Review of The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley

The Blue Sword

by Robin McKinley
read by Diane Warren

Recorded Books, 1992. 12 hours, 16 minutes.
Review written May 13, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Earlier review written July 2002
Starred Review
2002 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 Young Adult and Children’s Fantasy Rereads
2010 Sonderbooks Stand-out: Wonderful Rereads
1983 Newbery Honor Book

(I’m writing new reviews for the books that had reviews in the old not-phone-friendly format, and that don’t have a blog post. After 2005 in my #Sonderbooks25 celebrations, I may just add to or repost the original reviews.)

I’m cheating just a little bit in my #Sonderbooks25 plan, celebrating 25 years of writing Sonderbooks. My plan was to choose *one* book from each year’s Sonderbooks Stand-outs and reread them. Having reread this book in 2010, for my 2001 choice, I picked Gillian Bradshaw’s The Sand-Reckoner to reread – but then my eaudiobook holds queue was filled up, and I found an available copy of this book – and I simply had to try it in audiobook form.

And yes, I still absolutely love the story. Horses! Magic! Slow-burn Romance! (And, okay, I’m afraid it’s apparent I like books where the heroine gets abducted by a king – an honorable king with good reasons for it.)

I’m afraid I didn’t like the narrator. (But I love the book so much, I listened anyway.) She reads it with a motherly voice as one talking about children, rather than as the young adult teenage girl our main character Harry Crewe is. I also wish they’d used a narrator with a British accent, since the “Homeland” of the story mimics British imperialism, in a fantasy world setting. What would the British have done if the “natives” had magic? You find out in this book.

Speaking of that, the use of the word “native” and the attitude toward them stung my ears a little, reading in 2025 – but it is reflective of the time it was imitating – and Harry definitely learns there’s a deep and rich culture – and magic – among the Hillfolk.

Listening to it now from a writer’s perspective, I hadn’t noticed before how often Robin McKinley flits into other people’s thoughts. It works in this case, as she shows King Corlath’s worries that he has done a cruel thing by kidnapping Harry and perplexity as to why his magic had him do that. She shows us both of their thoughts hovering around the other – both slow to realize they’re falling in love. But it’s a testament to how much I love the story that this perspective-jumping (other characters, too) doesn’t bring it down.

For decades now, I’ve said that The Blue Sword and The Blue Castle are my two favorite books, and that still may be true, though if pressed, I know by now I’d come up with a dozen more titles on any given day. But I do know this: revisiting the story was an absolute delight. And yes, this will always be a book I will highly recommend.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/blue_sword.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Watership Down, by Richard Adams, read by Peter Capaldi

Watership Down

by Richard Adams
read by Peter Capaldi

Blackstone Publishing, 2019. Novel first published in 1972. 17 hours, 31 minutes.
Review written May 3, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Earlier review written in 2001.
Starred Review
2002 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #2 Fiction Rereads

Ah, it was so good to revisit Watership Down! This wasn’t the one book I chose to reread from my 2002 Stand-outs as part of my #Sonderbooks25 celebration of my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks – but that motivated me to notice that my public library had an available copy of an eaudiobook – and then I couldn’t keep myself from again enjoying the epic adventures of Hazel and Fiver and Bigwig and all the rest.

It’s funny – I’ve always thought of it as an adult novel. The library has it in the adult section. But my ex-husband did read it to our kids when they were young, and Overdrive has the audiobook listed as Juvenile. I’m going to fall back on the fact that it’s truly for all ages. There is plenty of life-and-death violence, and the reading level is adult, but I think that for listening to the story, this is a perfect family adventure.

So if you’ve never read Watership Down – it’s an epic adventure of a band of rabbits. Hazel’s runt brother Fiver has a vision of death and destruction, so they leave the old warren with a few others and set off across the dangerous countryside to a sunny place on a hillside. Along the way, they meet dangers from predators, but also from other rabbits, encountering two troublesome rabbit societies. And once they arrive, they have the problem that they need some female rabbits, or the new warren can’t survive.

