Reading My Library

At the beginning of the summer of 2006, 15 years ago, I returned every single book I had checked out from my local library. I packed my bags, and with them just one book: my Bible. I was heading to Jacksonville Florida for a Summer Training Program with the Navigators and had purposed that I would be, for that summer, a woman of one book.

My summer in Jacksonville was a fruitful time, life-changing in fact. God used the focused time in his word to cut through some key misunderstandings I had about the gospel and my standing before God. I wouldn’t trade that summer for anything.

But I did miss my library.

I returned home and went under the knife, getting a long-awaited septoplasty to help me breathe better. But that septoplasty left me recovering from surgery with NO LIBRARY BOOKS!

I hatched perhaps the craziest, most ambitious plan of my life – I would attempt to read every book in my local library. (Okay, I’m just realizing that maybe the craziest, most ambitious plan of my life has been to keep having children after all we’ve been through…I’ll have to think about which is crazier :-P)

I embarked 15 years ago, on September 5, 2006.

Reading Since September 5, 2006 (15 years)

Category	Items in 2020-2021	Total Items	Notes
Juvenile Picture Books	372	2880	My goal for 2021 has been to read at least one picture book a day – and I’ve been cruising right along. So far, I’ve closed out picture books author last name AA-EL and X (totally cheating because my library of record only has one picture book with an author last name X!)
Juvenile Board Books	0	558	I closed these out in 2018 and, with pandemic going on, have chosen to only read our personal collection rather than borrowing board books from the library this past year. I *did* review my logs of board books read in the past to request favorites to be added to our collection as Christmas presents to Shiloh.
Juvenile First Readers	47	127	I purposed to read one of these a week with Tirzah Mae during 2021, but have been disappointed to find that I’ve not been able to find decodable readers – everything is leveled readers, which don’t follow the best science for teahing reading but instead encourage kids to guess vs. decoding words. I’m still reading by myself but I’ve found precious little the Tirzah Mae can read to me as of yet (she’s getting close though – once we get to r controlled vowels soon her decoding ability will explode.)
Juvenile Fiction	42	452	Between whole-family read-alouds during morning time, individual read-alouds with each of the three older children during their “special times”, and a bit of independent reading of my own, juvenile fiction reading has really picked up this year.
Juvenile Nonfiction	54	522	I think we peaked on these pre-pandemic when the kids adored picking out their own nonfiction when we went into the library in person. My guess is we’ll increase again over time as we start doing more science and history work with our homeschool.
Teen Fiction	12	64	One of my 2021 goals was to read a teen fiction book each month – Daniel found Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books and we’ve both been enjoying those this year.
Teen Nonfiction	0	5	This is barely a category at the library, but it does have a few titles.
Adult Fiction	8	511	My 2021 goal is one a month – and I’ve been keeping up (barely), which means I didn’t read any in the last quarter of 2020 :-)
Adult Nonfiction	53	1084	I don’t need a goal to keep my nonfiction reading up – this is the kind of reading I find easy to do in the 10-15 minute segments I have available (generally while exercising, using the restroom, or winding down before bed.)
Audio CDs	465	2243	This really inflates my numbers – I listen to one to two albums per day, one album from each Library of Congress classification before looping back around to the beginning. In this way, we listen to a broad variety of music throughout the course of a week or month.
Juvenile DVD	12	80	We’ve been enjoying watching the “Signing Time” videos, slowly (very slowly) building up our vocabulary in American Sign Language
Adult Fiction DVDs	9	128	Daniel and I are watching (sometimes rewatching) the Marvel movies in chronological order – and, of course, we’re borrowing the DVDs or BluRay from the library to complete our watching
Adult Nonfiction DVDs	18	92	SO. Many. Dinosaur. Documentaries.
Periodicals	12	143	I’m reading “Women’s Health” this year – and I continue to hold to my opinion that all popular health media is a bunch of hot air carrying a thin veneer of science.
Total	1103	8889
	3.0 items/ day	1.2 items/ day

