2009 Finalists: A terrific, heavenly, so good, not bad list

–A note from Anne Levy, Cybils Administrator:

I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad problem assembling this year’s Cybils finalists.  Most of our first-round judges decided to sign their summaries for the short-listed titles.  That meant inserting links to their blogs.  And that meant meandering through their recent posts, catching up with old friends, making some new discoveries…and generally running out the clock on 2009.

Seriously, I could raise procrastinating to an art form.

I wanted to leave comments thanking each of you for your hard work, but then this list would’ve been posted sometime in March.  So let me point out how this year’s panelists outdid even the amazing job done by last year’s bunch.

From our database:

  • Total eligible books across all categories: 939
  • Books read by at least 1 panelist: 931 which is 99.1% of the books
  • Books read by at least 2 panelists: 894 which is 95.2% of the books
  • Unread books: 8 which is 0.9% of the books

Eight books.  That’s it.  We only failed to read eight books–less than one percent of the nominated titles.  One word: Wow.

Like last year, I’m posting links to each page of finalists.  If you have trouble seeing a page, leave me a comment below.

Finalists listed after the jump, of course …

Easy Readers & Short Chapter Books
Fantasy & Science Fiction (Middle Grade)
Fantasy & Science Fiction (Young Adult)
Fiction Picture Books
Graphic Novels
Middle Grade Fiction
Non-Fiction Middle Grade/YA
Non-Fiction Picture Books
Poetry
Young Adult Fiction