A Pleasant Thing to Find in One's Mailbox

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My Alex Award has arrived!

The Alex Awards, you'll remember, are given out by the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association every year to ten adult novels that young adults can read with pleasure. Nick Hornby has dubbed them the "not boring" awards, because by definition any novel a teenager can be bothered to read is not a snooze.

You can see why I'm so pleased with this. And being in the company of nine other winners very pleasantly points out the fact, often obscured by awards, that this is not a competition. We're all of us engaged in a common attempt to write books that will endure.

The ALA gives out a slew of YA awards yearly, the very biggest of which is the Newbery Medal. Which was won this year by Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I just now checked its online listing at Amazon and saw that it's rated as being for ages 9-12. I hate those upper-age caps and their implicit aren't-you-too-old-to-be-reading-this?-ishness.

So I guess that it's the twelve-year-old in me that thought it was a fine piece of work.

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