In addition to the numerous fine things that I learned at this year’s UELMA conference, I had the great luck of receiving copies of the shortlists of the 2011 Beehive Book Award Nominees. These lists were a key acquisition because all of the elementary librarians in my school district need to hurry and order these books with what’s left of their budgets before this year’s budgets are frozen, BUT WE HAVEN’T KNOWN WHICH BOOKS TO BUY.  It was therefore imperative that I obtain this information.  I succeeded, with one exception: I only went to the elementary session of CLAU’s presentation, so I did not get my hands on a copy of the young adult fiction list.

In the hopes of rectifying this oversight, I checked the CLAU web site, the UELMA web site, and the UELMA conference wiki, but none of these sites are yet endowed with such a list.  It turns out that the people of the Children’s Literature Association of Utah, although great at picking out their nominees and booktalking them at the conference, aren’t that quick at updating their web site.  Well, that’s okay, neither am I.  Getting desperate, I then consulted my friends Google, Bing, and Twitter, in the hopes that some insider or fanatic had posted this info on their blog or tweeted about it, but the only semi-relevant hits these engines gave me was someone’s beehive-2011-long-list shelf on Goodreads, and one guy’s tweet from UELMA.  It turns out that Utah’s school librarians aren’t exactly Twitter fanatics.  A true librarian, unlike the wanna-be librarian that I am, may point out that it is less effective to choose these popular search engines when researching information.  However, I stand by my methods, as I have little faith that any database or resource on Pioneer will help with this research problem at this point in time.

It was at that point that I realized something. Because there is apparently nothing out there about these new nominees in the electronic world, if I were to publish the lists here on my blog (purely as an informational/journalistic service, of course), I would possibly become one of the top search results for “2011 beehive nominees,” and also I myself would become that fanatic that I was searching for.  This has proved to be an opportunity I can’t pass up, so, without further ado, here are the 2011 Beehive Book Award Nominees in every category except for young adult fiction. If anyone out there in bloggie land has that young adult list and feels like sharing, holla back in the comments. YA nominees now added! I hope that CLAU doesn’t blacklist me from joining now that I have scooped their own website.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

2011 Beehive Children’s Fiction Award Nominees

• 11 Birthdays by Wendy Mass (Scholastic)
• The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill (Front Street)
• Binky the Space Cat by Ashley Spires (Kids Can Press)
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (Henry Holt)
• Extra Credit by Andrew Clements (Atheneum/Simon & Shuster)
• The Leanin’ Dog by K. A. Nuzum (Joanna Cotler Books)
• Me and the Pumpkin Queen by Marlane Kennedy (Greenwillow)
• Mudville by Kurtis Scaletta (Alfred A. Knopf/Yearling Books)
• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (Little, Brown)
• The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice (Bowen Press/HarperCollins)

2011 Young Adult Book Nominees

• Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen (Viking)
• Brooklyn Nine: a Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gartz (Dial/Puffin)
• The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (Simon & Schuster / Atheneum)
• The Compound by S.A. Bodeen (Feiwel & Friends / Square Fish)
• *The Devil’s Paintbox by Victoria McKernan (Alfred A. Knopf)
• *Eon: Dragoneye Reborn by Alison Goodman (Viking / Firebird)
• Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith (Putnam / Speak)
• Musician’s Daughter by Susanne Dunlap (Bloomsbury)
• My Fair Godmother by Janette Rallison (Walker & Co.)
• Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George (Bloomsbury)
• Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger (HarperTeen)

(* = “mature readers”)

2011 Picture Book Nominees

• The Apple-Pip Princess by Jane Ray (Candlewick Press)
• Birds by Kevin Henkes; illustrated by Laura Dronzek (Greenwillow)
• That Book Woman by Heather Henson; illustrated by David Small (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
• Chicken Cheeks by Michael Ian Black; illustrated by Kevin Hawkes (Simon & Schuster)
• The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen (Candlewick Press)
• Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal; illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld (Chronicle Books)
• Higher! Higher! by Leslie Patricelli (Candlewick Press)
• Just What Mama Needs by Sharlee Glenn (Harcourt)
• Most Loved in All the World by Tonya Hegamin; illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera (Houghton Mifflin)
• Tsunami by Kimiko Kajikawa; illustrated by Ed Young (Philomel)

2011 Informational Book Nominees

• 14 Cows for America by Carmen Deedy and Thomas Gonzalez (Peachtree Publishers)
• Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone (Candlewick Press)
• The Boy Who Invented TV: the Story of Philo Farnsworth by Kathleen Krull and Greg Couch (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Darwin by Alice McGinty and Mary Azarian (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children)
• Down, Down, Down: a Journey to the Bottom of the Sea by Steve Jenkins (Houghton Mifflin)
• George Washington Carver by Tonya Bolden (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
• Life in the Wild: George Shaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts by Pamela S. Turner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mermaid Queen: the Spectacular True Story of Annette Kellerman, Who Swam Her Way to Fame, Fortune & Swimsuit History by Shana Corey (Scholastic)
• Nic Bishop Frogs by Nic Bishop (Scholastic)
• You Never Heard of Sandy Kofax? by Jonah Winter and Andre Carriho (Schwartz and Wade)

