Completely Full Bookshelf

I now have one week of in-person college under my belt, and I'm feeling pretty good! Thankfully, almost everyone is masked (even over their nose—imagine that!), and I'm of course armed with a KN95 mask and Clorox wipes for the desks, so I haven't worried too much about COVID-19 exposure. And my classes seem like they will be a lot of work, but quite interesting too—if I can just find the balance between working enough to actually learn something but not working so much that I can't finish any of my assignments, it will be a good semester! Moving along, it's time for another round of Picture Book Pandemonium! I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my underfunded public library just doesn't have the latest and greatest picture books on Libby, so I picked out a lot of books that I hadn't seen bloggers recommend just because Libby had them. And I couldn't help myself, so we have 5 picture books today instead of 4—let's get started! The Rab...

Well, it's happening—on Monday, I start in-person college classes for the first time in my life. Accordingly, I will be wildly busy and frantic for a while, but considering I posted a book review every single week of my first year of college last year (which was all-virtual), I don't think my blog will suffer too much. But you can expect that Thursday Thoughts posts will be on hiatus, and I probably won't have time to stop by people's blogs during the week (although I will still be diligent about commenting on your MMGM and #IMWAYR posts). Blogging is a nice respite from the chaos of college, so I will look forward to sharing oodles of book reviews as always in the months to come! In other news, I bought a bunch of new graphic novels using gift-card money! A few are already out, most of them come out in September and October, and one comes out in February and one in April. It'll be nice to have some cool books just magically showing up on my doorstep! Aggravatingly,...

I realize it's Friday (not the ideal time for Thursday Thoughts), but this is when I could get this post put together, so here it is! Also, I think it bears noting that this is likely my last regular Thursday Thoughts post until December—I'm going to be frantically busy once again with college classes starting this Monday. So what do I have for today? Well, a few weeks ago when I reviewed Goodbye Stranger  by Rebecca Stead for the third (yes, third) time, I realized that, even if I couldn't re-read the book all the time, I wanted a way to re-experience some of the passages from the book whenever I wanted. Thus began my crafts project, in which the aim was to create a display for my copy of Goodbye Stranger  that would showcase some of my favorite quotes from the book AND match the aesthetic of the book's beautiful cover! (Please note: The quotes on my display contain SPOILERS , so I recommend not reading them within the images if you can help it.) Let's begin! Step...

I hope everyone is doing well today! As back-to-school season begins, I just want to take a moment and thank all the wonderful educators I've met in the blogging world, as well as all the wonderful educators I haven't  met at all, for their tireless work in shaping the kids of today and tomorrow into better, smarter people, in spite of being under-paid, under-appreciated, and under-protected from the pandemic. I wish you all good luck!!! I also want to mention that I did some spiffing-up on the blog this past week, so the menu and sidebar have a different layout that is hopefully a little more intuitive—I realized that things I wanted people to see were buried in sidebar widgets or other pages, while things I didn't care much about were taking up space in the main menu. Let me know if the new layout works for you or is totally confusing and awful! (Update [8/15/2021]: I just discovered that the sidebar looks weird on a larger screen, because Blogger, in their...

It's time for another installment of Picture Book Pandemonium! But before we dive in, I have an announcement: As of Sunday... Completely Full Bookshelf is 5 years old!!! I would tell you it doesn't feel nearly that long since I posted my very first book review (of When You Reach Me ) all those years ago...but, actually, it feels exactly  that long since then! It's pretty entertaining to see how I've gradually moved from reviews that were only 3 or 4 sentences to reviews that are 3,309 words long . Running this blog for so many years has been such a valuable experience for me that I can't even express my feelings properly—it's been an outlet for me to talk about one of my favorite things, it's been a motivating force to keep reading books (including ones I might never have tried otherwise, like the picture books I'll be reviewing today), and it's been a means of participation in two wise, supportive, and fun online communities! I'd like to thank e...