Tag Archives: otherwordsforhome

Top 5 Saturday: Books with Diverse Characters

Welcome to Top 5 Saturday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by Devouring Books, and this week’s challenge focuses on books with diverse characters.

It was really hard to narrow it down for this one! I love reading books with a diverse cast of characters, and I’m especially particular about this when choosing books to use in my classroom. Therefore, this is going to be kind of an eclectic list of books! I tried to include a broad selection of books that ranges from middle grade, to young adult, to contemporary fiction. Without further ado, here are my top five books with diverse characters (in no particular order)…

Top 10 Tuesday: Characters Whose Jobs I Wish I Had

Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is about characters whose jobs I wish I had!

This was another hard one for me! I don’t know why I’ve been struggling so much with these lately. For this one, I read a lot of children’s and young adult books, and frequently the adults in these books are teachers since school is such an important part of adolescence. However, I can’t pick those because I already am a teacher! For this one, I decided to be pretty flexible with the prompt. I don’t have the skills to do the majority of these jobs, but if there is any aspect of the job that I like then I decided to include it in this list. With that being said, here are my top ten (in no particular order)!

Top 5 Saturday: Books with a Unique Format

Welcome to Top 5 Saturday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by Devouring Books, and this week’s challenge focuses on books with a unique format.

I had a lot of fun with this one! I enjoy finding books to read that are out of my comfort zone, and one way I do that is by finding books to read with a format that is “atypical” for me. For this post, I decided to sort it by format rather than by specific book, as there were several categories for which I was able to think of multiple examples. So here we go! Here are my top five categories of unique formats for books (in no particular order)!

Top 8 Physical Books of 2020

As rough as 2020 was, being stuck in quarantine sure did make more time for reading! Without my commute to work, I listened to fewer audiobooks but was also able to get to more books in my physical TBR pile! Even with the reading slump I hit this summer (amidst pandemic wedding planning), I still managed to read an astounding (for me, anyway) 100 books, with many of my favorites being from the very beginning and very end of the year.

I have my top books divided up among physical books and audiobooks (since this greatly impacts the reading experience). I considered dividing the lists by genre or by target audience (adult, young adult, children’s), but decided to go by format instead since a great book can be written for any audience and from any genre. I also didn’t commit to a specific number of books to acknowledge for each category, I just identified my standout reads from the year and ranked them within that range.

Without further ado, here are my top physical books of 2020!