What books are you and your children really enjoying right now?

A thread even though Substack did away with threads

In fall of 2024, Substack announced that they were doing away with threads — almost certainly because they wanted to force writers to use Chat, which, HAHA, is never going to happen over here. I absolutely do not want to be reached by Chat. I do not need One More Thing to update or check or care about even in the slightest. Keeping up with comments — which I often do in the middle of meetings or standing waiting for an event I’m hosting to begin or when I’ve collapsed onto a hotel room bed after a long day of getting wherever I am going and am just trying to check out mentally but have these things to attend to — is enough.

HOWEVER.

I still want to talk to you. I still want to hear what you’re reading with your families or what bangers you’ve deployed in your classroom or library storytimes. (I hear Tumblebaby by Adam Rex is completely amazing for these, especially with older elementary kiddos, and though I haven’t had a chance yet to see it for myself, I have never once met an Adam Rex book I did not immediately want to own and read 10,000 times. So.)

And I still want to share the same with you, even though there’s the usual plus extra amount of chaos happening in my life — and I’m in Tempe for work as you are receiving this; shoutout to my Arizona subscribers! 🌵👋 — and I know we are all hanging off the edge of a cliff by our fingernails, etc., etc. Substack’s dumb decisions (which are multiplying daily) aren’t going to hold me back — no, ma’am.

(As Laura Lippman wrote in her most recent newsletter: “I hope for the best and when I’m wrong, I’m disappointed, but I never regret having been hopeful. The way I see it, being hopeful reduces the number of hours one spends being miserable.” 100%. Here we are, despite it all — what a gift, and let us not forget that.)

Here’s what my own children and I have been enjoying lately. (If I’ve reviewed any of these in the past, I’ve linked to them here.)

• Love Letters by Arnold Adoff

• Minn and Jake by Janet S. Wong

• Gooseberry Park by Cynthia Rylant — this is my husband’s bedtime read-aloud with the kids

• Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine, produced by the DNR, chock-full of fascinating information about the wildlife in our state, which we have been reading over breakfast — just keeping it real here 😆

• Dogtown by Katherine Applegate

  

  Every good thing you’ve heard about this one is 100% true

• If You Go Down to the Woods Today: More Than 100 Things to Find by Rachel Piercey — for a long time I thought the Brown Bear Wood search-and-find series only really appealed to preschoolers but my 8-year-old has surprised me by being SUPER INTO this book👇

  

(Said 8-year-old is also so into Dog Man and Cat Kid that more than once we have had to physically pull these titles from her hands so that she will eat a meal. Before you flood the comments with your feelings about Dog Man: I am working on a whole post about this series right now — stay tuned!)

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I told you I was in Minneapolis at the incomparable Birchbark Books?

Birchbark Books & Native Arts is an independent bookstore owned by author Louise Erdrich. Located in the Kenwood area of Minneapolis, it’s a teaching bookstore that “provides a locus for Indigenous intellectual life,” among many other wonderful things. It is WELL-WORTH a visit.

I bought a tall stack of books there (not as tall as my mother’s, who had to purchase a canvas bag just to carry them all out of the store), and have already worked my way through, and can highly recommend, some of the children’s titles:

• Where Wolves Don’t Die by Anton Treuer (YA — I couldn’t put this down)

• Buffalo Dreamer by Violet Duncan (middle grade)

• Stealing Little Moon: The Legacy of the American Indian Boarding Schools by

  Dan Sasuweh Jones (YA — This should be required reading for every American, full stop)

Your turn! What are you reading with the children in your life?

(Board books, picture books, graphic novels, middle-grade titles, nonfiction, audiobooks, seek-and-finds — we’ve got all ages and no judgment here.)