Why is the Newbery medal treated as nearly infallible, unlike every other literary award? From critics to book group members, from solitary readers to bookstore owners, bibliophiles love to quarrel with the choices of those who pick the Pulitzer, the Booker and the Oprah moment winners. Nobody assumed that Susan Sontag's "In America" was spectacular just because it won the most recent National Book Award for fiction; we know that while some prizewinning books are extraordinary, others are at best forgettable. But when the Newbery medal gets awarded to "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published in the United States during the preceding year," adult readers suspend their own judgment and accept that of the experts. Newbery medalists immediately sell 100,000 copies -- bought by every children's library in the country and by many parents and grandparents without a second thought -- and stay in print forever.

We should know better. Most of the people I've asked remember the Newbery medalists as the "boring" books, the books that stayed on display at the library because no one checked them out. There's a reason for that memory. No one who reads for pleasure and challenge and joy would willingly subject themselves to such demeaningly tedious books as the 1959 winner "The Witch of Blackbird Pond," the 1962 winner "The Bronze Bow," the 1974 book "The Slave Dancer" or the 1998 snorer "Out of the Dust." Their neon-bright messages flash clearly: religious prejudice is wrong; slavery is wrong; poverty is bad. Yes, inspired authors -- for instance, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison and John Steinbeck -- can and have written gripping, even brilliant fictions about subjects like witch hunts, slavery and dustbowl poverty. So why, instead of delightful and powerful fictions, give children these other insomnia-curing books written in terrifyingly earnest and plodding prose, full of stick figures -- books as free of passion as a bad educational documentary, books that could turn an imaginative child into a dedicated television fan?

Worse, while eat-your-spinach books were getting Newbery medals, truly brilliant books were overlooked. Instead of "The Bronze Bow," the 1962 Newbery could have gone to Norton Juster's "The Phantom Tollbooth;" instead of the forgotten title "Shadow of a Bull," 1965's award could have gone to Louise Fitzhugh's "Harriet the Spy."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"