Attention, opinionated readers!  Now is your time to make your opinions known!  For perhaps the first time in your lovely lives (or at least, for the first time in mine), you have the chance to nominate books that could go on to win an award.  Yup, I’m talking about the Cybils–Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards.  You can nominate your favorite 2010 books in any of the following categories:

• Easy Readers
• Short Chapter Books
• Fantasy/Science Fiction — separate noms for middle-grade and young adult
• Fiction Picture Books
• Graphic Novels — separate noms or middle-grade and young adult
• Middle Grade Fiction
• Nonfiction (MG/YA)
• Nonfiction Picture Books
• Poetry
• Young Adult Fiction

Nominations are now open, so you can herewith proceed to www.cybils.com to make your choices known.  You don’t have to be a famous blogger or anything.  Just someone who reads.

The rules (pased from the Cybils website.)

• One book per genre per person. Have two young adult books you love? Get a best friend, co-worker or random stranger to nominate the other one.
• Anyone may nominate. Anyone! This means you. And me. And that person over there, and the guy who cut you off in traffic. Or that kid you won’t sit next to at lunch. Anyone!
• The book must have been published between the last contest and this close of this one. In other words, between Oct. 16, 2009 and Oct. 15th 2010.
• The book can be bilingual, but one of the languages must be English.
• As long as a book has a nomination, it’ll be considered. You don’t need to try and nominate it over and over. The nomination form will kick it back to you anyway.

Ooh, and if you want to leave a note here saying what you’re nominating, that would be cool!

I will divulge here that in YA, I plan to nominate Every Little Thing in the World, by Nina de Gramont, about a pregnant teenager who’s sent on a canoeing trip in the wilds of Canada for unrelated misdemeanors and spends the summer coming to terms with her friendships, herself, and the choice she must make.  I thought the setting was majestically presented (not an easy thing to do), that the protagonist’s relationship with her best friend and others on the trip were realistically developed, and the will-she-or-won’t-she plot kept me on the edge of my seat. I really didn’t know what she was going to do, and I liked how the choice seemed both surprising and inevitable, as they say.

I don’t know what I’ll nominate in the other categories, as my pick for middle-grade, One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia, has already been nabbed, and to be honest, I don’t totally know which faves in other categories are well and truly 2010!  So I will do my research and report back.

Go forth and nominate!  It’s your right as a citizen of the world!