Welcome to the fifth year of the Newbery Reading Challenge! (Wow, five years already!) Newbery and Caldecott books are fun to read - whether it's our first time experiencing them, or we're revisiting them from our childhood. If you want to challenge yourself to read more Newbery and Caldecott books this year, then you have found the right place!

Here are the rules:​
Each book you read is worth points. You get:

• 3 points for a Newbery Medal Winner
• 2 points for a Newbery Honor Book
• 1 point for a Caldecott Book (Both Medal winners and Honor books are worth a point.)

In addition to that, you pick a level to aim for:

• L'Engle: 15 - 29 points
• Spinelli: 30 - 44 points
• Avi: 45 - 59 points
• Lowry: 60 - 74 points
• Konigsburg: 75+ points

You can get to this level with any combination of points you want. You can read all Newbery Medal winners. You can throw in a few Honor Books. If you want, you can even read 75 Caldecott Medal winners! How you get to your point level is totally up to you. 

Also, anywhere in the point range for your level counts as completing that level. So for example, if you signed up for the Avi level and read 46 points' worth of books, then you have completed that level!

Challenge Guidelines:

• Rereads count (because you were probably a kid when you read it last, and your perspective on the story just might have changed since then).
• Audiobooks and ebooks count.
• And paper books count, too. :)
• All books must be read between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2018. Books begun before January 1 don’t count.
• Books can be used for other challenges as well.
• You don’t have to have a blog to participate. You can link up reviews from Amazon, Goodreads, etc., or just hang out with us in the comments!
• Reviews are encouraged, but not necessary.
• Choose your point level. You can always aim for a higher point level, but you can't move to a lower one.

To join the Newbery Reading Challenge:

• Write a post (or a comment) stating your intention to join. Choose your point level. You can find the challenge image above to use in your post.
• Add your link to the Linky at the bottom of this post. Make sure you include the link to your sign-up post, not just your homepage.
  • The Linky seems to be having difficulties sometimes. I have no idea how to fix this. If it doesn't accept your link, you can try again another day, or just put your link in a comment. That will count as signing up, too!

Free Printable Template!

• Christine at Buckling Bookshelves made this awesome template to use for tracking your reads for this challenge. She generously offered to share it with all of you! Just click on the file below to download it for your own use!

I hope all who celebrated Thanksgiving here in the U.S. had a wonderful time! My family time was great, except for my sister-in-law's big black lab. Turns out my little guy was terrified of him, which is hardly surprising since they're pretty much the same size. That made Thanksgiving a little more interesting!

2017 Newbery Reading Challenge Wrap-Up (If you participated and wrote a wrap-up post, you can link it up here!)

The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen Flynn (This was a quieter novel than I expected, but really good!)
The Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra (This was an interesting book, but there was so much distance from the characters that it was hard to feel invested in anything or anyone.)

North! or Be Eaten by Andrew Peterson (This is such a great book. The title alone should tell you that, right?)
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (83% complete! Almost there!)

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline (Our December book club book)

Another year of reading Newbery Award winners, Newbery Honor books, and Caldecott Medal books is just about finished. We have about a month left to go. Have you completed your challenge yet? This is the place to link up your wrap-up posts, or feel free to leave a comment saying how you did. Hope you enjoyed this year's Newbery Reading Challenge!

P.S. Sign-ups for the 2018 Newbery Reading Challenge will be live Thursday, November 30!

Happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. readers (and anyone else who feels like celebrating)! Our plans are to spend today with my husband's family and tomorrow with mine. I love all the family time (and the yummy food, of course!).

I hope you have a joyful Thanksgiving, giving thanks to God for all of the many blessings He has showered you with!

The next holiday is almost upon us (at least, here in the United States, it is). My husband is only working two days this week, so we've got lots of family time ahead of us. And good food, of course! And once Thanksgiving is over, it's time to break out the Christmas decorations (I've already been listening to Christmas music for a week, so we might as well make the house match)!

The Secret of the Swamp King by Jonathan Rogers (I enjoyed the first book, but I loved the second one! Can't wait to get my hands on the third!)
Inferno by Dante Alighieri (Yay, I finished! Although I need to read the entire Divine Comedy for my Classics Club list, and only the first part is on Serial Reader. Now I need to be just as good at reading a bit every day when it's on paper, not my phone.)
The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde (Loved it, as expected!)
All's Faire in Middle School by Victoria Jamieson (Oh, my goodness, I loved this one! We definitely need to buy a copy for the school library I volunteer at and get it into the hands of some middle schoolers!)

