End of October Cybils Reading

I'm a Round 1 Nonfiction judge so I'm reading as many of the nominated books in my triple category as I can. There's the picture books, the middle grade books, and the high school books, all clamoring for my attention. Because I'm an idiot, I also have a bunch of other books to read as well. So I'm separating my reading piles so I can make sure I'm concentrating where I want to. Sadly this week it's barely necessary as I've spent far too little time reading anything. 

Hmm, now that I think about it, I should post these on Sunday and the other ones on Monday. I will fake that when I post this, as I didn't think of this until after yesterday's post.

High School Nonfiction

Nothing.

Middle Grade Nonfiction

Changing the Equation: 50+ US Black Women in STEM, Tanya Bolden. Many short essays about successful Black women in technical fields, from barrier-breaking pioneers in medicine and engineering who proved that women could be doctors and technicians to game designers and innovative surgeons today. I like the picture of plentitude -- these are 50 women among many who could be in this book, and offer good role models to kids wondering if their dreams are feasible. Many of the modern women discuss how they are involved with mentoring because they found that their race and gender sometimes made for extra obstacles in their path, and hard work is grinding enough without society putting up extra hurdles. 

The book seems better for dipping than for a cover-to-cover read. There's only so many ways to frame a career success story. It's a good resource for finding inspiration or a topic for a deeper biographic study.

Who Gives a Poop, Heather L. Montgomery. Science goes everywhere. Montgomery has never met a poop pun she didn't like, but she somehow manages to stay just on this side of amusing rather than annoying to me, maybe because she's also willing to ask tough questions and get her hands dirty answering them. She'll dissect road kill to look at the intestines, sometimes bringing it home to her dinner table for extra investigation with her microscope. She'll tag along on field scientist expedition, sometimes finding herself nose to nose with their investigations. All along she's interested in the science -- what does this indicate? How could that be tested? What is a correlation, and how can we determine a causation? It's a fun peon to the scientific method and rigor, as well as a reminder of the pitfalls of bias and assumptions. 

Elementary Nonfiction

 

Feed Your Mind: A Story of August Wilson, Jen Bryant. It took me an embarrassingly long time to remember who August Wilson was, which is awful because I just read Fences! But I clued in right before he started writing a lot of poetry. I liked how the book echoed his work with the author and illustrator trying to capture the essence of how his plays affected literature through the way they used words, images and context to convey the story of his life. The childhood parts show a love of words and libraries, with the scenes set in libraries opening up worlds and language while the school settings were more hostile and limiting. As he moved into adulthood words again come to the front as he pulls in language from the people and conversations around him and weaves it together into his work. 

There's a good backmatter section where the author talks about how she tried to capture the feel of the work in the tone of the book, a bibliography giving more details of Wilson's career, and a bibliography that includes notes on each quote uses in the text. It's a good way to do a biography of an playwright that kids probably haven't encountered yet but that centers his work and ambitions. It's also a love letter to libraries, which endears it to me. It's not an own voices book. Bryant has a real appreciation for Wilson's work and conveys the collage nature both in the text and through the illustrations. She does a good job interesting kids not only in Wilson's life (struggles in school, wrote a term paper for his sister to pay for his first typewriter!!) but also in his writing techniques and methods.

Fred's Big Feelings: The Life and Legacy of Mister Rogers, Laura Reynald. This biography of Mister Rogers starts with his childhood of bullying and music lessons, and then goes through his embrace of television as a way of getting children to understand their feelings. The illustrations are pleasant and active, showing the TV sets and congress halls where Rogers worked to get his message heard. Yet it's a very nostalgic book, leaning back into the good times in the Neighborhood when Mister Rogers could invite the mailman in for a foot bath. I'm not sure how much it will resonate with today's kids; I don't think they are watching reruns of Mr Rogers instead of glitzier shows. The idea of emotional education lives on in television, but the landscape has changed. I want a bigger look at how his impact has changed things today.