SIBA's 2011 Book Award Winners

Cavalier House Books is a proud member of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. SIBA is awesome; it's one of those resources that my customers don't really hear about but that helps me to function as a better bookseller everyday. When John and I opened the store we were so excited to join SIBA, and we've basically been excited about it ever since. From the yearly tradeshow to the camaraderie between our regional bookselling peers ... it's just fantastic.

So having said all that, I would like to share with you this year's SIBA Book Award Winners followed by a short quote from the nominating bookstore. To be nominated by for an award the book must be southern in nature (either written by a southern writer or dealing with a southern topic/setting).

In the Children's Category: Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

“Catlin will touch your heart. What more is there to say?” –Fiction Addiction in Greenville, SC

In the Young Adult Category: Countdown by Deborah Wiles

“Oh, this story brings back memories!” –Two Sisters Bookery in Wilmington, NC

In the Fiction Category: Burning Bright by Ron Rash

“Ron Rash can’t write a false word.” –Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, NC

In the Nonfiction Category: The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family by Jim Minick

“A captivating look into a couple’s efforts to create an organic blueberry farm in Central Appalachia. . .sit back and savor the sweetness of his blueberry story.”—Malaprop’s in Asheville, NC

In the Poetry Category: A House of Branches by Janisse Ray

“These poems are about waking up, looking around at the world, and discovering how to live within it.” –Kathryn Stripling Byer

In the Cookbook Category: Southern My Way: Simple Recipes, Fresh Flavors by Gena Knox

“Gena’s cookbook shows quicker ways to make traditional southern dishes from a fresh angle!” –Page & Palette in Fairhope, AL

The internet has me thinking...

There is a series of recent articles swirling around in my head right now (not the least of which is this one - no more Oxford comma? I'm a fan of all commas!). I know how they all fit together in my head; I'm just looking for a way to connect them to yours. You know, without the convenience of The Matrix.

The first is a recent discussion on NPR's Talk of the Nation regarding our limitations in media input called "You Can't Possibly Read It All, So Stop Trying." The title basically says it all and I don't know if I can possibly explain to you how this made me feel. As a means of understanding I'll share an anecdote from my childhood, when I was a kid I once asked my mom how long she thought it would take me to read every book in the world. She told me that I couldn't possibly, ever. This hit me pretty hard. Frankly, I'm still getting over it. And I'm still trying to read every book ever, which is probably why I have over 1,000 books at home. But back to the show, one of NPR's culture critics, Linda Holmes, suggests that you must either cull or surrender when it comes to imbibing books (or culture or mass media at large). To cull is to make a broad swipe and say this is not good/relevant/worth my time/whatever and ignore whole sections of artistic output while surrendering is to say this may be great, but I've already got all this other great stuff going on over here so I can't possibly get to it.

I'll call myself an approaching surrenderer (yeah, I just made that up). I'm not a cultural elitist, so I wouldn't say that I judge wide swaths of culture as beneath me and thus cull them. That being said, I can tell the difference between art and entertainment and I think that's a really important distinction that often gets lost in the shuffle. So, what I mean when I say that I am an approaching surrenderer would be that I try to balance the art with the entertainment (perhaps what my more highbrow peers would cull). I don't think being well-read means that you've read all of the Russians or Milton or whatever; it seems to me that being well-read means being widely read. I've read Milton and I've read Christopher Moore, for that I consider myself rather well-read. There's a cultural playing field when it comes to literature that I feel comfortable stepping out on. I know that there are holes in my literary background but I'm striving to fill them. That's just gotta be enough for me because, as my mother told me years ago and Linda Holmes reminded me Monday, I can't read everything.

Now, why am I sharing this with you? Before I go there, let me share the next article. Author Ann Patchett will be opening a bookstore in her hometown, Nashville. Apparently, Nashville doesn't have a bookstore anymore. The indie that had been in town for 30 years has closed, the chains have fled, and Nashville is left with nothing but the internet (and here's hoping a thriving library system but somehow I doubt it; are "thriving library systems" even allowed exist anymore?). I'm hoping you are starting to catch my drift here. This is going to be one of those "bookstores are important!" posts. I heard Patchett's news and I immediately thought of Holmes' discussion.

When you know that the number of books out in the world is really too much to fathom, how do you deal with the question of what to read? For some the answer is simply the recommendations of friends, for others it's the NYT Bestseller's List, but one that I think is really important is the community bookstore (as well as the library; I'm a huge library fan). Sure, a website can tell me what books customers purchased together, but is that all the information I want? What if I want a recommendation that's geared to me and my immediate literary community? That's not going to happen without a conversation. Then there's the limitless possibility. Not all limitations are a bad thing; in her interview Patchett says "I think we’ve got to get back to a 3000-square-foot store and not 30,000." The word typically used for stocking a small bookstore is "curating," as though it were a collection. When you have such a small amount of space a great deal of care goes into how you fill it, trust me on this one. When I consider whether or not to put a book in my store I am taking into consideration whether or not I would recommend it to someone. I don't have enough space (or funds) to dedicate it to books I don't believe in.

