Completely Full Bookshelf

This is so nerdy, I'm not sure if anyone else will even want to read it, but it's one of those things I have to put out into the world, because I've been having so many thoughts  about it recently! (And FYI, Thursday Thoughts are not making a permanent return—just a temporary one, for this post!) The facts: Rebecca Stead is an author of middle grade fiction. Besides two novels cowritten with Wendy Mass (one coming this summer!), she's written five novels solo: First Light , When You Reach Me  (winner of the Newbery Medal), Liar & Spy , Goodbye Stranger , and The List of Things That Will Not Change . Importantly, Rebecca Stead is also  my favorite author of all time (which isn't news if you've been reading this blog for a while). I believe I've read Goodbye Stranger  8.5 times (and reviewed it 3 times), and I've read When You Reach Me  somewhere around 5 times. I was actually re-reading When You Reach Me  during the middle/end of this college semester...

It's time for my last Thursday Thoughts post until the summer! (I'm skipping the post I had considered for 1/13, because I'm tired—what can I say?) Also, before my post, I must share some completely random news: I just found out that one of my favorite graphic novelists, Svetlana Chmakova, is coming out with the sequel to Awkward , Brave , Crush , and Diary , called Enemies , in September! Here are the details. It's a long wait, but it will be so  worth it! Today, I'm posting my second-ever Reviews Revisited post, in which I look back over a 6-month period of books to see if they ended up being as memorable as I thought they would be when I reviewed them. Rather than looking at the previous 6 months (which would include books at the end that I had literally just finished), I actually look at the 6 months before that, so this post covers January – June 2021 rather than July – December 2021 (I'll look at those books in July 2022). Let's dive in! (Please not...

It's time for another round of Thursday Thoughts! I have decided to switch the topics of this week and next week's posts, since I'm short on time today and this topic will take less time to write about. It's about to be 2022, and because I've been on break, I've made a few changes in my reading life that I hope to continue throughout the year! I figured I'd share a little bit about them in a post together. Updates on my book-hoarding It's been about a year since I finally collected the many, many  books I had scattered around the house and put them into a single set of bookcases in my room ( which you can see here ). Well, they look pretty empty in those photos, but after a year of purchasing more books than is perhaps reasonable, they had gotten pretty cramped! So I took some time a couple of weeks ago to sort through everything once again, and I ended up donating five bags of books to my local public library, leaving me with much more space (even after...

Hello everyone! First of all, I wanted to mention that I have finally organized my Goodreads account —I created it over the summer, but I barely logged into it the last few months, so I finally took some time to get it back in order. I’ll discuss what I did in one of my upcoming Thursday Thoughts posts, but I figured I would remind you that the account exists and is no longer an insane mess in case you want to stop by! And now for the main purpose of this post! Somehow, I have never once reviewed any of Sandra Boynton’s books on this blog, and that is an extreme tragedy that must be rectified ASAP, since my family has been devouring her books since I was little! Her mix of brilliant humor and whimsical illustrations makes her books just as entertaining for older readers as they are for younger ones. So I am recommending three of her books today, two Christmas-related and one not—but as I unfortunately discovered, both  Christmas-related books appear to be out of print. (I knew Chri...

Thursday Thoughts has returned! (At least temporarily—I don't plan to continue these posts after 1/6, but while I'm on break, they're back.) Since I'm taking a break from reviewing books for the last two Mondays of 2021, I figured we could take some time to look back over the reading I accomplished this year! Broader trends First of all, except for the last two weeks of 2021, I reviewed a book  every single week  of the year, which I believe is a new record! Those of you who have only known me since I joined #IMWAYR have no idea how comically flaky of a blogger I used to be, but when I joined in March 2020 (right as the pandemic started) with a review of Ramona Blue , I actually started a streak of weekly posts that ended with the break I'm taking now. So although I don't have any data on my reading in previous years, you can infer that this year was a more successful year in reading than any other year since I started this blog (except maybe 2020). Another majo...