I’m feeling quite behind on my poor blog – last week was pretty much entirely give over to running my second-ever Crafts for Hogwarts Grads at the library, and this week to catching up. We had close to 50 people come to make Harry Potter-inspired wands, t-shirts, light switch plate covers, and more. It was lots of fun! Perhaps this time I’ll have pictures so that I can pull together a post about it on its own… And after that I ran my regular game day, and then an ESL conversation group, had a meeting wrote reports… such are the perils of trying to maintain a blog in spare time between patrons.

But on to my reading. I read 27 books in February, though I didn’t finish one of them. Here’s the breakdown:

Picture Books

I’m sure I actually read more, but these especially are the ones I want to write about especially for the Girl Scout project. All of these feature some kind of diversity in the characters if not always the author/illustrators.

Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson and E. B. Lewis
Janine by Maryann Cocca-Leffler
Butterfly Park by Elly Mackay
Elana’s Ears by Gloria Roth Lowell. Illustrated by Karen Stormer Brooks

Early Chapter Books

These are all for my daughter. We are listening to all the Judy Moody books my library has on CD during the drive to or from school. We’re still reading Lulu and the Hamster in the Night together, but it’s slow going as we have four chapter books and some picture books that we’re rotating through.

Judy Moody Declares Independence, Judy Moody Goes to College, and Judy Moody, Girl Detective by Megan McDonald
Princess Posey and the Next-Door Dog by Stephanie Greene.

Middle Grade

The Marvels by Brian Selznick
Secret Coders by Gene Luen Yang and Mike Holmes
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Goblin Secrets by William Alexander
Ghoulish Song by William Alexander
The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman

Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley
Secrets of the Dragon Tomb by Patrick Samphire

Teen

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
Serpentine by Cindy Pon
Ms. Marvel vol. 2: Generation Why and Ms. Marvel vol. 3: Crushed by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona

Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet
Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix
The Six by Mark Alpert

Adult

You’re Never Weird on the internet (Almost) by Felicia Day
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
Masks and Shadows by Stephanie Burgis

Reading my World Challenge

I should design some spiffy graphics for these, since they’re just my own personal challenges. For Reading My World – 9 of my 27 authors were ethnically diverse – 30%. I read one Japanese, one Canadian and one Australian author and two British authors, so that only 11% of my reading was neither American nor British. Should I make myself feel better about that by counting the British authors?   11 of the books (40%) had main characters of color, and four of them had main characters with other diversity, including LGBT (The Marvels and Carry On), being non-neurotypical (Janine) or having a disability (The Six, Elana’s Ears).

Anyway, together with the 7 diverse authors I read last month, that makes 18 books towards my goal of 60 books by diverse authors for the year. I might make it!

Looking back for reference to my list of top 10 books I missed in 2015, I have (perhaps unsurprisingly) read all five of the books that I had on hand waiting to be read when I wrote the post, but only two of the books that I didn’t. Must get on that now! Or, you know, when I’m feeling that my shelf has a little space on it again…

In the meantime, while I’m having no trouble filling my print book shelf, I’ve been having a little more trouble finding audiobooks.  Any suggestions?