Introduction

Welcome! This site will track my progress through reading all of the Newbery Honor books, with a post for each as I finish.

If you’re not familiar: every year since 1922, the American Library Association awards the John Newbery Medal to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” from the previous year. The committee may also award several runners-up with a Newbery Honor designation. This blog is for the second group.

If that seems like a weird choice, well… I’ve already read all of the Medal winners. My wife and I made it a challenge for ourselves in the COVID days, and it turns out getting through the 100 or so books doesn’t even take a full year, even if you’re reading other, grown-up books on the side. I’ve kept up with the new winners in the few years since, and last year I even followed along with the School Library Journal’s Heavy Medal blog and their mock Newbery process, which involved a short list of something like 15 books. 

I don’t read middle-grade fiction in any other context than Newbery stuff, but it’s been fun, so I thought I’d take another trip through the history of the award. This one will take longer – there’s only one medal winner per year, but there’s usually a handful of honors. It looks like there are currently 338 books on the list, although more will be added before I’m done.

I did my read-through of the winners in chronological order. On the one hand, it’s interesting to follow the development of what’s considered the best in children’s literature through the years. On the other, a lot of those early-decade books were not good, so there were some long stretches of unpleasant reading. This time, I’m mixing it up — I literally put a random number column on my booklist and hit sort, so I’m doing whatever that gives me. We also bought copies of all of the winners as we got to them, and I think I’m doing that again. (It may be hard to track down copies of some of these, we’ll see.)

Looking through the list, I think I read about 15 of them as a kid, which is something like half the number of winners I had read before I started that list. I thought it’d be more; I read a lot as a kid, and figured there’d be a dense run of the 80s and 90s I’d have made it through, but not really. About half are either Laura Ingalls Wilder books (she won 5 Honors!) or ones from the Heavy Medal mock I read this past December. My plan is to re-read all of them but the ones from last year, but who knows how I’ll feel when I get closer to the end. I really loved Pedro Martín’s Mexikid, maybe I’ll do that one anyway.

So, here goes nothing. The first on my list is the 2004 Honor book Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes.