Pyrite Time, Once Again

Here at Someday, we have a tradition (this is year three) of a Mock Printz which, in a fit of serious humor,* we styled the Pyrite Printz. (Get it? Because Pyrite is like gold but not? Also, alliterative.)

As always, we are still (still!) reviewing serious contenders and reading away madly to catch up with all the surprise books (Carnival at Bray, anyone? No nook version and no copies at, count ’em, FOUR bricks and mortar stores).

But that’s us, and the Pyrite, my friends, is about you. So it’s time to get it started.

Here’s how this works. In the comments, you may nominate up to five titles. We’ll do some fancy data analysis (which is to say, counting) and post the results in a week, and from that, we’ll choose a shortlist that we’ll consider our nominations. Even if we have already discussed the titles, we’ll come back to them and discuss them some more, and then in January we’ll do some voting based on RealCommittee procedure.

How does this compare to the RealCommittee process in general?

Honestly, it’s a little weak, because our timeline is so strange.

The basic RealCommittee process: nominations open early in the year, usually just after the YMAs. Committee members can begin nominating immediately thereafter; in a nonscientific poll of past members, consensus is that there is a tiny flurry of nominations, then some digital discussion, and then another little flurry before Annual. After Annual, nominations are usually fewer and of higher caliber, because the discussion at Annual has done so much to establish what the current committee values. The nominations continue until not too long before MidWinter (my recollection is that they closed on 12/31, but I couldn’t swear to that), and then committee members read and reread like mad for that last month leading up to the big discussions.

Here, we have an artificially short process, but it’s so late in the year that the short nomination window is somewhat balanced. Also, real committee members can nominate as many titles as they want, but we’re limiting it to force some hard thinking and because otherwise this all gets unwieldy.

Here’s our process:

• You may nominate up to five titles (again, RealCommittee members have no limit and might nominate from zero to infinity. But usually the numbers are WAY lower than infinity).
• All 2014 publications designated YA are eligible, whether or not they made our initial longlist or updated longlist or not, and regardless of whether we’ve written about them here.
• Nominations will be made via comments on this post.
• In your comment/nomination, please include title, author, and a brief statement which references or draws on the official criteria to explain why the book you are nominating deserves to win the Printz. (This is effectively the same as the process required to suggest a book for the RealPrintz for field nominators, which is pretty much the same as the formal nomination form committee members have filled out in the past, although we’ve cut out the brief annotation and the bibliographic data fields to make life easier.) For those of you who blog or post reviews on Goodreads or elsewhere online, feel free to link to any/all of those spaces in addition to or in lieu of the brief “why” statement.

Once nominations close (on 12/26), we’ll post results and narrow the nominations down to some reasonable number (10? 15? Let’s see how many discrete titles get more than one nomination) for discussion and a Pyrite vote, which will happen shortly before MidWinter and the actual Youth Media Awards.

*Humor, like beauty, often comes down to the eye of the beholder, so you might have a different word in mind here. I am sticking with humor.

The Pyrite is a mock Printz, done in good fun and with an eye towards shadowing, in some small way, the kind of reading and discussion the RealCommittee participates in. We are not affiliated with the actual Printz, although we think it rocks, which is why we do this. The RealPrintz is formally YALSA‘s Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and is sponsored annually by Booklist.

Filed under: Books to look for, Housekeeping, Process, Pyrite, RealCommittee