2011 Poetry Nominees

• Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow)
• The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry edited by Bill Martin Jr. (Simon & Schuster)
• Button Up: Wrinkled Rhymes by Alice Schertle (Harcourt)
• Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian
• Far From You by Lisa Schroeder (Simon Pulse)
• A Fuzzy-Fast Blur: Poems about Pets by Laura Salas (Capstone Press)
• Partly Cloudy: Poems of Love and Longing by Gary Soto (Harcourt)
• Truckery Rhymes by Jon Scieszka (Simon & Schuster)
• The Underwear Salesman: Jobs for Better or Verse by J. Patrick Lewis (Ginee Seo Books)
• Whiff of Pine, Hint of Skunk by Deborah Ruddell (Margaret K. McElderry)

As you may or may not know, I am a wanna-be school librarian. As such, Friday I had the opportunity through my work to attend the UELMA conference (Utah Educational Library Media Association) at Mountain View High School in Orem (“Family City U.S.A.”), Utah.  This was my first time attending such a conference, and I actually enjoyed it.  My boss won an award based on a nomination letter that I drafted (well, and maybe partly based on all the great things he’s done for libraries in our school district that made it easy to draft said letter).  Plus, I got paid to be there and I got a free lunch out of the deal.

Examples of things I learned

• All kinds of great and wacky ideas for programs and events to do with students in a library, which got me all excited, until I remembered I don’t have a library to do them in or students and teachers to do them with.  This plethora of ideas came courtesy of Lanell Rabner, librarian at Springville High School and also the current president of UELMA.
• It turns out that Dickens’ Great Expectations and the beginning novel in Stine’s Goosebumps series are basically the same book.  Seriously though, I learned a bunch of cool ideas about archetypes and the universality of narrative, and the importance of libraries/librarians refraining from putting up any impediments to a child’s choosing a book to read, even (and perhaps especially) if it is something lame like Goosebumps.  This came from a session by Clint Johnson, a writer and writing teacher at Salt Lake Community College.
• Not every session you attend in a conference is great.  This realization helped me begin to understand why a few conference-goers seemed so jaded about the whole thing.  I am still a rookie and I mostly drank up the kool-aid  the whole time.
• Perhaps most importantly for my current job, I learned  how to steal MARC records from the Canadians.  (Thank you, Summer Cornelius of Hurricane High School.)

So that was basically my freshman UELMA experience.  Stay tuned for my next post, in which I reveal to the web some exciting information to which only I and a few hundred others were privy as attendees of the conference.

It’s halfway gone.

(Pat’s B.B.Q. in Salt Lake City)

So, this was going to be the year when I finally got my act together and published a nice bunch of reviews of my favorite albums of the year by the end of the year. Turns out it’s not going to happen, as I got dumped on this December with snow, work, family stuff, and, most recently, preparing to move.  So, no plethora of album reviews for you, but I will try to do better next year. I figured the least I could do is put together some lists of favorites, even if I can’t provide much of any context, description, or justification for my choices.  Here are my favorite albums of 2009, arranged in an arbitrary manner most convenient to my purposes.

Fifteen Favorites:

1. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
3. Holiday Shores: Columbus’d the Whim
4. M. Ward: Hold Time
5. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
6. Woods: Songs of Shame
7. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
8. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
9. Passion Pit: Manners
10. Caetano Veloso: Zii e Zie
11. Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
12. Kurt Vile: Childish Prodigy
13. Girls: Album
14. Atlas Sound: Logos
15. Ganglians: Monster Head Room

Five EPs:

1. Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms
2. Abe Vigoda: Reviver
3. Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange
4. Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
5. Bon Iver: Blood Bank

A Trio of Great Rock Albums:

1. The Dead Weather: Horehound
2. Dinosaur Jr.: Farm
3. Sonic Youth: The Eternal

Two Magic Albums:

1. Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic
2. Memory Tapes: Seek Magic

A few other albums I feel are worth mentioning:
(alphabetical by artist)

• Crystal Antlers: Tentacles
• Dan Deacon: Bromst
• Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
• Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
• Heartless Bastards: The Mountain
• Little Dragon: Machine Dreams
• Mos Def: The Ecstatic
• Small Black: Small Black
• Wavves: Wavves
• Wilco: Wilco (the album)

Enjoy.

Disclaimer: Of course, these lists are only a frozen instance of my musical taste at this moment in time.  I reserve the right to add to or take away from them at any moment in the future, as I discover new music that came out in the past year, or discover upon repeated listens that an album is much better than I thought it was, or much inferior to what it initially sounded to me.

Tip: A great place to listen to virtually any album for free (completely legal, too) is lala.com.  They will let you stream a song or an entire album all the way through one time to try it.  I’m not bothering to link all these up there, and there are of course many other ways to check out new music, but I just suggest it as a great way to test out music.  You can buy perpetual streaming rights there for super cheap, as well ($ 0.10 a song, or $ 0.80-1.00 an album).  I don’t receive any compensation from lala.com, I just think it’s a great web site.  I hope that Apple/iTunes doesn’t ruin the things I like about them.

At the start I thought this would be really cheesy, but it ended up almost making me cry. I did say “almost.” Merry Christmas, everyone.

P.S. I realize that cheesiness and being brought close to tears are not necessarily mutually exclusive states, so the video clip can and in fact does meet both criteria for a special Christmastime message.