[Saturday Reads] Award-Winning-Books Reading Challenge #AWBRead2015 and the Reading Challenges We are Joining!

Myra here.

Every Saturday we hope to share with you our thoughts on reading and books. We thought that it would be good practice to reflect on our reading lives and our thoughts about reading in general. While on occasion, we would feature a few books in keeping with this, there would be a few posts where we will just write about our thoughts on read-alouds, libraries, reading journals, upcoming literary conferences, books that we are excited about, and just booklove miscellany in general.

Reading Challenges We are Joining this 2015

#MustReadin2015

The #mustreadin2015 reading challenge is hosted by Carrie Gelson of There’s A Book for That, Maria Selke of Maria’s Melange, and Linda Baie of Teacher Dance. My list is hardly definitive as I plan on keeping my reading structured yet organic, systematic yet fluid (heh!). My reading is also largely (yet loosely) based on our reading themes for the year:

• January-February: Once Upon a Childhood – Throwback Reads on Childhood Favourites and HOT for CYBILS
• March-April: Grey & Golden, Young and Fleeting – Ruminations on Mortality and Transient Lives
• May-June: Made in China + Plus the Middle East
• July-August: Diversified – Rainbow Colours of Literature
• September-October: Comic Crazy!
• November-December: Myths, Mystery, Mayhem – Whodunit

This is a sampler, though, of what I hope to read this year.

Fats’ Book Riot Read Harder Challenge

Fats also mentioned that she is joining the Book Riot Reading Challenge. Click here to know more details. Here is Fats’ reading list:

NonFiction Picture Book 2015 Reading Challenge

We are joining Alyson Beecher at KidlitFrenzy‘s Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge for 2015. We hope to read 25 nonfiction titles throughout the year.

…And do Join our very own Award Winning Books Reading Challenge

Back in 2013, we hosted the Award-Winning-Books Reading Challenge. 

This reading challenge allowed us to explore different genres and discover obscure titles that we would not otherwise have known. It was also very interesting to check out our participants’ highly-diverse book titles. As a teacher, I am aware that there are children who seem to shy away from award-winning-titles. Some may feel that the language is way too lyrical and too beyond them to grasp – it isn’t fun reading any longer. Even teachers may feel this way – and so teachers may question whether the award-winning-titles are truly meant for children, or for literary judges’ predilection and distinct ideations of what children should be reading – with limited awareness of children’s everyday contemporary realities – something which teachers are intimately aware of being with children day in and day out. Seemingly, a great deal of award-winning-books fail to appeal to young readers’ predispositions, given where they are at developmentally, keeping in mind cultural context, societal changes, and so forth and so on. There is no fast-paced adventure, no sir. Each chapter lopes along gracefully, with a meandering unearthing of the writer’s sensibilities.

And so, there are teachers and parents who provide a sampler of what is known as ‘gateway’ literature – books which may not have won any kind of literary award, but are sure to capture a young child’s attention and hook them into reading, until they are ready to step into the world of award-winning-titles.

With all this in mind, groups such as the Nerdy Book Club come up with their own book awards.

Click here to know the 2014 Nerdy Awards for Fiction Picture Books, the 2014 Nerdy Awards for graphic novels – among others.

There is also the CYBILS (Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards), which seeks to give voice to active book-bloggers who make it a part of their lives to hunt down books that they feel children can resonate with.

For our reading challenge, I invite you all to visit the aforementioned websites, and to also include award-winning-titles from your own countries, cities, school communities, the Goodreads Choice Awards, just to cite a few. Expand your reading tastes, widen your book selections, and be ready to take in bits and pieces from world-renowned literature that have taken root in people’s minds and stayed there for a long time, giving birth to fan fiction, new ideas, new characters, new story threads.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you to join our reading challenge, we will randomly select one winner every two months. Here are the book prizes courtesy of Pansing Books (special shout-out and thanks to the Pansing group).

January-February Book Prize: Deep Blue by Jennifer Donnelly

March-April Book Prize: A Song for Ella Grey by David Almond

May-June Book Prize: Lone Wolf by Rubert Muchamore

July-August Book Prize: The Dark Wild by Piers Torday

September-October Book Prize: Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick (which I reviewed here)

November-December Book Prize: The World of Norm – May Contain Nuts by Jonathan Meres

What are you waiting for fellow readers, book bloggers, reading enthusiasts? Join us in our reading challenge for 2015! Sign up here.