hauntings, and that Po is quick to learn manners, but then cannot understand when Liesl thoughtlessly abandons them. The language cavorts past your eyes, turning little somersaults just for the pleasure of being used:

“The boy seemed to drag, inch, ooze along like a giant slug.” (52)

or

“[Liesl] repeated the word ineffable clearly, three times in her head, lingering over the gentle slope of the double fs, like the soft peaks of the whipped cream she remembered from her early childhood, and this made her feel slightly better.” (44)

If there is one flaw to the book, and it is a minor one in my opinion, we don’t fully understand (although neither does it) what causes Po to show up in the first place. It just appears all of a sudden and demands to know why Liesl has given up her art.

Highly recommended for everyone. Particularly appropriate for middle grade readers, particularly those who might not be ready for some of the darker regions that fantasy novels aimed a few years older start moving toward. An ideal read for those who will be ready in a few years for The Graveyard Book or The Book Thief.

Pages: 307