The ALA awards and honors certainly get pride of place around here, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the NBCC announced their finalists over the weekend. The winners will be announced on March 6 in NYC. (I don’t think it’s BYOB.)

Autobiography

Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone, Free Press
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, Knopf
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982, Ecco
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso
Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia, Random House

Nonfiction

Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Hill & Wang
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s

Fiction

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men. Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter. Ecco
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, S. & S.

Biography

Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press

Poetry

Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago

Criticism

Acocella, Joan. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon
Alvarez, Julia. Once Upon a Quniceanera, Viking
Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt
Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus
Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus

Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing

Sam Anderson — winner

Finalists:
Brooke Allen
Ron Charles
Walter Kirn
Adam Kirsch

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award

Emilie Buchwald, writer, editor, and founding publisher of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis

I don’t have time today to link these to their Booklist reviews, but will get to it if I can.

So, I’m standing at the Booklist booth at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, eavesdropping as our youth books editors discuss the awards that have just been announced. I want to link to all the award winners, but the press releases aren’t all up on the ALA site yet. That’s how fresh this news is.

But the biggest winners are:

Newbery Medal

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! written by Laura Amy Schlitz & illustrated by Robert Byrd (Candlewick)

Caldecott Medal

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, illustrated by Brian Selznick (Scholastic)

Printz Award

The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean (HarperTempest)

Coretta Scott King Award

Elijah of Buxton, by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic)

Odyssey Award (NEW AWARD!)

Jazz (Live Oak)

I’ll be posting more and updating as more links become available. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on the winners–and the non-winners, too (whether you’re standing next to me or not!).

Update: I managed to get these lists updated in Booklist Online before I left Philadelphia yesterday, although I didn’t have time to mention it here. Consider it mentioned. The links below are public; BOL users can access the full reviews of the award-winning titles and also limit Advanced Searches by any combination of awards. (So take your free trial of Booklist Online today!)

Newbery Medal

Newbery Honor

Caldecott Medal

Caldecott Honor

Printz Award

Printz Honor

Sibert Medal

Sibert Honor

Coretta Scott King Award

Coretta Scott King Honor

Update to the Update: Here’s another one.

Alex Awards

Well, I keep meaning to blog and I keep not blogging and now I’m trying to get out the door to go to Philadelphia for ALA’s Midwinter Meeting. I’ll try to post from there but, who knows, maybe I’ll be back next Tuesday making more excuses. My little clipboard of blog-worthy items is bulging–and gathering cyber-dust.

I’ll leave you with just one link–to a Publishers Weekly story (”Romance Blog Suggests Romance Writer’s Plagiarism; Signet Says It’s Fair Use,” by Lynn Andriani) that includes Google Book Search in a now-familiar role. The somewhat unusual element, however, is that the publisher is not disassociating itself from the author.

Veteran romance novelist Cassie Edwards is revered by her fans for her meticulous research when writing books. From Savage Torment to Savage Sunrise, her books (of which there are more than 100, published by Dorchester/Leisure Books, Signet, Harlequin and other houses) have detailed descriptions of Native American religion, weaponry, cuisine and other subjects. But this week, the romance review blog Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books called attention to some striking similarities and, in some cases, verbatim passages, between Edwards’s works and a number of nonfiction books about Native American history and customs. Signet, however, is standing by the author.

If you follow the links, you’ll find, in an Associated Press article (”Romance novelist accused of lifting work,” by Hillel Italie) an interesting scene from the author’s home in Mattoon, Illinois:

NEW YORK - A popular romance novelist alleged to have lifted work from other texts acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.

“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Cassie Edwards told The Associated Press, speaking earlier this week from her home in Mattoon, Ill.

Edwards then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.

As Google Book Search identifies more and more alleged plagiarists, the whole discussion of plagiarism is likely to become even more nuanced than it did in 2007. Or, once the number of accused authors grows large enough, accusations may elicit nothing more than yawns.

Or is that happening already?

Indefatigable American Libraries editor Dan Kraus has just finished another video for AL Focus–with the focus this time on Booklist editors. Every January, editor-in-chief Bill Ott solicits our favorite personal reading for his Back Page column (”Reading for Fun“). And this year, Dan got a few of us to talk about it on camera. I’m sure that, watching the fruit of his labors, Dan is thinking that he may as well quit–whether because he’ll never be able to best this masterpiece or for some other mysterious reason (hey, we tried to be brief), only he knows for sure.

