The literary journeys of a 20-something, bilingual, elementary school teacher.
Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is about my most recent reads!
I’ve been a little behind on my blogging lately, but I’ve still been managing to read in my (minimal) spare time! Thank goodness for being able to listen to audiobooks during my commute to work. Here are the 10 books I’ve read most recently!
Welcome to Top 5 Saturday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by Devouring Books, and for this week’s challenge I’m reminiscing on the best books I read in 2018!
I couldn’t find the actual topic for this week, so I just decided to come up with my own! I tried brainstorming what kinds of bookish topics really interested me and that would be different than what I usually post about. I feel like I typically blog about books I’ve read more recently since it’s easier to write about books that are still fresh in my mind. However, there are so many great books that I’ve read before starting this blog!
2018 may seem like an oddly specific and random year to choose for this. However, this was a special reading year for me. During college, I went through a period where I nearly stopped reading. It wasn’t intentional, but as I was taking a gap year between college and grad school, I realized that this was a part of myself that I had kind of lost over the last few years. Reading has always been such an important part of my life, and it made me sad to realize how much I had let it go during college. Therefore, in 2018, I made an effort to begin reading again and take back my identity as a reader. That’s why this year-in-books stood out to me and why I decided to single it out for this post! The books on this list are the books that helped me fall back in love with reading as an adult. Also, just to clarify, these are books that I read in 2018, and not necessarily books that were published in 2018. And full disclosure – there are actually seven books on this list instead of five! I just couldn’t narrow it down any further. In no particular order, here are my top seven books of 2018!
Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is about colorful book covers!
Last week I focused on books that were predominantly a single color, so that when I put all of them together they made a rainbow of books! But this week, I got to search for books that had a myriad of colors on each cover! I couldn’t help but immediately think of children’s books; there are so many beautiful and colorful ones. So for this post, I’ll be focusing on middle grade books with colorful covers. Here are my top ten books (all of which I’ve read and enjoyed)!
Welcome to Top 5 Saturday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by Devouring Books, and this week’s challenge is about the longest books – either that you’ve read or that are on your TBR!
This was a really fun prompt! I do tend to enjoy long books, but I don’t read them very often because I find them so intimidating! Of course, once I get into the story I don’t even notice the length anymore, but just looking at the extreme girth of a long book can be a little nerve-wracking. Of these five books, I’ve read the first three and the last two are still on my TBR. Without further ado, here are my top five longest books!
Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is about books for every color of the rainbow!
Originally, this post was supposed to be about book titles that sound like they could be Crayola crayon colors, but I really couldn’t come up with anything for that! So instead, I decided to make a virtual rainbow out of book covers! Unfortunately, there are fewer than ten colors in the rainbow, but that just means I got to add in some extra ones! I definitely had to recite ROYGBIV in my head many times while coming up with this list in order to remember the colors and their order in the rainbow (does anyone else do this??). Also, most of these are books I’ve read and enjoyed, but a few of them are on my TBR! However, something they all have in common is that they all have stunning covers! Without further ado, here is my rainbow of books!
We should all be feminists: A controversial statement that shouldn’t be controversial.
This very short book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie certainly packs a punch. In this book, she gracefully tackles the concept of feminism and the stigma that surrounds it.
With many personal and relatable anecdotes, Adichie takes down the criticisms of feminism (both a a word and as a concept) one-by-one. I also found that there were many indirect connections to the arguments surrounding the BLM movement, which I liked! In the classroom we call that a text-to-world connection; I thought it was great that I was able to learn and think about so many things in such a short amount of time.
Spoiler-Free Review: “We Should All Be Feminists” is a short but powerful rebuttal to those who have misconceptions about the concept of feminism. In this quick manifesto, Ngozi Adichie shares many…
Welcome to Top 5 Saturday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by Devouring Books, and for this week’s challenge I’m using book titles to create an April acrostic poem!
This week’s prompt was originally about books with blood on the cover, but I couldn’t really think of any for that. However, April does have five letters, so I figured an acrostic poem would make a good prompt! The books I’m picking have nothing to do with April or spring or anything, I picked them solely based on the first letter of their titles (and also if I enjoyed them enough to flaunt them on here)! Without further ado, here are my top five books that make up an April acrostic poem:
Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is about books I’d gladly throw in the ocean!
Normally for these posts I focus on either books I’ve read and enjoyed or books that I’m still looking forward to reading. However, for this post I got to think back on books that I haven’t enjoyed so much. To be fair, even with books I don’t enjoy, I would never go as far to destroy any of them (or in this case, throw them in the ocean). Normally I would just donate them, but I have to say it was fun to reminisce and remember those books that made me feel… strong feelings. Without further ado, here are my top ten books that I’d gladly throw in the ocean!
What’s the most random job you’ve ever had?
One of the most random jobs I’ve had is working as a belayer at children’s parties. A belayer is someone who is there for safety while another person is rock-climbing; the rope runs through their belay device and they make sure everything is secure and safe for the person up in the air. I’m terribly afraid of heights and don’t enjoy rock climbing myself, so this was definitely a strange job for me to have. That being said, I think it’s fascinating to learn about people who do it professionally! And I wish I weren’t so afraid of it.
While mountaineering and rock climbing certainly aren’t the same thing, there are definitely some similarities. I was worried when I started reading Peak that I wouldn’t have too much interest in it. I’m afraid of heights, don’t have much knowledge of climbing of any kind, and don’t typically read books of the adventure genre. However, this book was such a pleasant surprise! I learned so much about mountaineering, and found the story really uplifting as well.
Spoiler-Free Review: “Peak” is an adventurous middle grade novel about a young boy named Peak who joins his father in an attempt to…
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)…
