Completely Full Bookshelf

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas if they celebrate it! I know I did, mostly because I got NEW BOOKS!!!  I spent the week cleaning out my bookshelves in preparation, largely because "Completely Full Bookshelf" had become "Completely Full Bookshelf In The Family Room, Two Completely Full Bookshelves In The Upstairs Room, Desk In My Room Covered In Various Piles of Books, Bookshelf In My Room Completely Full of Books I Neither Needed To Read Nor Wanted To Keep, And Pile On My Dresser Of Books I Actually Wanted To Read But Had Now Read And Had Since Started Filling With Books I Had Already Read Because I Had No Space In The Aforementioned Locations." (Not the catchiest blog title, if you ask me.) I have since gotten my collection of books stuffed into the bookcase in my room, alongside three (yes, three) piles on the floor which I will put into another bookcase once it ships (along with the picture rails I will use to display my all-time favorite books). For my...

Do you ever sit down to write something, try to phrase it five different ways, and then give up and start complaining about it to the readers of your blog? No? Just me? Okay. I believe I'll start this post off with a lengthy series of random, disjointed, and irrelevant spiels: All I want for Christmas...is two different shots so that I can leave my house without worrying about horrible disease and death for the first time in nine months! I was trying to help my parents buy one of the new Xboxes online, and the fact that we actually got one for the MSRP and a shipping date in mid-January is nothing short of a Christmas miracle! Best Buy's website makes you wait again and again and again  for 45 minutes as new batches of stock appear, failing to mention that they won't ship it and those batches are not within 250 miles of you. Amazon's website gave me a true constellation of error messages—I got error messages in the cart saying that the item was not available, I got the ...

I hope everyone is holding up OK as the winter holidays approach! (So...much...online...shopping...) I'd like to share a teensy bit of news before we get to today's review. A few days ago, Disney held their "Investor Day" when they basically announce all of the things  and cause an Internet spectacle to prove to their investors how beloved they are, and although I was personally most excited by the new Disney and Pixar animated movies (just 454 days until Turning Red !), there are a few book-related adaptations coming soon! Flora & Ulysses , a movie based on the book by Kate DiCamillo , is coming to Disney+ on February 19 (it sounds like they have changed the plot somewhat, so I'll hope for the best, I suppose). They are also going to put a new Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie on Disney+ in 2021, this one animated instead of live-action. Finally, they reminded us that they had apparently already announced a show based on the Mysterious Benedict Society series , als...

For #IMWAYR, I am writing my post about the graphic novel Witchlight  by Jessi Zabarsky in an unusual format: as a letter to the author of the book herself (not necessarily for her to read, but just because it makes sense). I hope you will soon see why. Before we get to that, I should mention that this book is appropriate for MG readers, but since it is a romance story, I classified it as YA. Dear Jessi Zabarsky,           Hello. I am a book blogger "named" Completely Full Bookshelf. You might know me as—OK, never mind, there is no chance you know me. That is fine. Normally, I am an overenthusiastic book reviewer, but I have had a tendency in the past to, well, skewer the books that have flaws that upset me. I have realized now that doing this is immature, and I want to do better. So here I am. (I'm sure you're not thrilled to keep reading, but I promise I will try to be kind.)           I am writing this letter because Witchlight ...

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving and was able to make the best of celebrating in this pandemic! Today I am reviewing yet another absolutely, stunningly gorgeous book, The Girl Who Drank the Moon  by Kelly Barnhill.           I seriously do not know how I have managed to read so many stunning books this year! I bought a copy of The Girl Who Drank the Moon  before it won the Newbery a few years ago. Reading it now, I thought, "This really should have won the Newbery!" Then I looked, and it did win. And thank goodness for that, because I have rarely seen a book that so clearly deserves medals and praise to be heaped upon it. I was going to write a synopsis of this book modeled after the style of one chapter where each sentence begins with "Once upon a time...," but I do not have enough energy to make that sound beautiful and not pretentious, so I'll stick to what I know. The Girl Who Drank the Moon  is several different, beautiful stories s...

Normally, I would review a YA book this week, but I didn't read one because I am super-crazy-ridiculously-busy (I'm already writing this post late at night and a day later than I planned to). With that in mind, I do have an MG review for today, of the fabulous graphic-novel biography Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Journey to Justice , written by Debbie Levy and illustrated by Whitney Gardner.           Most of you probably know that, as yet another awful moment of 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the beloved second female U.S. Supreme Court justice, passed away several weeks ago. Her seat on the Supreme Court (which she held until her passing) has been filled by another woman (though a far more conservative one), Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett's appointment was marked by drama (as is anything Donald Trump is involved in), but, as I said in my post when RBG passed , it is important not to let the drama overshadow Ginsburg's legacy. Special thanks to #IMWAYR blogger Sh...

OK, before we get to today's review, I have to vent. Today, in our house, we kept hearing a smoke alarm chirping as if the battery was low. Normally, smoke alarms chirp every few seconds, but this one was really irregular. Sometimes it would chirp, and then it would go silent. So my family and I ran around the house, trying to find this alarm every time we heard it. But it was absolutely bizarre: every time we ran toward the sound, it sounded like it was coming from a different place. We went upstairs, but then it was downstairs. We went downstairs, and then it was on the other side of the house. We went to the other side of the house, and then it was upstairs again. We. Could. Not. Find. It. We spent hours  running around, pulling batteries out of five smoke alarms, putting them back in, testing them, wondering if our whole interconnected system was broken, Googling articles about how to find a chirping smoke alarm, and generally agonizing. And then—this is what really kills me—my...

YES!!! I am so glad that Biden and Harris have won the U.S. presidency/vice-presidency. I try not to get political on this blog, but it's hard to spotlight and value different perspectives in books when the president is screaming hateful rhetoric for four years straight. Obviously, this win will not solve all of America's problems, and depending on the results of the Senate elections, it may not allow for any real policy improvements, but at least we can sleep at night knowing a reasonable person has the nuclear codes and veto power. This is an unusual post, because I didn't read a YA book to review for my #IMWAYR-only post this week, so I have a picture book instead: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse  by Charlie Mackesy. I also decided to post two reviews of movie adaptations of books I reviewed a while back. I actually meant to put these up around 3 months ago, but I was going to wait until I had time to watch the movie adaptation of The Hate U Give  with m...