It Ain't So Awful Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas

It Ain't So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review copy provided by Netgalley

If this isn't in contention for something from the ALA this winter, I will be seriously disappointed. It has Newbery or Printz written all over it. I've never read any of this author's other work, and this is probably the first children's book I've ever read about an Iranian American character. If there was ever a book that deserved promotion from We Need Diverse Books, this is it. I loved this.

I'd call this book historical fiction, though it's not exactly ancient history. Still, the Iranian Hostage Crisis is something from before most of this book's readers' lifetimes. This book deals with a topic that most readers will know nothing about fairly and honestly. More than simply learning about the historical period, readers will find that they can empathize with the characters. The mistreatment of this family is hard to take. I found myself questioning the motives of every friend and acquaintance she had, and every character gave me a momentary reason to wonder about their allegiances and intent. Still, all in all, it was the kindness of her neighbors and friends that I found most endearing in this book. I really loved this book and I hope that many other readers will feel the same. Given the chance, this could be a book that people will still be reading and talking about years from now. Well worth the time it would take to read. Amazing.

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The Years of Greatness Awards

A year ago, I posted a review of the Goodreads Choice Awards. This year, I looked at the awards as they were being voted on. I tried to find my favorite books from the past year, and what I found instead was disturbing. I hadn't read any of the nominees. There were a lot of nominated books that I'd marked "to-read", but none that I'd actually gotten around to reading. I felt like I'd missed everything good from this year in publishing.

It was a disturbing realization, yet, when I thought about it, I didn't have a bad reading year. I had read my normal quota of books, lived a reading life as well as I could, and had enjoyed the books that I had read. The only thing I hadn't done was read any books that were brand-spankin' new. Those books just weren't at the top of my list. Other books had been waiting to be read, and when I got my hands on them, I devoured those instead.

It brought me to the conclusion that maybe a lot of good readers might not be able to participate in the Goodreads Choice Awards for the same reason. They simply didn't have time to read the books that they were hoping to get to, or maybe they needed a couple extra years to get all the necessary reading done in order to make an informed voting decision about this year's batch of new books. Normally, I admit that I am essentially "shooting from the hip" in my posts. I don't normally use research to back up my opinions, but in this case, I looked up some statistics about annual reading habits of Americans, and I can now say with relative certainty that most people haven't read enough each year to really decide what's the best of the best. I saw a couple of polls and though the numbers varied slightly, ten books a year was as lofty as the averages got. That's not much fodder to make an informed decision with.

So where does that leave me? Well, a little disappointed, but not entirely surprised. Also, it makes me want to rethink the idea of book awards. If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that I've never been particularly enamored with any particular award. I often encourage second guessing any book's award-worthy status. Maybe a book deserved its accolades and maybe it didn't, but that's really for each reader to decide. There is no authority on the matter and there doesn't need to be, though some people might want to argue that point.

But I have a vision for a series of awards that might do a little better job of representing the annual catalog of books. I call it the Years of Greatness Awards, or the YOGA for short. This is the award that should give those slower readers like me a chance to really know what they're voting for. I propose a few denominations of the award: a five year category dubbed the 5YOGA, a ten year category known forever after as the 10YOGA, and a twenty year category henceforth called the 20YOGA. Essentially, the idea isn't that revolutionary. What I'm proposing is, in essence, a rematch. All the books that are up for an award this year go head to head with each other again after year five, ten, and twenty years. If we were to have an inaugural award dedication this year, the books eligible for the 5YOGA would have to have been published between the years of 2008 and 2009; to be eligible for the 10YOGA a book would have been published between 2003 and 2004; and eligibility for the 20YOGA would be limited to books published between 1993 and 1994.

Of course, nothing is set in stone here, but here are some rules that I've been hashing out as I write this. To be eligible, the book would have to still be in print, or at least it would have be widely available to readers/voters in some way. I'm not sure exactly how to define that rule. Secondly, the book should be available in the United States. That's my way of saying that we're not concerned with whether the book is by an American or not as long as we Americans can get our hands on a copy (I'm not on board with exclusion of the J.K. Rowlings and Cornelia Funkes of the world). Third rule is, the books you vote on should be books you've actually read and enjoyed enough to remember. I don't know how to enforce that one either, but by my thinking, voting for a book that you've heard is good but haven't bothered to read first is pointless. That's the whole reason for making an award for books that have waited five, ten, or twenty years to become eligible. Other rules...I haven't thought of any yet, but I think the three I mentioned would be a good start. I'd like to make a couple categories to separate children's books and books for adults at least. As I mentioned, it's all up in the air still.

So there it is. A non-fan of book awards made up his own batch of book awards. Seems a bit hypocritical, but I think the idea is a good one. I don't know how to make it a reality, but if it's going to actually happen, this is the best way I thought I could start. If anyone has any ideas that could improve what I've started, speak up. Also, if anyone knows what the award could look like, that would be good too. As you'll probably notice, there are no pictures of the proposed award right now, only words describing it. So, start pouring on the comments. Let's see where this takes us!

