Bibliophilia

Today is one of my favorite shopping days of the years: the Acton Memorial Library book sale. What I love about these book sales is that they're a bit like surfing the Internet. You never know what you're going to find -- and specifically trying to look for something is a futile goal -- but the messy, wayward search is the fun of it. Amidst the crowds of people and stacks of books is a hidden book waiting to catch your fancy. And best of all, everything is cheap enough that you can indulge every fantasy.

I only ended up getting 4 books. (Haha, I haven't even read anything I bought last time...) All of them are a little worn, but that gives me license to read, use, and abuse these books to make them my own. I'm always intimidated by brand new books because I hate marring something perfect. So I got an anthology of modern short fiction, Crime and Punishment (I have to read it someday), Waiting by Ha Jin (whose short story When Cowboy Chicken Came to Town still haunts me), and a giant tome called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'll be tackling them sometime this summer.

Since high school started, my reading as degenerated and devolved, mostly transposed to blogs and forums online. Academic fatigue is also a factor, making me blithe and blase to the written word. I was trolling around the Internet today, aimlessly clicking links, until I got to a Wikipedia list of Newberry Medal winners. As I clicked through the list, I realized that from 1990 to 1999, I had read every single Newberry Medal winner with the exception of one. I was quite voracious reader in elementary school. All of these books were some of my favorite as a kid, and I own many of them. (But everything after 2000 I haven't even heard of.)

1999	Louis Sachar	Holes
1998	Karen Hesse	Out of the Dust
1997	E. L. Konigsburg	The View from Saturday
1996	Karen Cushman	The Midwife's Apprentice
1995	Sharon Creech	Walk Two Moons
1994	Lois Lowry	The Giver
1993	Cynthia Rylant	Missing May
1992	Phyllis Reynolds Naylor	Shiloh
1991	Jerry Spinelli	Maniac Magee
1990	Lois Lowry	Number the Stars

Missing May is the only one I haven't read, but I love love love all of the other books on this list. (Walk Two Moons and Shiloh and lower on the love list, but still overall positive impressions.)

This list prompted me to dig The View from Saturday out of my bookshelf. Why?

"It documents the story of four 6th grade children, Noah, Nadia Diamondstein, Ethan Potter, and Julian Singh, along with their paraplegicteacher, Mrs. Olinski, as they form a group they call "The Souls" and make their way to the New York State Academic Bowl Championship."

Oh man, these sixth graders are so much cooler than us. Seriously. It's not even funny.