Completely Full Bookshelf

Happy New Year's, everyone! I hope every one of you enjoyed your holidays, and I wish all of you a happy, healthy new year—I'm mildly petrified to see what 2022 has in store (considering our hope for 2021 lasted exactly 6 days), but I know we'll all be able to handle whatever's in store! By the way, January 1 is an important day in the kidlit world—it's the day the finalists in the Cybils Awards are announced! You can view all of the finalists here —it's truly overwhelming how many great books were selected. And now that Round 1 is over and the finalists have been announced, Round 2 begins, which means I start my term as a Round 2 Judge for Elementary/Middle-Grade Nonfiction! (If you're curious, you can see which books I'll be reading here .) I encourage you to go check out the finalists—some of them were nominated by bloggers I know, so make sure to see if your nominee was selected! Moving into my review, I have been so spoiled lately, because I have j...

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...

If you celebrate, I hope you are having a delightful holiday filled with family (at least the ones you can stand!), love, maybe a little snow or some good food, and of course, NEW BOOKS!!! My Christmas book haul!!

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...

Update (12/13/2021): I have decided to take my first blogging break in quite a long time! I will not be posting reviews on Monday 12/20 or Monday 12/27—I will return on Monday 1/3 in the new year. In the meantime, my hope is to post a Thursday Thoughts post every Thursday from 12/16 to 1/6—I hope to see you there! (And you're welcome to subscribe using the options on the sidebar if you'd like to keep up with those posts.) Happy holidays! I hope everyone is doing well! I need to finish up a relatively easy essay today, and then I will be officially done with my college semester—I can't wait! For my creative writing course, part of my final assignment was to revise one of my short stories, which I have never actually done before—I discovered that revisions aren't as unpleasant as I thought, but I also discovered that wondering if you are actually making things worse  is also part of the revision process, which is...intriguing! Also, I need to clean out my bookshelves once...

Well, it happened again—I didn't have time to cram in a full book, so I'm doing another  picture book post! I will say, finals are happening, and I don't have any actual exams, but I do have several projects and general chaos going on, so I have a little bit of an excuse here. (On Saturday, I actually finished two of my five classes—hooray!) Anyway, let's dive into some picture book reviews! The One Thing You'd Save Written by Linda Sue Park and illustrated by Robert Sae-Heng Preview the illustrations on Amazon         This is less of a picture book and more of an illustrated book of poems, but since it's such a short read and has a single plot like most picture books do, I'm including it in this post! I've seen this book recommended by Cheriee Weichel at Library Matters , Sierra Dertinger at Books. Iced Lattes. Blessed , Linda Baie at TeacherDance , and possibly others who I unfortunately cannot recall. I wasn't thinking I'd have a chance to cra...

Before we get started, I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving—ours was very peaceful, and it was when I actually finished reading the book I'm reviewing today! Also, I want to quickly mention an album of music I've been enjoying lately. Aimee Mann, who I first started listening to around 2 years ago, just debuted a new album called Queens of the Summer Hotel , and it is awesome! You can go read  this interview to learn about it, but just know that it's brilliant and worth a listen (or several)! (And especially a listen in order, since the order really matters.) Finally, I have the winners of the Holiday Picture Book Giveaway to announce! The first winner is... Danielle! Danielle will be receiving a copy of Eyes That Kiss in the Corners . The second winner is... Carlo! Carlo will be receiving a copy of A Map into the World . The third winner is... Patricia (a fellow MMGM blogger at Children's Books Heal )! Patricia will be receiving a copy of A Big Mooncake for ...