The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn (Enjoying this so far. Very unusual premise.)
​Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (69% complete!)

The Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra (A book set in Japan, and then I am done with my Where Are You Reading? challenge!)

It's been quite a while since I've participated in one of these, but it seemed like a good way to keep moving forward with my Classics Club list, since my deadline is the end of next August!

You're supposed to create a list of 20 books from your Classics Club list, but I only have 10 left. On Friday the 17th, they will post a number, and that's the book you're supposed to read by the end of the year. I might have to generate my own number if it's past 10, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it!

Here is my spin list:​

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
2. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
3. Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw
4. Tender Is the NIght by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Erewhon by Samuel Butler
6. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
7. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
8. The Divine Comedy by Dante (Technically already in progress, but if this one is picked, I'll be sure to keep going onto Part 2 right away.)
9. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
10. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

It is currently snowing as I type this!! I love snow, although I don't like the cold. So if it's going to be this cold outside, then it had better be snowing! That makes it the perfect weather to curl up with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book!

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin (This book was fascinating. I learned a lot about Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel soon to learn even more. Very inspiring!)
​The Tale of Holly How by Susan Wittig Albert (The perfect cozy mystery for cold fall days. I love this series!)

The Secret of the Swamp King by Jonathan Rogers (So far I'm liking this one even more than the first book in the series!)
Inferno by Dante Alighieri (84% complete. I should finish this one this week!)
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (53% complete)

The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde (Continuing with my reread of all of Jasper Fforde's books!)

Three weeks ago (Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon day, actually), I went to a library book sale. My goal was to find lots of books for my Little Free Library. I opened my LFL in August, and there's definitely more books going out than coming in at this point. I had almost depleted my stash of books to put in it, so I thought that the $5-a-bag day at the library book sale was perfect to replenish it.

And it was. I came home with nine bags of books. The book sale volunteers said I won the prize for taking the most books home with me. They had a place to leave the bags as I filled them, and after a while, they would see me coming with a full bag and already have the next empty bag ready for me, complete with my name written on it. They were good!

I promised I would share my goodies here on the blog once I finally unpacked all of the bags. It took me several naptimes' worth, but here are the glorious books I found!

This is the stack of children's/young adult. By the time $5-a-bag day rolls around, these sections are already extremely picked over, so I didn't expect to find too much.

This is nonfiction. I honestly didn't even touch the main nonfiction table, sticking more to the memoir-ish books. I thought those would probably be more popular in my LFL.

And these two glorious pictures show what I found in the fiction section. There were so many good books! I kept telling myself, "I'll make it to the end of this table, and then get another bag," but I couldn't make it that far. The bags would be overflowing, and I'd end up with an additional armful to add to the next empty bag. Such a wonderful selection!

And here's the stack I got for myself. Some of these will eventually go into the LFL piles, but I wanted to read them first (How can you pass up a book called The Pope's Rhinoceros?).

Altogether, I ended up buying 167 books, which works out to 27 cents a book. How can you beat that??

Happy November! We had a chance to play in the leaves this past weekend. We created a huge pile for my little guy to jump into. He loved flopping into the leaves on his belly and having handfuls of leaves thrown at him. Burying him wasn't so popular, but the rest of the time he had fun!

From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth (This was a little bit heavy on the difficulties of travel and bureaucracy, but I really enjoyed Seth's writing and a chance to read a book about an area of the world - Xinjiang, China, and Tibet - that I don't read about very often.)
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson (I remember reading and liking this book as a kid, but I can't for the life of me figure out why upon rereading it. The relationship with the captain was just plain creepy.)
The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (This book was amazing!! I read this one as a buddy read with Christine from Buckling Bookshelves, which was a lot of fun. You should read this book!)

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (I've been wanting to read this one for a long time. Finally getting around to it!)
Inferno by Dante Alighieri (57% complete)
​Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (39% complete)

The Tale of Holly How by Susan Wittig Albert (I am reading this series all out of order. I read #3, 4, 5, 6, 1, and now this is #2. It's an incredibly enjoyable series, even if a little bit harder to piece together this way!)

Within the last week, I've visited two libraries. At the first library, I got two books, ended up returning one the next day because it turned out not to be the one I wanted, and then got another to replace it. At the second library, I was only planning on stocking up on picture books for my son and not getting anything for myself. That didn't work so well. I came home with two graphic novels, which is a genre I've really only dipped my toe into so far.