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 [...]

Husband and I were talking about this with friends this weekend. Do you have a a place online that you frequent regularly–but that would surprise everyone to know about? (And no, I’m not talking about THOSE kind of websites. I’m a children’s librarian, for heaven’s sake! Please don’t spoil my innocence.)
My website confession was this one: [...]

So, when I get super busy (i.e. during the school week) I tend to read nonfiction. It’s perfect for my drained mind and snippets of time. Not that nonfiction is light reading. But I do read it differently than fiction. I begin with a quick flip through the illustrations and their captions. Then a scan of chapter titles [...]

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 [...]

You would think that after 14 years of working in schools I would know that I’m not actually going to get anything done in the library on my teacher work days.
Yes, it’s Labor Day, and I’m heading into work to finish up a few things for my classes tomorrow.
Anyway, one of my favorite things of [...]

(Although I flew west to get there. But whatever.) I’m back from China! We have literally thousands of photos and tons of what we think are amusing anecdotes, but I’ll keep it simple here:
Top 10 Memories
Climbing the Great Wall at Mutianyu. This was special for many reasons, one of which was that it was one [...]