Books
Finished reading: Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole 📚
Finished reading: Dark Desires After Dusk by Kresley Cole 📚
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ I tore through this one so fast. I think it might partly be because the heroine is a PhD candidate.
Finished reading: Dark Needs at Night’s Edge by Kresley Cole 📚
My favorite Immortals After Dark book so far. A burlesque dancer becomes a ballerina, ends up a ghost, and falls in love with a vampire who is trapped in the New Orleans Gothic manor that she haunts. 🌹👻🩰
Finished reading: Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night by Kresley Cole 📚
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ as always. Werewolves continue to not be my thing but I love witches.
Finished reading: No Rest For The Wicked by Kresley Cole 📚
Listen, all these Immortals After Dark books are 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️, okay? That’s just what’s up. I like this one better than the one that came before it, definitely more my vibe.
📚🗨️ “This union was supposed to be for eternity—it followed that their courtship would be extended.” - Kresley Cole, No Rest for the Wicked
See, that’s why W and I were together for 10 years before we got engaged. ("‘Til death do us part" is for quitters.)
📚 This is your reminder that The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond is out today!
Finished reading: A Hunger Like No other by Kresley Cole 📚
Incredibly high spice level, all the chili pepper emoji 🌶️! A Valkyrie/vampire hybrid and a werewolf (there wolf) fall in love. I’m reading this as I listen along to the first season of Fated Mates.
Finished reading: The Truth About Dragons by Julie Leung 📚
A 2024 Caldecott Honor winner.
Finished reading: Two New Years by Richard Ho 📚
Winner of the 2024 Sydney Taylor book award.
Finished reading: Nacho y Lolita/Nacho and Lolita by Pam Muñoz Ryan 📚
Pam Muñoz Ryan won the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. This was where NoveList Plus recommended starting with her work.
Finished reading: Fox Has a Problem by Corey R. Tabor 📚
Reading my way through this year’s American Library Association Youth Media Award winners. This won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished beginning reader book. It’s super cute.
Finished reading: Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas 📚
A sizzling historical that has two refreshing leads: she’s a writer, not a bluestocking. He is a gambling club owner, not a duke.
Finished reading: Then Came You by Lisa Kleypas 📚
Classic 90s pre-Victorian historical, medium spice level.
Finished reading: The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun 📚
Lovely! What if the dude who was producing The Bachelor fell in love with the bachelor? This book is all kinds of sweet and affirming, with great queer, neurodivergence, race, and mental illness rep.
📚 Reading Notes: A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Lawrence Smith, Chapter 9, “Education”
…a good school is one that is constantly engaged in self-examination, in improving itself, in becoming wiser in its ability to both teach and inspire.
Smith returns to this idea many times in this chapter. Every school I’ve worked at had some sort of process for this, but Smith says that in a Quaker school, everyone in the school is involved in this process. In the public schools where I’ve worked, there was always a School Improvement Team (PDF). This is basically a committee and it consists entirely of adults. Students aren’t on the SIT. Further, as you might expect in a public school, the success of the School Improvement Team and the School Improvement Plan is evaluated based almost entirely on students’ scores on standardized tests, which to my mind is an incomplete measure of learning.
It’s a school that is intent on turning out good people who will help make a better world.
At the beginning of every school year, M’s teachers have us complete a survey and one of the questions is always about our hopes for the school year. We always answer that we want him to grow into himself and to continue to learn how to be a caring member of our community. I love this idea. While I suspect most teachers in most schools have this in mind as their intention, the systems and structures of compulsory public education, at least in North Carolina when I was working in public schools, tended to focus on performance in a few academic subject areas and compliance with school policies. I like the idea of a whole school taking this approach, rather than only individual teachers.
It’s the soul of a school—its intangible persona, its character, its principles, its daily life over time, the impressions it makes, the efforts it inspires, and the moral authority it possesses—that helps mold a child into an educated, assured, humane, and caring adult.