I only have annual data for 2010 and then 2016 through now, but it’s interesting to see trends in my reading makeup over the course of the years. I have reason to believe that 2010 was actually an outlier as far as picture book intake – I believe I was trying in a concentrated way to make my way through the picture book collection at my library that year in a way I didn’t do before or after until I had children. Of the more recent data, you can see that my “grown up” reading tanked in 2018, the same year my children’s book reading really took off and I started getting serious about listening to CDs from the library. Is it a coincidence that this was the year that I had a three year old, a one year old, and was expecting baby #3? I’m guessing not :-)

When I look at the non-media, non-picture book reading I’ve done on an annual basis, I’m a little surprised at the variability of the past four years. Though if I think of it…

…2018 I hit board books hard, trying to finish the category (I didn’t succeed until just a bit into 2019)

…2019 we were at the library in person on a weekly basis and the kids were picking up dozens of nonfiction picture books every chance they could get

…2020 was pandemic and I had to read on a device or nothing for months while the library was closed (Ugh.)

…2021 has been my year to focus on “balancing” my consumption between library categories. Each day, I’ve tried to read one picture book and listen to one CD. Each week, I’ve tried to read one early reader, one juvenile nonfiction book, and one juvenile fiction book. Each month, I’ve tried to read one adult fiction and one teen fiction, watch one children’s DVD and one adult fiction and nonfiction DVD, and read one magazine. Nonfiction I read at will, which is lots :-)

So there we have it. 15 years of reading, right there.

How is it possible that it’s been 14 years since I began my crazy goal of reading every book in my local library?

In that time, I moved from Lincoln to Columbus Nebraska (and kept on using my Lincoln library) and then from Columbus to Wichita (and switched from my Lincoln library to Wichita’s Central Library). We moved from downtown-ish Wichita to just outside of Wichita (and kept on using the Central Library) – and then the Central Library moved to the new “Advanced Learning Library”. Now that coronavirus means just picking up books we’ve requested (rather than browsing the stacks), I’m picking up my books at a closer location (but I’m keeping on using the Advanced Learning Library as my library of record, in hopes that someday we’ll be able to return!)

TOTALS as of September 5, 2020 (14 years or 5114 days)

Category	Items in 2019-2020	Total Items since 2006	Notes
Juvenile Picture	528	2508	We were racing through these at the beginning of the year, but pandemic really slowed us down – and then we started really liking chapter books…
Juvenile, Board Books	15	558	We closed these in 2018, so this is just “fun reading” that the kids picked up during visits to the library (back when we could still visit the library.)
Juvenile, First Readers	3	80	I’m going to vote on this one for greatest growth over the next year.
Juvenile Fiction	2	410	The “two finished” is quite deceptive, since re-reads don’t count – and I’ve been reading quite a few of my favorites out loud to the kids. Also, these numbers won’t jibe with previous reports since I reorganized the “chapter books” from my old library into their place here as juvenile fiction.
Juvenile Nonfiction	55	468
Teen Fiction	0	52	Just not doing a lot of this sort of reading these days.
Teen Nonfiction	0	5
Adult Fiction	13	503	My statistics tell me my average for adult fiction is 37 books a year – obviously VERY skewed from my pre-kids days.
Adult Nonfiction	29	3	I knew my reading was down, but this is shocking. My overall average is 76 per year.
Audio CD	357	1778	Music, which takes an hour (for shorter CDs) to ten hours (for the big multidisc sets) and can be listened to while carrying out ordinary tasks, is a lot easier to get through these days.
Juvenile DVD	7	68	Harry Potter and kids yoga videos. The children watched the latter with me; Daniel and I did not let them see the former – because, witchcraft ;-)
Adult Fiction DVD	7	119	We’re currently watching the Marvel movies in chronological order (per this list. It’s fun.
Adult Nonfiction DVD	7	74	Do I like documentaries? Yes. Did my children and I watch a college course on child development? Yes, that too.
Periodicals	4	131
Total	1018 items	7786 items
	2.78 items/day	1.21 items/day	While I have vastly decreased my “me” reading over the past 14 years, picture books and audio CDs inflate my item count these days.

