Completely Full Bookshelf

I'm back again , with my second consecutive post after Max's Great Hiatus of 2022! First off the bat, I'm using this post as a chance to announce something exciting... the #LiveLikeABookChallenge! This is a challenge I'll be hosting in January that gives you the chance to bring a book you love to life...and if you're curious what that means, click the big, dramatic link below to skip to the end of the post and see the details! Jump to the #LiveLikeABookChallenge below! Now for reviews! This week, I'm reviewing one picture book ( A Spoonful of Frogs ) completely from memory, because it was due back to the library several months ago and I read it like 20 minutes before returning it. And then I'm reviewing three more picture books I've had checked out for an obscene amount of time—I've been renewing them, so they're not overdue, but still...they need to get out of my house so other people can enjoy them. Oh, and these rev...

Hello everyone! If you're reading this on Monday, I'd like to wish you a happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! This past college semester, I took a class where we read King's Letter from Birmingham Jail , and he made a very profound point that I wanted to share. He discussed people's insistence that Black people just remain "patient" and wait for change to arrive naturally, before pointing out that change does not, in fact, just arrive over time—it takes specific actions on the part of the public to make it happen. I think so many of us nowadays sometimes feel like we need to be patient and allow change to be made incrementally, but we can see that the decades and decades Black people waited for change actually resulted in stagnancy and no change  until they started a movement in the 1960s. I think it's worth remembering with many of today's issues that maybe we don't need to wait for change at all—maybe we need to demand change now , because that may...

For MMGM, I am recommending The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo (author of other books I have enjoyed, such as those here and here ), with illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline. Here's the publisher's description: Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a china rabbit named Edward Tulane. The rabbit was very pleased with himself, and for good reason: he was owned by a girl named Abilene, who treated him with the utmost care and adored him completely. And then, one day, he was lost. Kate DiCamillo takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the depths of the ocean to the net of a fisherman, from the top of a garbage heap to the fireside of a hoboes' camp, from the bedside of an ailing child to the bustling streets of Memphis. And along the way, we are shown a true miracle -- that even a heart of the most breakable kind can learn to love, to lose, and to love again. THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER is now available in paperback! This ...