{"id":243,"date":"2009-01-26T10:22:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-26T17:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=243"},"modified":"2009-01-26T10:22:31","modified_gmt":"2009-01-26T17:22:31","slug":"and-the-winner-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=243","title":{"rendered":"And the winner is&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Graveyard-Book-Neil-Gaiman\/dp\/0060530928\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1232990405&amp;sr=1-1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-52\" title=\"The Graveyard Book\" src=\"http:\/\/matthewkirby.com\/kirbside\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/graveyard-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Graveyard Book\" width=\"150\" height=\"226\" \/><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Graveyard-Book-Neil-Gaiman\/dp\/0060530928\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1232990405&amp;sr=1-1\" target=\"_blank\">The Graveyard Book<\/a><\/span><\/em> by Neil Gaiman won the 2009 Newbery Medal this morning.\u00a0 I am absolutely thrilled.\u00a0 It was my pick this year, but I didn&#8217;t think it was eligible based on some internet rumblings.\u00a0 You see, there&#8217;s an award exclusion criterion for works or portions of works previously published, and a chapter of <em>The Graveyard Book<\/em> appeared as a short story in 2008.\u00a0 Based on that, there were several who thought Gaiman&#8217;s book would be ineligible.\u00a0 But apparently, the internet rumblings were wrong, as internet rumblings frequently are.\u00a0 <em>The Graveyard Book<\/em> is everything a Newbery should be.\u00a0 Storytelling of the highest quality.\u00a0 And even though popularity should not be a consideration, this book has already spent weeks and weeks atop the NYT bestsellers list.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure it will be made into a movie shortly, like Gaiman&#8217;s previous children&#8217;s book <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.coraline.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Coraline<\/em><\/a><\/span> (which you should read, if you haven&#8217;t).<\/p>\n<p>Check out Gaiman&#8217;s first thoughts <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/journal.neilgaiman.com\/2009\/01\/insert-amazed-and-delighted-swearing.html\" target=\"_blank\">on winning the award<\/a><\/span>, and I&#8217;d also like to point you to <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mousecircus.com\/videotour.aspx\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Graveyard Book<\/em> video tour<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 You can watch Gaiman read the <em>entire<\/em> book to a live audience, for free; an extraordinarily generous thing for a writer to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman won the 2009 Newbery Medal this morning.\u00a0 I am absolutely thrilled.\u00a0 It was my pick this year, but I didn&#8217;t think it was eligible based on some internet rumblings.\u00a0 You see, there&#8217;s an award exclusion criterion for works or portions of works previously published, and a chapter of The [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mtjQ-3V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}