What with not being able to access our library’s physical collection AT ALL for almost 2 months, it’s been a weird year of reading – but I’m soldiering on with my goal. I’m going to keep trying until I die (no doubt.)

We read 74 children’s picture books in the month of March – which, given that we only visited the library once the whole month (and that only to pick up less than a dozen books on hold!) is quite a feat, I think.

Our physical libraries are closed at least through the middle of April, so I’m guessing my “read every book” goal is going to have to take a pause while we spend more time reading what we already have in our home collection.

A fun rhyming retelling of the classic story, set in modern day Chicago (I think) with a fast-moving city hare and a slow-and-steady country tortoise.

Homer, a young Cleveland boy, is ecstatic that Larry Doby has joined the Cleveland Indians. Here at last, is a chance to prove that Jackie Robinson is not just a fluke, that black folks can be just as good as white ones. Homer and his father eagerly listen to the fourth game of the World Series, rejoicing as Larry Doby makes a home run – one of the two scores to win the 2-1 game. In the morning, Homer and his dad see a picture of Doby and white teammate Steve Gromek hugging in the newspaper – and they feel that, at last, change is coming for black people.

I’m a bit of a sucker for “precious” picture books with very few words and a general theme of “I love you”, clearly intended to be read to babies and young toddlers. This is a very nice example of the genre – sweet without being saccharine, expressing a parent’s delight in a child without romanticizing bad behavior (as some books of the type occasionally do.) I also appreciate how the illustrations show a diverse selection of children and parents – boys, girls, men, and women black, white, and brown.

Texas is so hot that Ten-Gallon Bart (the dog) heads up to the Yukon to cool off (and maybe prospect for a bit of gold). When he gets buried in a crazy snowstorm, his friends head north to dig him out and bring him back home. This is not fine literature, but it’s fun. The children enjoyed the story, mama enjoyed the Texas drawlin’ and the fun cut paper illustrations. Crummel and Donohue also wrote two books about Ten-Gallon Bart before this (but that we read out of order): Ten-Gallon Bart and Ten Gallon Bart and the Wild West Show. We thoroughly enjoyed all three in this series.

A man has the lonely job of uncorking ocean bottles and taking them to their recipient. He dreams of having a bottle addressed to him, but knows there is little chance since he has no friends. But, as Tirzah Mae pointed out: “Well, then, he should make some friends!” And so he does, with the help of an anonymous bottle. A sweet and lovely book.

A young girl grows up in a war zone. Wednesday afternoon relief trucks are the only thing she has to look forward. Until a bomb strikes the relief truck and their drop-off point is cancelled. But the neighbor, Mr. O brings out his cello and plays in the center of the empty war-ruined square, giving everyone hope. This is a weighty book, but a wonderful one.

A relatively simple book with thick, tear-proof pages. Each page starts “I’m a little fire truck…” and can (generally) be sung to the tune of “I’m a little teapot.” Louis (who is obsessed with trucks) and Beth-Ellen (who is obsessed with singing) particularly enjoyed this title, requesting it over and over and over again until I had no voice to sing and had to refuse to read it again.

March 5 just so happened to be the half-year mark on my “reading my library” challenge, which I began on September 5, 2006. So we’re about 13.5 years in. So far, it looks like this year will look relatively similar to last year – except that we’re reading a lot more juvenile picture books compared to other types of books/materials.

TOTALS as of March 10, 2019 (13 years and 187 days or 4935 days)

Category	Items in past 6 months	Items in 2018-2019	Total Items
Juvenile Picture	272	323	2252
Juvenile, Board Books	14	31	557
Juvenile, First Readers	1	2	78
Juvenile, Chapter	0	0	92
Juvenile Fiction	2	4	326
Juvenile Nonfiction	28	133	441
Teen Fiction	0	3	52
Teen Nonfiction	0	6	11
Adult Fiction	9	22	499
Adult Nonfiction	16	49	1018
Audio CD	142	488	1563
Juvenile DVD	6	8	67
Adult Fiction DVD	1	5	113
Adult Nonfiction DVD	1	18	64
Periodicals	2	33	129
Total	494 items	1125 items	7262 items
	2.93 items/day	2.94 items/day	1.21 items/day

We are racing through the children’s picture books, having read 84% of last year’s total in just 6 months! I’m loving having found something that’s working for us for read-aloud time. Juvenile nonfiction intake, on the other hand, has plummeted (only 21% of last year’s total so far this year) as we’ve spent a lot more time in the car, which makes me less likely to want to go INTO the library (and therefore less likely to let the kids pick out their own favorites) – we’ve been doing a lot more just driving through the window to pick up our holds on the next picture books in line.