Yes! Especially the daily life over time: how we spend our moments is how we spend our days is how we spend our years is how we spend our life. The life of a school is in the day-to-day.
At a good school teachers and students are jointly engaged in a search for truth…
This jibes well with a school librarian’s focus on inquiry-driven learning.
Teachers… work to provide a climate of sensitivity to the human condition.
This is so critical. When I was a student teacher and first set foot in my mentor teacher’s classroom, I was appalled by what seemed to me to be an out-of-control class with absolutely no attention paid to Latin, the class’s subject matter. (I was 22 and I like to think I’m less judgy now.) By the end of my four months in student teaching, my perspective had totally transformed: I saw that my mentor teacher was more concerned with supporting her students than with a laser focus on their academic achievement, and that her love and support was a critical foundation before they could have academic success.
Without input from people of differing life experiences and cultures, a school quickly becomes insular and intellectually stagnant.
It seems obvious but it’s absolutely necessary to say.
…moments of silence help students center themselves amidst the hubbub of the school day.
To quote the Carolina Friends School website:
Settling In and Out
We use this Quaker practice of shared silence as a meaningful way to make oneself present in the moment, focus or redirect attention, and create a shared energy and sense of intention with a community.
Back to the book…
Another characteristic of Quaker schools is that they have involved students in community service at all grade levels.
Experimental education is the name of the game in Quaker schools, and they are constantly cooking up new ways of doing things.
And what’s probably my favorite quote from the chapter:
There is no formula for imparting love of learning. Despite new methodologies, there must always be reliance on the old virtues of skills, care, love, patience, and time.
Care, love, patience, and time are all things that the structures of public schools make it hard for teachers to prioritize, though I bet most teachers would love to be able to prioritize them.
🗨️📚 “Take the time to take time because nobody else will do it for you.” Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Margaret, and Sophie Mas, How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits
Finished reading: New Adult by Timothy Janovsky 📚
Like if 13 Going on 30 was instead 23 Going on 30. Timothy Janovsky’s characters make me so happy, they’re so heart-full. Also lots of good stuff about keeping comedy in its proper place in your life rather than letting it become an all-consuming obsession.
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/17595/2024/1000002085-01.jpeg" width=“600” height=“600” alt=“A book titled ‘New Adult’ by Timothy Janovsky is centrally placed on a textured fabric surface, surrounded by colorful tarot cards and small heart-shaped stones. The book cover is adorned with illustrations of young adults engaged in various activities and has stars scattered around. The image features a quote from the New York Times praising the novel as “witty, playful, heartbreaking, and intensely poetic”. The overall mood of the image is whimsical and colorful, evoking a sense of curiosity.">
Finished reading: A Dish Best Served Hot by Natalie Caña 📚
A lovely, slightly spicy romance. This one resonates a lot because one of the main characters is an oldest sibling who feels responsible for everything.
Finished reading: A Proposal They Can’t Refuse by Natalie Caña 📚
Super sweet and a little steamy romance.
Want to read: Grove Hollow Metamorphosis: A 1980s Gothic Paranormal Romance Novel by Shelby Nicole McFadden 📚
Probably going to buy this one but I’ve told myself I have to finish one of the books I own before I may.
Finished reading: In the Case of Heartbreak by Courtney Kae 📚
Highest of recommendations here. This book is a cute romance but it’s also healing to read.
📚🗨️
You are not a burden… You are a blessing.
Just Courtney Kae still wrecking me with In the Case of Heartbreak, that’s all.
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Your feelings are valid and important no matter how they make me feel… you aren’t responsible for my response.
Read this in Courtney Kae’s In the Case of Heartbreak last night and then wept uncontrollably for a while. Is this what a trauma response feels like?
Finished reading: Love Requires Chocolate by Ravynn K. Stringfield 📚
Full review coming later, but I loved this confection of a YA romance from Ravynn K. Stringfield, my creative nonfiction for academics teacher. A Francophile Black American girl falling in love with Paris and a cute Parisian. Highly recommend.