I have reached a significant milestone in my Newbery Challenge.

As I sourced books for the challenge, I found it was much easier to find the books that won the Newbery Medal than those that were just Honor books.

One of the reasons is that at the library most of the Newbery Medal winners had stickers on them so it was easy to find them. I would simply go to the shelves and pick up a handful of winners and check them out.

Of course, it soon became evident that I was moving quickly down the path toward finishing the medal winners. My local library branch did not have all of them, but I was able to request the missing ones from other branches. Our county library system had all but one of the medal winners in their collection. The only missing book was the 1938 medal winner, The White Stag by Kate Seredy. I was able to request it from Link+.

Early this month I realized I had less than 20 medal winners left and that if I concentrated on them I could complete them  by the end of the year.

Here are the last eleven books. As you can see in the picture some of them were short books and some of them were quite lengthy. A couple of weeks ago I requested all of them from the library so that I could finish up over the holidays. I was also a bit embarrassed when I found one of these titles on my own shelves while looking for another book. Not the first time I have checked out a book from the library that I had on my own shelf.

I quickly read through the shorter books and saved the longer ones for last. This evening I finished the last of the Newbery Medal books, at least until next year.

The last book was Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool. This great novel won the medal in 2011, so is one of the most recent winners. I really liked this book as it was set in Kansas and was Historical Fiction. The author wove together a wonderful story of a young girl who was learning about both her past and the past of the town she was living in. Definitely one of my favorites of the Newbery winners.

Now on to the next part of the challenge. I may divide it into two parts.

As I mentioned in my previous post about The Newbery Challenge, the Honor book award was not implemented until 1971. However, the previous runner-ups for each year were retroactively named Honor books.

I have found that the Honor books for the 20’s and 30’s are not going to be easy to source. I will need to request most of them from outside my library system.

I will most likely concentrate on the recent Honor books as they will be easy to find.

You may occasionally see posts that are based on Newbery books. I wrote a few of them so far and have a few more in mind.

Here are a few of the ones that I have written recently:

The Bronze Bow

Shadow of a Bull

The One and Only Ivan

Now I need to reflect and come up with a list of my favorite Newbery Medal winners.

Do you have a favorite one?

Steven