That is how I'm helping you to surrender to the vastness of the literary world. I spend most of my time reading books or reading about books because that's my job. I do it so that I can act as a guide through this vastness and in that way you can still have time to, you know, do your job.

Who is YA?

By now, everyone's heard of the Wall Street Journal article about YA literature with the byline "Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?" At first, I wasn't even going to respond to this article. I am neither a reader nor writer of YA literature. I've started reading more of it since we opened the store two years ago and since I made a friend who blogs about YA books (and forces the best of them into my TBR pile), but I'm not connected to this genre in the way that others are. Now I'm gonna talk about it anyway.

In my opinion, YA literature is for young adults. Isn't that what those two letters, Y.A., stand for? Meghan Cox Gurdon's article refers to a 13 year old girl. As a bookseller, I would not point the mother of a 13 year old kid to the Young Adult section. 13 to me means kid ... it doesn't mean Beverly Cleary kid but it doesn't mean House of Night teen either. It's somewhere in the middle, and where appropriate reading material for one 13 year old kid falls may not be appropriate for another 13 year old kid. In her article Gurdon writes, "kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18." She admits that the genre is broad. So broad that maybe we shouldn't be calling it a genre anymore; YA literature has become literature in which the main characters are younger than 20. It's got as many genres within as Adult literature and is read by 13, 16, 18, 20, 30, and 60 year olds. That opens up a lot of doors.

Guess who's here to help you navigate that multitude of doors: booksellers! librarians! teachers! These are people who live to help young people find not only age appropriate titles but titles that are appropriate to the specific person in question. Personally, I focus on middle grade literature. Send me any kid, give me a few specifics as far as likes and dislikes and I can recommend a book they will love. Parents of reluctant readers have told me that I work some sort of magic. It's not magic - it's my job. I read a lot and I research even more so that I can recommend the right books to the right people. I love creating that perfect coupling; that's why I'm in this business. It's not a fancy algorithm, it's just me being a passionate reader and someone who likes to share my passion. I can guarantee that every good bookseller, librarian, and teacher feels the same way. All the ones I know do.

And let's talk about censorship for a moment. Gurdon claims that those she calls "gatekeepers" operate in contrast to the publishing industry. The publishing industry exists to sell books and "smut" (her word) is what sells best to teens, so her gatekeepers (the same teachers and librarians I was just talking about) must operate to keep that smut out of the hands of precious, corruptible children. Gurdon even includes a colorful quote from an unnamed editor about the sacrifices publishers have to make to satisfy these gatekeepers. I'm sorry, but that's just not the way it works. Yes, eliminating some of the bad language from a book aimed at teens may get a wider acceptance in the school curriculum. But not every book is meant for the school curriculum. Publishers know that. That's why when I have a discussion with my publishing sales rep she says "this is a great title for you to bring into book fairs!" She's read the books; she knows what's best for the diversity of a school and a bookfair where there's less hands-on bookselling. That's not censorship. A class has anywhere between 20 to 30 students. A teacher may have 7 classes. That's over 200 possible students. Of those 200 students some will be comfortable with bad language (or dark subject matter) but many (and their parents) will not. I think it is just as bad to censor a book as it is to force a child or young adult to read something that they are not ready for.

I don't consider teachers or librarians (or booksellers!) to be gatekeepers. That sounds like a negative term. I prefer to think of us as individuals who open doors, not those who seek to keep them closed. My favorite teachers were the ones who taught me on my level. They recommended outside reading. They exposed me to books and authors I wouldn't have found and ideas that challenged me. I was ready for that, but not every kid is and good teachers know it. A friend recently told me that she borrowed a copy of "The Stand" from me in middle school and it terrified her. I loved Stephen King at that age; she didn't. We are different people with different ideas. There's nothing wrong with that. Stephen King shouldn't be published just because I liked him and he shouldn't be banned just because she didn't. King's novels are published because there is a market for them. The market wasn't created. No one forced me to buy that copy of The Stand - I wanted to read it. As long as teens want to read dark books there will be dark books because the market demands it.

I wish that the mom described in Gurdon's article had come to my store instead of the chain she went to. I would have talked to her about her kid. Learned about her interests and recommended a stack of appropriate books that I was enthusiastic about. She wouldn't have been overwhelmed by the amount of darkness in YA literature because once she told me she wasn't interested in dark books I wouldn't have recommended them and she wouldn't have even noticed them.

I had originally wanted to talk about this article and #YAsaves but sometimes my brain goes otherwheres. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about my ideas as to why the market demands such dark subject matter.