Spoilers, Sweetie: Read 100 Books in 1 Hour

Happy Friday, Everyone!

Back in February 2016, we launched the website Spoilers, Sweetie for librarians who don't have the time to read everything, but are expected to know it all. Today, we are really excited to announce that we have covered 38 Awards and spoiled over 100 books! Since summer seems to be the busiest time for reader's advisory (especially if you work with kids who need book suggestions for summer reading), we thought now would be a good time to highlight our spin-off blog!

So, looking to read 100 books in one hour? Head over to Spoilers, Sweetie!

If you click on "By Category", you can easily see the awards divided by age group, for those of you who want to focus on your reader's advisory audience first.

And, if you find this website useful, please consider signing up to help with spoilers! We have a long list of award winning books and any that you are willing to read/have read and can spoil would be useful.

Spoilers for the 2016 Youth Media Award Winners

This past Monday, the American Library Association announced the winners of the 2017 Youth Media Awards. All one hundred of them! No, actually not that many, but close when you add in all of the lists, too. It is an exciting time to see who won, but it may also be overwhelming to the slow or busy or selective reader.

Thankfully, our sister blog, Spoilers, Sweetie, is working hard to help in this endeavor. (After all, there's still reader advisory to do!) Since the winners were just announced, it'll take them a while to compile spoilers for the 2017 winners. But if you didn't have a chance to read last year's winners (and in some cases, winners from 2015), here's your chance now. We divided them up into three categories, depending on where you are most interested in:

Outstanding! Distinguished! Excellent!

Newbery Medal, 2016 and BONUS: 2015
Caldecott Medal, 2016 (American Picture Book)
Printz Award 2016 and BONUS: 2015
Odyssey Award, 2016 (audiobook) and BONUS: 2015
Theodore Seuss Geisel Award, 2016 (Beginning Reader)
YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for YA, 2016
Scott O'Dell Award, 2016 (Historical Fiction)
Quick Picks for Reluctant YA Reads, 2016
Great Graphic Novels for Teens, 2016

New Talent

John Steptoe, 2016 and BONUS: 2015
Morris Award, 2016

Diversity

Coretta Scott King Author Awards, 2016 and BONUS: 2015 (African-American author and illustrator)
Schneider Family Book Award 2016 (disability experience)
Stonewall Book Award, 2016 (GLBT)

To be notified of spoilers for 2017 (and they're finishing up 2016), make sure you follow the Spoilers, Sweetie blog! Each award is posted only after all of the winning books are read and spoiled by a fabulous volunteer team. If you plan to read a 2017 winner and would like to submit a spoiler, please register here.

Happy reading/spoiling!

Introducing Spoilers, Sweetie!

We are excited to announce the launching of our spin-off blog, Spoilers, Sweetie!

Back in December, we wrote a blog post talking about a crazy idea we had: writing spoilers for award winning books. We were excited about the possibility, but we needed people - LOTS of people - to help us read and spoil books to make this happen. 

I am proud to say that the librarian community has stepped up and joined us. Over the past two months, everyone has been hard at work reading and writing spoilers. While they were doing that, I was trying to find a way to add this new segment to our blog. It soon became clear, though, what we were doing was bigger than what we could do here. So, we created a new blog dedicated specifically to spoilers.

So, please say hello to http://spoilers.5minlib.com! (You can also get to it via the tab up top, on the desktop version of our website.)

It is much different than our 5minlib setup. We wanted the awards to be the focus, so we choose a flipcard style to make it easy for you to navigate through it and find the awards that fit the audience you are serving.

If you prefer to search by age group, announcement years, or specific awards, you can easily do so by clicking "By Category".

And when you click the flipcard to go to the blog post, you'll be pleased to know that all spoilers are hidden by a grey box, so you won't accidentally see any spoiler you don't want to read! You must click on the box for the reveal:

We will be posting new spoilers as each award is completed. If you don't want to miss a post, make sure to follow us by email or RSS feed, located on the right side of the blog.

We are covering all awards for all age groups, but we can only post the awards for which people are writing spoilers. If you enjoy reading and/or find these spoilers helpful, please consider joining our Spoilers, Sweetie team! As you can see from the Book Awards Calendar we shared two weeks ago, there are many books to spoil!

Join our Spoilers, Sweetie Team!

If you are interested in joining our Spoilers, Sweetie team, please fill out the form. You will get to choose what book you want to read and you'll have 4 weeks to read the book and submit the spoiler. It is that easy! Since we are giving everyone a month to submit, progress is slow. The more people participating, the more spoilers we can share! We especially need adult literature readers.