Grown-up reading seems a bit low so far, but it’s always a little hard to tell actual status on that, since I always have quite a few books going at any given time (I think I have about 10 going as we speak, give or take). Also, especially when it comes to fiction, I tend to go in spurts and fits. I’m guessing I’ll be doing lots more grown-up reading after the new baby comes when I’ll be breastfeeding all the time.

Despite being a shorter-than-average month (even with that leap day), February was a productive reading month. I read 83 children’s picture books with an author last name “C”. In large part, I think this was due to my decision to try to spend just a little bit of time with each child individually each day (usually right before their naps). I’ve mostly spent that time reading aloud (what else?) When I don’t have to wait for everyone to be ready to listen together, it makes reading aloud tons easier – and has allowed me to power through a lot more of our picture books. We have maybe 40 or 50 more books to go until we’re done with author last name C – we’ll likely finish those out in March!

The dog, Homer, is offered lots of opportunities to go out and do all sorts of interesting things. He’d rather lie on the front porch and watch it all. He delights to hear everyone’s stories of all the exciting things they’ve done, but mostly, he likes to be at home with everyone he loves around him. I can identify. :-)

A little rock has great dreams – but what will he become? A simple, short book that’s just right to keep the interest of all four of our little ones (5, 3, 2, and 19 months.)

When all his big siblings make a brass band, Little Pig wants to join too, but none of the instruments fit him. He’s able to find his place, though – a much needed place – as band leader, getting them all to play together in time.

A cute little story that helps to explain the saying “the elephant in the room.”

More a poem than a story, with art that’s visual poetry. Animal mothers invite their children to join them in their tasks before ending with a refrain: “This road is hard, this road is long, this road that leads us home.” And then it ends, “This road is hard, this road is long, but we are not alone. For you are here, and I’m with you… and so this road is home.” Just lovely.

This is not fine literature, but Mrs. Millie’s silly mis-speaks had my two oldest (5 and 3) roaring with laughter all the way through. Mrs. Millie instructs her students to “hang up your goats” at the beginning of the day and keeps making “mistakes” with rhyming words and sound-alikes all day long. “We have parrot sticks and quackers today!” Very fun.

The kids and I read right around 50 children’s picture books in January (in addition to some nonfiction, some board books, and listening to Cherry Jones narrate Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy.) These are some of the highlights from this month’s reading. We’re going to plug along with authors CON and on in February – but we’re also excited to continue our Laura journey with Little House on the Prairie and maybe On the Banks of Plum Creek as part of Barbara’s final Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge.

We’ve read a couple of other whimsical folk-type tales by Brock Cole, but this was my favorite. In it, a boy goes off to wake up Spring, who is sleeping in Winter’s castle. Cole’s illustrations are just delightful and this story very fun.

I was unfamiliar with Rachael Cole, but fell in love with her City Moon, in which a young child and his mother take a walk through the city at night, watching for the moon. The spare text does a good job of getting inside a child’s mind – and reflects the interactions between mother and child well.

Cole’s second book, Mousie, I will Read to You, illustrates the progression of a child’s reading and the wonder of introducing books to the next generation in a non-didactic way that both parents and children can enjoy (if myself and my children are any indication, that is.) This book lover teared up at the end – but don’t worry, this isn’t sentimental pablum. It’s just delightful.

So far, these are the only picture books Cole has written – but I’ll definitely be watching for more from her.

A boy wakes up early to get a chance to see deer with his father. Slonim’s thick oil (acrylic?) paintings give wonderful expression to the joy of experiencing nature at dawn. While we certainty don’t experience any scarcity of deer sightings her on the plains like the narrator does on the coasts, the experience of waiting silently for a reticent animal to show itself is certainly common to nature lovers everywhere.

