Tag Archives: piecingmetogether

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 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!

Cluster Review (December Wrap-Up): My Final Reads of 2020

Hello again! It’s been a while since I’ve written a review. Teaching in December is always a whirlwind (and teaching virtually is no exception). In order to get through these last few weeks of the year, I have been reading ravenously. It’s to the point that I’ve done little else in my free time. I decided to just embrace it and take a break from my blogging and reviewing, but now I’m back!

In this post, I will write very brief reviews of some of the stand-out books I managed to read in December. I finished my last two books of the year yesterday, which brings me to 100 total books read this year! I can’t believe it.

Many of the books I read this month were…