Special Thank Yous

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a few people who were invaluable to getting this new blog off the ground. I can come up with the ideas, but without these people, Spoilers, Sweetie! wouldn't have become a reality. So, thank you to my husband, who is the technical genius behind our new blog. He helped me figure out how to modify it to fit our needs, most especially how to cover the spoilers so no one accidentally reads the wrong description. I also must share a shout-out to Kat, my former colleague and fellow 5minlib writer. She knew from day one we probably would need a new blog and was my sounding board to figure out the design. I am also excited to announce that Tegan, Amanda, and Nathalia has join our Spoilers, Sweetie Staff and will be a huge help with keeping the process moving along. I couldn't do this without any of you. Thank you so much!

Spoilers, Sweetie

I am excited to announce a new segment to the 5 Minute Librarian titled: Spoilers, Sweetie!. This segment will be very different from our other ones because we're starting it with a call for help:

We're looking for readers who can help us write spoilers! Here's your chance to join the 5minlib team and help librarians everywhere! If you like to read and your soul doesn't die when you share a spoiler, this is for you!

Scandalous, I know. But let's look at the facts:

#1. More Books are Published Than You Can Read in a Year

Even if you read a book a day, you won't be able to read every single new book that is published. (Just in YA Lit alone, Goodreads lists over 1,400 YA books were published this year.) That doesn't even cover all of the books that are currently in your collection that you haven't even read yet. If you are a new librarian who isn't familiar with previous publications, good luck to you! 

#2. Librarians Aren't Paid to Read

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all we did was sit, read, and then recommend? We all love reading -- you can't get into this profession without it -- and we're expected to know our collection, but reading must be done on our own time. I get it -- it is hard to justify paying someone to read when librarians are needed for circulation, ordering, programming, teaching classes, patron help, etc. But this is our FREE time we're talking about and many of us are also balancing second jobs, families, and so many other commitments. How many books can we realistically read? It is never enough.

#3. Librarians Don't Love Every Genre or Book They Read 

Not only do you need to read on your own time, but it's also in genres and titles that you don't even enjoy. Wouldn't it be nice to read a bunch of spoilers and then pull the book off the shelf to read a few chapters for the reader's advisory info? It doesn't take long to figure out the pacing and style of writing. Five minutes and you have a new book under your belt that you can booktalk for the appropriate audience.

#4. Why Spoilers?

Let's be honest. Librarians have NEVER read every book that is published. It isn't possible! So, many people have found other ways to build their RA toolbox. I've heard of reading lots of reviews to skimming books to bouncing around on audio books. We're putting in so much time and effort to become acquainted with as many books as possible. 

But it isn't a perfect system. For starters, if you are anything like me, as you're trying to skim, you become hooked in the book and end up reading it anyway. If I knew the spoilers ahead of time, I wouldn't have that problem. Other people struggle with this because they worry about content warnings -- how much sex, violence, and death are in this? The only way to know for sure is to finish the darn book.

#5. Are You Worried You'll Kill the Love For Reading?

All of our posts will list the titles at the top of the page and we'll link them to their spoilers and back up to the top. We don't want to spoil anything you really want to read. In fact, we are hoping that this series will free up your evenings so that you CAN actually read what you want to. Because we love reading. We already have To-Be-Read book lists that we'll never finish. But we all also have genres we're not interested in and popular books that we just cannot make ourselves read. Let us at 5minlib do that dirty work for you!

#6. What Can I Do?

If you enjoy reading and willing to write up spoilers, please fill out this form: http://goo.gl/forms/vnyNHujIfO. We are going to begin this series by spoiling the award-winning books. You'll get to pick what book(s) you want to read and must be able to submit spoilers within a reasonable deadline (one month). It is simple, and the more people who participate, the quicker we can share these spoilers with everyone and possibly branch out to other niche-genres. You will be credited for your work!

#7 And What is With this Title? 

For those of you who don't know, I'm about to up your geek cred a little bit:

On Doctor Who, the amazing BBC sci-fi series, the Doctor has a (super awesome) love interest named Professor River Song. Since they are both time travelers, they don't tend to meet in the right order - one may have already had an experience that the other has not yet had. In order to keep things exciting, River Song discourages speaking about these things, with the warning: "Spoilers, Sweetie." We love that phrase and decided to name our series after it.