A couple of animals live next to each other, pass every day on their way to work and home from work. But then one day, someone ventures a “Hello” – and their whole lives change. A very simple, sweet book.

A little boy packs up his belongings to go to visit his grandma. He says goodbye to what he leaves behind – but, to his surprise, the moon follows him all the way to Grandma’s house! My children enjoyed Carter’s thick paint on poster-board illustrations – they kept asking if they were birthday cakes (since they strongly resemble the cut-out cakes I make for the kids for their birthdays.)

A little girl wants to give her baby brother a gift (like all the relatives are), but her grandma tells her that love is the most important gift of all. So the little girl sets off through the savannah to try to find love. A lovely story with lovely illustrations.

I briefly resurfaced from under the dark waves to discover that I’d missed an important anniversary – the 13th anniversary of my massive project to read every book in my local library. So, instead of giving my totals as of September 5, I’ve got totals as of September 23 – when I realized I’d forgotten to write an update.

TOTALS as of Sept 23, 2019 (13 years and 18 days or 4766 days)

Category	Items this year	Total Items	Total Categories Closed
Juvenile Picture	323	1980	611
Juvenile, Board Books	31	543	285
Juvenile, First Readers	2	77	3
Juvenile, Chapter	0	92	7
Juvenile Fiction	4	324	25
Juvenile Nonfiction	133	413	14
Teen Fiction	3	52	5
Teen Nonfiction	6	11	0
Adult Fiction	22	490	78
Adult Nonfiction	49	1002	52
Audio CD	488	1421	116
Juvenile DVD	8	61	2
Adult Fiction DVD	5	112	9
Adult Nonfiction DVD	18	63	2
Periodicals	33	127	2
Total	1125 items	6786 items
	2.94 items/day	1.21 items/day

We made two big gains in the past year, closing the board books entirely per challenge rules (543 total books by 285 different authors) and closing the picture books by author last name B (979 total books by 335 different authors).

I’ve also made significant headway with the audio CDs, trying to listen to one CD from each Library of Congress classification. I’ve “cheated” a bit with these, though, listening to albums that are available on Spotify that way and (mostly) only checking out stuff that isn’t available on Spotify. That way, I’m listening at home in addition to in the car. I have not, however, been faithful with recording what we’ve listened to on Spotify – which means I likely have an additional couple dozen albums that haven’t been logged.

I was hoping to get picture book authors “C” read in 2019, but it’s looking like that might be a bit of a challenge since the kids have decided that nonfiction is really where it’s at. We have read just about every book the library owns about new babies and about construction vehicles, as well as a fair bit about tools and floods. And then, of course, there are giraffes and states and butterflies and “black knights”. The children almost always tell me as we’re walking in to the library what topic they’re interested in researching this visit.

I’m a little surprised to find that I read a little over 80 books for myself (not counting re-reads). I really thought my personal book consumption had slowed almost to a halt over the past year, but apparently not!

Sometimes, you’ve just got to press publish on the post you’ve been building over the course of a month – even if you haven’t got time to edit it. So, please forgive any roughness – and enjoy this peek into our month of reading.

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Asterisks represent books I recommend (3 stars or above).

Written by Dori Chaconas

• Don’t Slam the Door, illustrated by Will Hillenbrand
  Don’t slam the door, because if you do…it’ll wake the cat, who’ll set off a string of far-reaching implications. (Of course, someone slams the door!)
• Mousie Love illustrated by Josee Masse
  A mouse falls desperately in love and keeps asking his love to marry him (only to interrupt her answer with something else he thinks he should do to be worthy of her. I thought this was terribly fun, but it was really over the kids’ heads.
• *On a Wintry Morning illustrated by Stephen T. Johnson
  A sweet little daddy/child song that goes through a winter’s days activities. I sang the book to the tune of “Polly put the kettle on” and it worked quite nicely.
• *Virginnie’s Hat illustrated by Holly Meade
  When Virginnie’s hat flies off into the swamp she just about encounters all sorts of scary animals. This is a fun look at perceived dangers versus real ones.

