Tales from a Loud Librarian

My book group, Bookmarked, helped to nominate the books that were on the list for Teen's Top Ten. Teens around the country just finished selecting their ten favorites from the 25 nominated titles. What a great list it is! I can't wait to share the list with my students. I know that they will be thrilled too.  Watch this video from YALSA announcing the titles or see the list below. Teen's Top Ten Eleanor & Park  by Rainbow Rowell  ( Macmillan/St. Martin's Griffin) Splintered  by A.G. Howard  ( ABRAMS/Amulet Books) The Rithmatist  by Brandon Sanderson (Tor Teen) The 5th Wave  by Rick Yancey (Penguin/Putnam Juvenile)  Monument 14: Sky on Fire  by Emmy Laybourne (Macmillan/Feiwel & Friends) Earth Girl  by Janet Edwards  ( Prometheus Books /Pyr) The Testing  by Joelle Charbonneau, Joelle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Steelheart  by Brandon Sanderson (Random House/Delacorte Press) Siege and Storm ...

Bookmarked , the high school book group, has been helping to nominate the books for Teen's Top Ten since 2010. The 2014 list of nominated books was announced two weeks ago. There are twenty-five books on the list, and teens around the country can begin voting August 15th to help select the ten winners. Open here for a PDF with an annotated bibliography of the nominated titles .  Watch a video of the titles here: 

Vote here! The high school book group at PFTSTA, Bookmarked, has been reading and nominating books for YALSA's Teen's Top Ten program since 2010 . Voting has opened for the 2013 list. You can share the link with your teens, and they may vote for up to three of their favorite books. Voting runs now through September 15th. Winners will be announced during Teen READ Week in October. Vote right here . Visit Youtube here to watch a video with all the nominated titles.

The first day of Teen READ Week is always exciting because TRW has started and also because the top ten  teen-selected books are announced. This is one of the few book lists that is selected solely by kids. I made a sign that I am going to hang up in my library announcing the ten titles that won. Feel free to click the link below and download my sign from Scribd and hang in your library. 2012 Teens Top Ten Winners Sign

Lauren Myracle's books are very popular in my school library. When Bookmarked received an Advanced Reader's Copy (ARC) of Shine last year, I knew that I wanted to read it. We get so many boxes of ARCs that I can't begin to read even half of them. I try to save time to read a few authors that I love. Shine is a very different kind of book for Ms. Myracle. It is definitely for the mature teen as it deals with a hate crime and homophobia. Cat, the main character, has some secrets of her own, but she is loyal to a fault. She believes that she must solve the mystery of who attacked her former best friend, Patrick, because the sheriff wasn't going to do it. There is lots of intrigue in this story as Cat's friends and family try to hide what they know. Cat soon realizes that everyone has faults, but she plans to keep at it until she finds some answers. This story is riveting and many of my teens thought so too.  One of my students wrote a review of the boo...

Okay, I may have already neglected to fulfill my goal to post daily about the nominated books for Teen's Top Ten. However, since I have posted everyday, I am not going to chastise myself. I am going to soldier on and post as often as I can about one of the nominated books. Today, I want to spread the news about Divergent by Veronica Roth. There were a slew of really great dystopian novels published last year. This was one of my favorites. I even created a digital book talk in my Get Reading series about this title. You can find out all about this wonderful book right here:   Get Reading 10 from Elizabeth Kahn on Vimeo . I was also a big fan of Delirium by Lauren Oliver that I discuss on this episode of Get Reading. Too bad that title didn't make it into the list of nominated books. When the second title in Roth's trilogy was published this past spring, I was so excited to purchase it. I started Insurgent . I really wanted to like Insurgent , but I did...

On August 15, the voting poll opened for the annual Teen's Top Ten (TTT). There are 25 nominated books . This book list is created by teens, and the teens have the final vote on which books are their top ten favorites of the year. The teens have one month to cast their votes. They can select their three fav titles from the list of 25. Only teens, 12-18 years of age, can vote. There are many other lists that librarians can help select.  I like to have the books front and center so the kids will remember to read and vote. I have some cards that you can copy and put in each book to help get the word out about TTT.  I did not create these cards. I found them online last year. I edited them to fit on the page and updated the URL and QR code to reflect the voting poll for 2012. I copied on cardstock and when cut the cards are about the size of a business card.  I hope that you can use these cards to advertise the books in your library.  Vote for me car...

  I hope that I am not going to give myself an impossible goal, but I would like to blog every day about one of the books nominated for YALSA's Teen's Top Ten (TTT). I have read many of the titles but not all. I figure that I can find something interesting to say about all of them because I know that for every title I can find at least one student who has read it.  I am going to start with Hourglass by Myra McEntire . I started this book the other day, but I haven't finished it yet. Though I got a good chunk of it read this afternoon as I waited in the room for the doctor to arrive.  Anyway, Myra McEntire is going to be our first author visit of the year. She will visit PFTSTA on September 17th. Over the last three years we have had many author visits both face to face and virtually on Skype. Almost every visit has been a big hit--though I will never schedule a visit on the last day of school again. I did that twice, and I think that I have finally learned ...

Tomorrow the polls open for the Teen's Top Ten (TTT) list sponsored by YALSA. The 25 nominated titles were selected by teens in 16 book groups across the country . Bookmarked, the high school book group at PFTSTA, is one of the book groups that has nominated books for TTT. The students and I have had a great time reading all the newly published and pre-pub books that the publishers have sent to us. This group of 25 is one of the best that I have seen in recent years.  I don't have a lot of space in my library. The library is about 650 square feet with 6500 print volumes on the shelves. That means that I have little room for display. If I want my students reading and voting for TTT, then I need to put the books in a prominent position in the library. Above is the display that I created. I have printed out the description of the books from the YALSA site so the kids can make their choices of what to read. Tomorrow when the URL link to vote goes live, I will post the link...

A few months ago I watched a video from Scholastic promoting some of their new young adult titles for spring. Since the students in Bookmarked , the high school book group, are reading advanced reading copies (ARCs) for Teen's Top Ten , I thought that they would enjoy the video too because we had received many of the titles at school. One of the books that we received was The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves  edited by Sarah Moon and released May 1, 2012. I loved the premise of this work, and the idea that well respected published writers could offer some insights to young people today who are concerned or questioning their lives as LGBT people. These kids need all the love and support that they can get and putting good books on this topic on the shelves of our libraries is important.  Here is a description of this wonderful work of non-fiction:  In this anthology, sixty-four award-winning authors and illustrators such as Micha...

Check out author, Lauren Oliver's post on Good Reads . She has a fun give-a-way for Valentine's Day. Also, you can now find Bookmarked, the library book group, on Good Reads . The group is private, but you can see what we are reading and reviewing. You can also read any discussion posts. We hope to use Good Reads to keep up with all the books that we receive for YALSA's Teen's Top Ten YA Galley Program . Since we get the books before they are published, you can read the students' reviews to help you decide if you want to purchase a book or look for it in your library. .

Open here to watch the video to find out which 10 books were selected as the teen's favorites for 2011.