Watch it here.

(Why is the video not embedded? Take it up with WordPress. I keep meaning to and never getting around to it.)

Today also marks the launch of the first Booklist Online newsletter–Booklist Online REaD ALERT. (Get it? Get it?) I’m fried, so to explain it, I’ll just crib the first paragraph:

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Booklist Online REaD ALERT, an e-newsletter featuring quick links to a hand-picked selection of book reviews, features, and special web-only content from Booklist Online. Future issues of REaD ALERT will be sent to you on the same day that the latest issue of Booklist is published online - and before print subscribers receive their copies of the magazine. All of the content in this newsletter will be accessible to the public for at least two weeks, so follow the links and enjoy. 

Did I mention that it’s free? Sign up here.

Busy, busy day here. But the new issue of Booklist is live, and so are Editors’ Choice and Top of the List. Check ‘em out–they’re free!

(Love or loathe our picks? Let me know!)

I’ve been enjoying the posts at Book Group Buzz. Yesterday, Misha Stone’s “When Fiction and Reality Collide” addressed–well, you’re probably one step ahead of me on that one. Says Stone:

As a Fiction Librarian, I often get a little annoyed when patrons distinguish the difference between fiction and non-fiction as "fake" versus "real."

As a fiction reviewer, writer, and made-up person, I, too, get annoyed when I meet someone (usually at a cocktail party where the non-profit and for-profit worlds collide) who informs me that they don’t like to read novels because they like to “learn things.” Nothing wrong with simply preferring nonfiction to fiction, of course, but those who dismiss fiction out-of-hand usually strike me as being people who don’t know what to do with the facts they have. Facts are important, but what good are facts without insight? Fiction plays free with the facts in order to investigate even deeper matters.

This topic must be in the Booklist zeitgeist, as Joyce Saricks’ soon-to-be-published column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read,” confirms. She begins:

A few months ago, I came across a comment that got me thinking: readers read nonfiction to learn something. Though seemingly innocuous, the remark, in context, implied that one doesn’t learn from fiction. I confess it got my dander up: Is nonfiction essentially superior because it offers information, the opportunity to learn something? And is it true that we don’t learn from fiction? 

How does she conclude? I’ll add a link on Monday, when her column goes live, so you can read for yourself.

This is all to say nothing of the real-versus-fake issue facing memoir, about which enough has been said already to last us until 2009.

(Unless I think of something really, really clever. Then I won’t be able to help myself.)

Update: Here’s the link to Joyce Saricks’ latest column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read.”

In the event that she gets tired of merely telling us new things about her old Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling hasn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of actually writing a new one. From Time (”Person of the Year 2007: Runners-Up: J. K. Rowling,” by Nancy Gibbs):

“There have been times since finishing, weak moments,” she says, “when I’ve said, ‘Yeah, all right,’ to the eighth novel.” But she’s convinced she’s doing the right thing to take some time away, do something else. She’s working on two projects now, an adult novel and a “political fairy tale.” “If, and it’s a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding ] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character,” she says. “I feel like I’ve already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let’s give it 10 years and see how we feel then.”

There’s a lot more, including talk about her “religious agenda”–but even though she’s taken some shots from fervent fundamentalists, she’s no Philip Pullman.

Well, I’m back. I shaved off my holiday beard (it grows red and green, natch), tightened my belt, and now I’m raring to go…home, so I can sleep for just a few minutes more. But books never sleep, and neither should I.

In the New York Times (”The Library’s Helpful Sage of the Stacks“), Sam Roberts was written a feel-good profile of David Smith, the New York Public Library’s “Librarian to the Stars.”

Susan Nagel, who has written a book about Marie Antoinette’s daughter that will be published next spring, said: "Every now and then I have an emergency: I can’t read my own writing, I can’t find the proper sourcing, I was hoping that something would come in the mail from France and it hasn’t in time. Somehow David always rescues me. David has had a dream of beginning a writers’ services division of the New York Public Library, but the truth is, he is already that department in one man."

The article starts out by describing Smith as a well-kept secret. Not anymore.