The Goal

Long ago, I made a goal. I was 8 (at least that’s what I always tell people) and really liked reading. I believe it was my favorite thing to do. I was big into the Nancy Drew series (I read 61 of them in third grade alone) and Little House on the Prairie and anything Roald Dahl. I learned about the Newbery medal probably around that time since one of the Little House on the Prairie series received one and we read Island of the Blue Dolphins in my class at school. My mom’s library at home was also extensively stocked with tweener books and several had won the Newbery medal.

Enter a woman named Helen Halls. She was acquainted with my mom somehow. Apart from that, I have no idea how she became my reading mentor. She didn’t work at my school nor go to my church nor live close by and we were definitely not related. Whatever the connection, she found out I liked to read and gave me a bunch of book lists. One had a list of all the Newbery medals from 1922 to 1976, and later she gave me a list of all the Newbery medals and honors from 1922 to 1996. She would give me prizes when I finished a certain number of books from my list (usually a book) and even took me to Barnes and Noble once when I reached a particular goal, but talked me into getting a reference book about Greek mythology rather than the Roald Dahl book I wanted. :(

One fateful day (or maybe it was over several fateful days), I decided that as long as I had the list of Newberys, I ought to read them all. I liked checking things off of lists and I loved all of the Newberys I had read. Goal set, I began diligently reading books with the gold or silver medal on the cover. I fell in love with Number the Stars, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, The Giver, Banner in the Sky, and the list goes on. I think I envisioned completing this goal by the time I finished elementary school. Or maybe middle school. High school? I now have a graduate degree and am still not finished. In my defense, there are currently 386 books that have either received the John Newbery medal or received an honor from the committee. I am not a fair-weather-only-read-the-medal-winner kind of Newbery fan. I read them all. And as such, at age 27, I still primarily read books intended for 12-year-olds. And I am totally fine with that.

I have met with some opposition. In a discussion with peers in a high school English class, it came out that I read significantly more books than the other kids in my class. A girl (not a friend) then asserted, “Yeah, but Jenny only reads kids’ books.” Gasp! How did she know? Honestly, I was a little ashamed when I realized I hadn’t been devoting any time to the classics that *apparently* my classmates had all read. I tried to read some classics at that point (and of course, there are some that I love) and have dabbled in “good literature” since then, but I always return to my love. I also dated a boy who tried to discourage me from reading the old Newberys on more than one occasion, which only served to heighten my desire to achieve it and fuel my belief that we were not meant to be together (‘twas true).

 I have met with issues of accessibility as well. It turns out that out-of-print children’s books from the 40s are not available in most libraries even if they received a medal. I make a new search for all my remaining Newberys at every library I visit. Thankfully, BYU had a great juvenile library and I found many of the ancient hard-to-find Newberys in its catacombs. I checked out at least two dozen books from BYU that had never been checked out before. Some did not even have a barcode on them (which always threw the student librarians into an anxious mess until I directed them to the drawer where new barcodes were kept and assured them I had done this before). Despite this great library and other university libraries I have checked, there are a consistent 30 or so that have remained out of my reach over the years. They have not caused me much anxiety since there were always other Newberys that were available that I had not yet read. Until now. Last month, I finished A Pageant of Chinese History, a book that took me seven months to read (but really). It was a history of China from the beginning of time until 1935, when it was written (I give you this detail in an attempt to assure you of the book’s boringness and thus excuse the incredible length of time it took me to complete it). Anyway, this book was significant not for its content nor my feelings toward it (largely indifferent), but because it was the last available Newbery at the University of Georgia library that I had not yet read. Suddenly, I discovered that I did not have a single Newbery to read and not a place in the world to find one. That’s when I used the internet.

Shockingly (I feel even this adverb is an understatement), I had never thought to search for Newberys online before. I recognize that the internet wasn’t really even a thing when I first set my goal, but it has been for a really long time. I guess I never needed it because I could always find one in a library. Whatever the reason, I have never before searched for my old Newberys online (but I always looked up the new ones online – anxiously, at the end of January) and I made several AMAZING discoveries. Firstly (and most entertainingly), at least four of the Newberys on my list are spelled wrong (Helen Halls!) and I have been entering them into library databases incorrectly for 20 years. In fact, after discovering that Le Lun, Lad of Courage is actually Li Lun, Lad of Courage, I looked it up on the University of Georgia database and discovered that they do have it (in the repository, of course)! Ha! Who knew that one letter could be so dang important?

My second discovery was equally as exciting. There is some crazy internet site dedicated to celebrating women authors that has the FULL text of a few Newberys written by women from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, five of which I cannot find in any library. Christmas!!

And finally, the BLOG. I found this blog written by who knows who with a stupidly clever title about Old and New Berries wherein the author reviews each Newbery she reads and blogs about it! First thought: WHY DID I NEVER THINK OF THAT? Second thought: It’s still not too late. OK, it is too late. I could go back and read them all over again (goal: before I die?) just to blog about them, but we all know that is silly, and I just don’t remember most of them enough to give a good review of them from memory. And yet, the idea of this blog won’t leave me alone. Maybe because I want evidence that I did (will), in fact, achieve this goal. So that someday, in the far future, when I plead and beg the Newbery committee to allow me to join their ranks without any library science education or librarian experience and I have only my word that I know Newberys like nobody else knows Newberys, I’ll have something to show for it. It may even be my pride, because despite the fact that I can’t think of any real connection between my pride and this blog right now, it is the reason I do a lot of things and is thus probably a motivator.

Thus, I give you: The Newbery Goal (I could think of nothing as clever as whats-her-face blogger, so I decided to go with simple).