2013 Goodreads Choice Awards

So it happened again. The 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards were announced this past week, and once again I haven't read most of the books that were nominated. Worse, I haven't read a single one of the winners. Sadly, it wasn't an unusual experience. I've been a member of Goodreads for a few years now, and since I joined I've voted on a few of the categories every year. My book choices have never been in contention. They usually don't even make the final round.

I suppose it's not the end of the world. I mean, if I'm being honest, the books I read usually aren't eligible to win the awards anyway. I'm so far behind on my to-read list that, most of the time, I don't read books until they've been out for a couple of years already. Books that qualified to win in 2013 had to have been published since late November of 2012, so you can see my dilemma. Most of the time, I don't know if my favorite reads from the past year were published in the past year. I don't expend much energy examining copyright dates. I certainly don't remember that information after I've finished reading.

In essence, my reading habits make me a lousy judge of the best books from a given year. Not that I'm discounting my opinion or advocating for the value of "highly-qualified" judges, but simply reading a lot doesn't turn someone into the ideal candidate to adjudicate which book deserves an award. If you've read my other posts on book awards, you already know I'm not a huge fan of the award concept to begin with. This is just for fun though, and a lot of people shared their opinion, so I'm willing to give the finalists and winning books a bit of respect. When I haven't read any of the books from my favorite categories though, it seems dishonest to state that I hold the honored books in high regard.

However, this year I've concocted a plan to do the Goodreads honorees some retroactive justice. It won't mean that my voting will be any better in the year to come, but it will mean I gave the books from this year's list a chance to impress me. I've decided to read all the finalist books from the picture book category and the winner and first runner up from the middle grade category in the coming months. I'm not going to create a timeline on when I'll finish, because all that invites is stress and disaster, but I plan to read House of Hades by Rick Riordan, Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, and twenty picture books that I'm not going to bother listing here. I mean no disrespect to the picture book category, but twenty books is a lot for me to write and a lot for my few readers to read. I will say congratulations to picture book category winners Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffries for The Day the Crayons Quit. My father tells me that your book is wonderful, and I can't wait to read it as soon as I can nab his copy when he's not looking.

Picture book category winner

Well, I have a lot of reading ahead, but I'm up for it. I'll keep voting for the Goodreads Choice Awards in the years to come and if you've never heard of them, I encourage you to give them a look. Your opinion is as valuable as mine. If you find that you don't recognize any of the titles, don't be discouraged. You could always do what I'm doing. The way I see it, if I can't control the direction the ship is taking, at least I can analyze the resulting wreckage. There's my analogy for this issue. If you don't like it, feel free to substitute in something that you do like, and throw it in the comment section down below. Happy reading and enjoy your December everybody.

Amazon BUYS Goodreads!?!

It was announced today that Goodreads, my favorite social network for readers, has been purchased by Amazon, a move that I thought would never happen. Honestly, actions taken by the two companies over the past few years led me to believe that Goodreads and Amazon were doing everything in their power to distance themselves from each other. In January 2012, Goodreads stopped accepting metadata from Amazon's API because they called Amazon's terms of use too restrictive, meaning that Goodreads users were responsible for providing all the background information about any book on the site. The layout of the book pages on Goodreads changed to prominently feature a link to Barnes and Noble's webstore rather than Amazon. Amazon stopped featuring Goodreads book reviews on their site at about the same time. Preface all that with the fact that since August 2008, Amazon has owned Shelfari, a direct competitor for Goodreads.

Needless to say, as a longtime user of Goodreads and an Amazon Prime customer, I am curious about what this means for my reading future. I don't know if I should be upset or excited. As anyone would expect, Amazon and Goodreads are celebrating this deal as a boon for their users/customers. Amazon's stock price went up today and just look at the cheery email I received this afternoon from my friends at Goodreads.

Hello, Today is a very big day for all of us at Goodreads. As you may have seen on our blog, we are joining the Amazon family. We greatly appreciate all you do as a Goodreads Librarian so we wanted to reach out to you individually since you play an important role in our community. You’ll be glad to know that this announcement is great news for our catalog. Amazon metadata will be returning to the site, and we will have an even more comprehensive record of self-published books, as well as more complete records of international books. We will continue to link to a variety of sites on our book pages, of course, including OCLC WorldCat for library data. All of your reviews and ratings will remain on Goodreads. By joining the Amazon family, the Goodreads team will be able to invest more in the things that our members care about. We’ll also be working together on inventing new services for readers and authors. As part of this, we’ll be increasing the size of our team over time, and will be able to add lots of great new features that members and librarians will be excited about! I can’t make this clear enough – we plan to continue growing Goodreads and investing in making it a great community for librarians, and everyone else. We said in our blog post that our team gets out of bed every day motivated by the belief that the right book in the right hands can change the world. Now Goodreads can help make that happen in an even bigger and more meaningful way as part of the Amazon family. Here’s to the next chapter! Otis, Elizabeth, and the Goodreads Team

So everything is great, right? It certainly seems that way. And I certainly hope so. Honestly, I've put in too much time and effort to make my Goodreads account something that I can use to get great book recommendations and to monitor my reading progress to lose it now. This could result in a lot of positives for users of Goodreads. I'm kind of hoping that it will mean increased interactivity with Amazon's website. Since I've been reviewing books for a couple of years already, it would be great if the data that I've compiled in Goodreads would improve my shopping experience in Amazon. Amazon regularly attempts to improve the recommendations they make when I am shopping on their site. I can't help but believe that they could do a much a better job of recommending books for me if they knew all that I've read and recorded on Goodreads.

But enough about me. In every business deal like this, there are bound to be winners and losers. In this deal, Goodreads and Amazon both could make out like winners, but where does it leave Shelfari? Essentially, Amazon now owns two identical products that compete with each other. That's not going to last. Something is going to change. Does that mean that Shelfari and Goodreads will somehow merge into one site? I can't imagine how that would work. Does it mean that Amazon will sell Shelfari? That wouldn't make sense. Does it mean that Shelfari user accounts will migrate over to Goodreads? I don't know. That makes sense to me, but I don't work for Amazon, so I'm only guessing. Microsoft just migrated Messenger accounts to Skype and Hotmail accounts to Outlook.com, so it wouldn't be completely unheard of in this era.

Either way, it's going to be interesting. I'm wondering what will happen. I not going to say I'm worried, but it's going to take more than some cheery PR to put me at ease. I, like many others, will be watching and hoping for the best.

Reading challenges and an uncontrolled appetite...

If you read this blog carefully, and occasionally click on the blue highlighted words you find, you might have already noticed that I am a regular user of the book-centered website, Goodreads.com. I keep a running log of my reading activities on the site, I offer up reviews of many of the books I've finished reading (though they are typically very short reviews and incomparable to what I put up here), and I keep up with the blogging activities of many of my favorite authors thanks to a very simple blog display interface. More recently, I've taken part in the 2011 Goodreads Reading Challenge, something that I didn't think much of to start, but have since become unavoidably obsessed with. The premise is simple. Since users of Goodreads spend much of their time sharing what they've read and their opinions on those books, it seems only natural that Goodreads is able to gather statistics on a user's reading habits over a given time, provided that the user bothers to offer that information up. Therefore, it isn't too difficult to keep a running total of the books a user reads during the course of a year. If the user had a reading goal for a given year, Goodreads could offer progress updates to the reader and basically keep the reader on pace to reach that goal.

I made a tentative goal to read 100 books in 2011. I remember as a child when my school would hold the 100 book challenge and we would all read for that mythical number and the resulting pizza party when we succeeded.  When deciding on my own goal I thought, I read a lot of books as a children's librarian. Even though I don't have any kind of prior gage on my reading habits, I figured 100 sounded like a nice round, possibly attainable number. Then I started monitoring my reading, being sure to update the site on any books I finished in a given day.

Well, it turns out that I was low-balling it. I topped 100 yesterday and now I'm moving beyond that. And I have to say that I give Goodreads a lot of the credit. I'm not saying that I wasn't a habitual reader before. What I'm saying is that I was a disorderly reader before. I was in the middle of just about every book I put my hands on. I didn't finish things. I would read something, get really involved in it, put it down at the end of a day about half finished, and pick up something completely new and different the next day without ever returning to finish what I was reading the day before. I was a mess. I had a fairly good memory for books so when I would pick something up for the second time, possibly even years later, I would pick up where I left off with only vague blurriness about a few forgettable details. But it didn't cater to being the sort of reader who would finish a lot of books. I new a little of a lot of things, but not nearly enough of almost anything for my opinion to be worth its while.

Now, I find myself going back to the same book day after day, writing status updates on my current progress in the Goodreads sidebar, and being so engaged that I find myself driving my fiancee up a wall with an almost constant need to gush about what I thought of this or that book. That's where this blog is probably saving my life in some manner. If I poured everything I was thinking into one ear hole, the owner of that ear hole would have every right to attempt to murder me. It would easily be deemed self-defense by any court of law.

"Your honor," my former fiancee would say, "he had only just finished a one-sided discussion on the merits of Chris Crutcher's Deadline when he unthinkingly segued into an anecdote from a Sloane Crosley essay he'd been reading. Now, I like I Was Told There'd Be Cake as much as the next girl, but one person can only take so much! Am I right?" The judge would solemnly nod his head and pardon her of all charges, and justice would be done. I can't argue with that. One person can only take so much. So I put my thoughts down here, where the reader can choose to click the close button rather than doing me bodily harm for the sake of some peace and quiet. I clog the Internet with a little bit more mindless chatter, and I move one step further toward a happy marriage. It's a happy alternative I think. I'm sure my fiancee agrees.