You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2015.

Recently at work, our BookMatch committee was asked, “What was your favorite book of 2015?” I loved being asked this question in a work setting, as it motivated me to actually decide on some favorites (I quickly decided there had to be more than one!) Below you will find my list of faves, out of books that were published in 2015. What are yours? Click here to post it to a google form. which I will then report out in a blog post later this week! My only request is that they be books that were published in 2015.

Here are some of my favorite reads, in four different categories:

Picture books:

The Bus Is For Us by Michael Rosen

Bright Sky, Starry City by Uma Krishnaswami

Children’s Fiction:

Blackbird Fly by Erin Entrada Kelly

The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead

Young Adult:

Symphony for the City of the Dead by M. T. Anderson

Adults:

Why not me? by Mindy Kaling

Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai

collage

 

 

Recently, I had the honor of being asked for my thoughts on the We Need Diverse Books campaign and on related topics. The askers, Estelle and Magan, from the Rather Be Reading blog, were conducting an ongoing series of posts devoted to diversity, called Dive into Diversity, and as part of this, they decided to interview several librarians for their ideas and opinions about WNDB. I thank them for their astute questions which encouraged me to delve more closely into my thoughts about the need for books about diverse characters, especially for those written by authors who represent that same diversity. Below I have copied my portion of Estelle’s post as featured in their blog:

SAY HI TO A FEW LIBRARIANS | DIVE INTO DIVERSITY

Bookish has been a librarian for 8 years. She has previously worked in college admissions and as a middle school teacher.@bookish & her blog.

On what’s changed since the WNDB campaign became “mainstream”: When I first got into librarianship, if I brought up the need for diversity in YA or kidlit, I’d get uncomfortable silences on listservs and in conversations. Only a few brave souls would answer. There was a deafening silence from the rest. Now that the WNDB campaign is more “mainstream,” many more people are willing to at least listen to the need for diversity.

Diversity in books doesn't just mean slapping a POC into a book. Diversity also means fostering books BY writers of color FOR readers of color. That part of the message is at times missed. It is not enough to give lip service to the idea of diversity. It is important to actually think about why this need is there, and to fulfill the spirit of the need.

(Diverse) books and authors you’ve been recommendingGrace Lin, Zetta Elliott, Jacqueline Woodson, Neesha Meminger, Yuyi Morales, Uma Krishnaswami, Mitali Perkins, Janine Macbeth, Misako Rocks, books published by Lee & Low press, Corduroy, the list goes on and on and on!

Patrons and their quest for change: Young parents of color…are keenly aware that they didn’t get to see themselves accurately and genuinely reflected in books as they were growing up, but that they want their kids to have this important connection to literature, in a visceral way. This generation of parents of color are already clamoring for books that represent their lives, their realities, so that they can share these with their children.

On what needs to happen next: …this push for diversity is mistaken as needing to be fulfilled by getting already well-known mainstream white writers to write diverse characters into their books. Don’t get me wrong; this trend is definitely a step in the right direction, for the most part. But what would be WAY more heartening is to see publishers taking chances on a LARGE number of first-time writers of color, to allow the diverse stories to be told through diverse authorial voices.

Note: The original blog post in which the above appears is called Say Hi To a Few Librarians: Dive into Diversity. I also encourage you to check out the rest of their Dive into Diversity challenge, which went from January through December of 2015, and which provides lots of great food for thought as we close out 2015. I also want to give a shout out to Emma at Miss Print, for introducing me via the interwebs to Estelle! :)

This evening, a father came by the children’s desk, just to reminisce and to thank the library. He indicated a group of children and said, “It makes me so happy to see children at the library, using the library.” Needless to say, this made me happy. And so it goes.

December 2015
M T W T F S S
« Nov   Jan »
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
https://bookishdesi.wordpress.com/2015/12/
bookishdesi.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-51
70640
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GF7HRDN32XHJVYL2RJ5SLVJRZCUF6DJQ
<urn:uuid:ad990e1b-9735-48c0-8305-d24a6b707d09>
2019-12-16T06:14:00Z
192.0.78.12
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:OSZ6I2OGBS6LLUQO2ERHKAKIKZOZ2GX3
<urn:uuid:c80eea8a-0524-44f5-8644-fc3680ccd5f3>
https://bookishdesi.wordpress.com/2015/12/
response
<urn:uuid:e7996741-50f2-4c22-8d96-195d2fbb8214>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-51
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-157.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/