Today is the opening day of the Utah State Legislature and for the first time in 10 years, I’m not going to be there for the session. I thought I might be a tiny bit morose, but actually I’d completely forgotten about it until a friend asked me last night at a choir rehearsal if I was in my busy time of the year now. I looked blankly at her for a minute and realized she was talking about session and then told her, “No, I’m retired”. That’s when I remembered it’s opening day today. Ha! With my health deteriorated as much as it has over the last year, there’s no way I could make it through a legislative session, anyway, so timing is everything.
The other big news of the day is that the American Library Association named the 2012 Youth Media Award winners today. The link will get to the full list, but I’m happy to say that the wonderful “Inside Out & Back Again,” by Thanhha Lai and read this month by my book club was named a Newbery Honor book, along with “Breaking Stalin’s Nose,” written and illustrated by Eugene Yelchin. The Newbery Medal winner is “Dead End in Norvelt,” by Jack Gantos, which also won the 2012 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction last week.
We read “Wonderstruck: A Novel in Words and Pictures,” by Brian Selznick in December and it received the Schneider Family Book Award for books that embody an artistic expression of the disability experience. It was a great book and I liked it so much that I convinced Scott and Mark to read it, too.
So there you go, two completely different but noteworthy events today. Happy reading!
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