Written by Authors Last Name CHAL-CHAP

• Mr. Frog Went A-Courting, written and illustrated by Gary Chalk
  Based on an old song (that I am unfamiliar with), the story of Mr. Frog is full of all the ridiculous twists and turns often found in folktales. Careful observation of the illustrations reveals a “hidden story”.
• Pick a Pup, written by Marsha Wilson Chall, illustrated by Jed Henry
  How will Sam know which pup to pick? (Spoiler alert: Maybe it’s the pup who’ll pick him.)
• Mario Chalmers’ ABCs of Basketball by Mario Chalmers and Almarie Chalmers, illustrated by Emmanuel Everett
  Part informational, part motivational – I just can’t get into the “believe in yourself and you can do anything” stuff (some kids, however hard they believe and even how hard they practice, will never play in the NBA.)
• The Library Book by Tom Chapin and Michael Mark, illustrated by Chuck Groenink
  This was the lyrics to a song, rather a fun one, but one whose tune I don’t know. I tried singing it unsuccessfully. Perhaps if I could have seen the endpapers and tried picking it out on the piano… (Or, you know, I could have looked on Spotify – why didn’t I think of that until after I was returning it?
• 
  This was the lyrics to a song, rather a fun one, but one whose tune I don’t know. I tried singing it unsuccessfully. Perhaps if I could have seen the endpapers and tried picking it out on the piano… (Or, you know, I could have looked on Spotify – why didn’t I think of that until after I was returning it?
• Me Too, Grandma written and illustrated by Jane Chapman
  A “jealous of the new baby” book except that little owl is jealous of how her baby cousin is taking Grandma’s attention. Cute illustrations, not my favorite genre.

Written and illustrated by Jared Chapman

• Pirate, Viking, And Scientist
  A scientist is friends with a pirate and a viking – but when both come to his birthday party he discovers they’re NOT friends with each other. Time to experiment to see if he can get them to be friends with each other. Not bad.
• T.Rex Time Machine

Ugly juvenile illustrations. Hard to read out loud. Not a fan.

Written by Authors Last Name CHAR-CHE?

• The Selfish Crocodile, written by Faustin Charles and illustrated by Michael Terry
  The crocodile is selfish until he finds himself in terrible pain and someone helps him. Then it’s all sunshine and roses. A little too convenient an ending, I thought.
• *Alphaboat written and illustrated by Michael Chesworth
  A rather silly, but very fun romp off to C, packed full of word play using the names of the letters of the alphabet. A sample: “f we go here, what will v z? Atop this hill – a lonely tree where blue J’s flutter up to rest upon their X, safe in the nest.”

Written and illustrated by Remy Charlip

• Fortunately
  Very strange things keep happening to Ned, but fortunately… something stranger happens to save him from whatever disaster seemed so certain. This sounds like the sort of story an imaginative three year old might tell (rambling plot, no sense whatsoever, random strangeness everywhere…) I can’t like it.
• Little Old Big Beard and Big Young Little Beard
  The eponymous characters are cowboys and best friends and lovers of beans. But then they lose their cow. This is an almost plotless book.
• *A Perfect Day
  A simple book about what a perfect day might be – spending time together.
• *Sleepytime Rhyme
  A mama sings how she loves everything about her baby. The rhyme can be a bit awkward in places, but it’s nice overall.

Books out of order

• *Maisy Learns to Swim by Lucy Cousins

Simple description of beginner swimming lessons (which don’t involve any actual swimming). These “Maisy First Experiences Books” are a very nice way to introduce kids to common childhood experiences that might seem a little scary if they don’t know what to expect.

Books about Construction

• *Little Excavator by Anna Dewdney
  Does this sound familiar? Yes, yes. I’ve only read it to Louis fifteen thousand times by now. Although really, if you have to read a book fifteen thousand times, this is a good choice.
• *Mighty, Mighty Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker, illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld
  Of course we read this again (and again and again). And then I returned it (because I have SO many other books to read.)