Category: book lists
-
2018 End of the Year Book Survey
Inspired by Akilah’s End of Year Book Survey, I’m joining The Perpetual Pageturner’s annual event and looking back at my own year of reading. Number of books read: 401 (including picture books)Genre you read the most from: Picture Books and Graphic Novels Best Book You Read in 2018? I intentionally didn’t rank my 18 favorites…
-
18 Favorite Reads of 2018
2018 was a good year for reading. While I didn’t have as many “this is the BEST BOOK EVER” reading experiences as I sometimes do, I did like nearly everything I read. So there may not have been as many highs, but there weren’t that many lows either. With picture books included, I read over…
-
What to Read Next If You Loved One for the Murphys by Lynda Mulally Hunt
Lynda Mulally Hunt’s One for the Murphys is one of my preservice teachers’ favorite reads each semester. I book talk it once at the beginning of the semester, and then it’s passed around and I don’t see it again for 15 weeks. I do hear about it quite a bit, though, as students are browsing…
-
What Diverse Kids and YA Mysteries Should I Read for My Summer Book Gap Challenge?
I am still working on my #MustReadin2018 reading challenge as well as the reading challenge I created with my Children’s Literature students, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for just one more. My Children’s Literature students alerted me to a glaring book gap in my own reading life: mysteries. They kept asking for recommendations,…
-
#MustReadin2018: A Crowd-Sourced List
One of the joys of my reading life is making elaborate reading plans and long lists. I have never seen a reading challenge I don’t want to join or scanned a book list I don’t want to complete. But it is also a truth of my reading life that I hate assigned reading and…
-
#MustReadin2017 Spring Update
I love making #MustRead lists, but I’ll be honest: that’s usually where it ends for me. If I manage to read three or four titles on the list, that’s a very successful reading experience for me. There’s something about putting a book on a list and deciding to read it that makes me lose interest…
-
Top Ten Hidden Gems for Middle-School Readers
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. This week’s topic? Top Ten Underrated Titles or Hidden Gems. What makes a book underrated? I was planning to be guided by my own intuition, but Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers took a statistical approach that seems far more sound:…
-
#MustReadin2017: An Experiment in Crowdsourcing My Reading Life
Much as I love #MustRead lists and much as I love the #MustRead community, I told myself I was going to sit 2017 out. After all, I have a dismal record when it comes to actually reading the books on my annual #MustRead lists. I think it has something to do with my resistance to…
-
Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Favorite Books of 2016
It’s time for my favorite post of the year: my top ten favorite reads of the year. Brendan Wenzel’s They All Saw a Cat is by far my favorite picture book of the year. Its simple concept (the cat looks different depending on what kind of animal sees it) contains one of the most important lessons…
-
10 Bookish Facts About Me: Slice of Life #sol16
Today’s Slice of Life was inspired by The Broke and Bookish’s Top Ten Tuesday feature. Usually Top Ten Tuesdays focus on book lists, but this week the focus is on readers. Writing this post, I was reminded how productive a provided title and a little bit of structure can be. I tried to share new, never-before-shared-on-the-blog facts this…
the dirigible plum 