According to my bookshelf on Goodreads, I read 143 books in 2009. It’s actually more than that because I didn’t start adding to Goodreads until partway through the year. The rest of my list is here. But anyway… I gave 18 of them 5 stars. They are:

So you’d think these would be my favorites of [...]

A few tidbits that made me smile so far this week.
I’m officially on vacation for the next 12 days!
The first grade teachers won a grant at our school to get Playaways for their classroom listening stations. Have you seen a Playaway? They’re like iPods for books. Very cool–and very popular with our students. I smile because [...]

When we were in China, we were often asked what dish our part of the country known for. This was a stumper. Um, venison? Lutefisk? Then we realized it wasn’t so much a dish as a food group we should be sharing. And we started talking about cheese. I don’t know why we didn’t think [...]

A librarian from Florida contacted me earlier this month. She is retiring and looking for new homes for some of her books.  She was wondering if I’d like her autographed copy of Adele Comandini’s 1956 biography of Dr. Kate Pelham Newcomb, Angel on Snowshoes. Autographed not by Adele Commandini, but by Dr. Kate.
Oh, my.
Who is this [...]

1. I’ve returned to LJ. (Some of you may remember me as the Livejournaler rhwojahn.) I abandoned all extraneous writing 3 years ago under the pressure of a new job and a school/library series to write. The series is done now. And I’m settled in my job. So I’m back—I really missed the writerly connections [...]

It’s not DONE done, or even Done done, but it’s done: I finished my draft of MALCOLM. Whew! It’s only been….um…a little over two years. Granted, I did have 13 other books under contract that I had to write during the first year and a half. But, yeah, I’m a slow writer. Both my boys [...]

I first read this phrase as a blog post over on the Book Whisperer’s blog. She talked about how everybody has a story about how they came to reading. (Or even, as I thought at the time, a story about how or why they didn’t come to reading. These stories, I suspect, may be even [...]