And especially wonderful about this book are the tales told about El-ahrairah, the mythical rabbit hero and trickster. His exploits inspire their own adventures in life-or-death situations.

And, yes, this book about rabbits is full of tension and heroism, and you come to love the very rabbity characters. They feel like real rabbits with authentic rabbit interests.

And I was so happy to revisit this tale! It was fun to hear it told with a British accent. Yes, there’s some sexism, but since it’s about rabbit does, it feels like something I can overlook. Other than that, it completely stands up to the passage of time and I was simply happy to spend time with Hazel and company again. I decided to write a new review so I’ll have one in the new phone-friendly format. This is a book I will recommend all my life long.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/watership_down.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

#Sonderbooks25 – 2002 Sonderbooks Stand-outs

I’m celebrating my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks with #Sonderbooks25!

Tonight I’ll be looking back at my Sonderbooks Stand-outs from 2002.

Now, I confess that when I announced my #Sonderbooks25 project, I expected to post every couple weeks, not every few months. So let me start with some excuses.

First, my original plan was to simply read the reviews of the Stand-outs for each year and choose one book to reread and reflect on that every couple of weeks. I knew the first five years, 2001-2005, would take a little longer, because I also planned to reformat the Stand-outs pages.

What I didn’t realize was that once I’d gotten started, I’d want to reread every review I’d written during the year in question. For 2002, that was before the blog when I was still producing numbered issues, and covers Sonderbooks #19 through Sonderbooks #44. You can find all the Back Issues on the Back Issues Index page. Reading all of them, I think I did a good job picking out Stand-outs, as those are indeed the books I most want to revisit. But that wasn’t even enough for me. I also reread the posts from Project 52 from the year I was 37 and the year I was 38.

So I do have reasons to take a long time between posts. And it turns out, though my 2025 Sonderbooks Stand-outs page will be my 25th list of Stand-outs, I won’t hit the actual 25th birthday of Sonderbooks until August 1st, 2026. So there’s not really a big rush. All that said, it took me an especially long time to post about the 2002 Sonderbooks Stand-outs because of two additional complications.

1) I was writing a weekly blog series over on Sonderjourneys called “Laments for Lent.” It turns out that doing significant blogging more than once a week is tricky, especially because:

2) I broke my left pinky finger seven weeks ago, and it hurt to use my left hand at all for a few weeks, and that seriously slowed down my typing. (I finally see the doctor next Monday and hope to stop buddy-taping it. But I predict it will still be a while before my typing’s back up to speed.)

Okay, that’s probably enough excuses! Tonight I updated the links and my new version of my 2002 Sonderbooks Stand-outs is live.

Let me talk about the books in the order they appear on the original page.

From Young Adult and Children’s Fantasy, the stand-out of the Stand-outs is This Star Shall Abide, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl. Another that stands out is Heir Apparent, by Vivian Vande Velde, which I bought for my kids and both of them (or at least the younger?) enjoyed. The rest were all very good, but don’t make me quite as nostalgic. Though I’d reread them all if I could find the time (and if I weren’t trying to move on to books reviewed in 2003).

Among the Young Adult and Children’s Fantasy Rereads, The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley, is still quite possibly my all-time favorite book (though it’s so hard to narrow it down to one!). I have reread it many times, though, so I didn’t feel as compelled to make it my one Reread for 2002 – though, Ha! I checked just now and my library has it in eaudiobook form, so I just placed a hold.

The Harry Potter books are Alas! tainted by the fact that their author has revealed herself to be a transphobic bigot. But the other in that category, Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine, is completely delightful, and – Oh look! We’ve got that in eaudiobook form, too.

For Young Adult Historical Fiction, I don’t remember any of the three titles distinctly, except to be sure I’d enjoy rereading them. And as for the “Rereads” – The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi, is among my all-time favorites, and I’ve reread it many times. (Oh look! That one’s on eaudio, too!) As for Treasure Island – we read it aloud to our kids, as an elementary school teacher once did for me, I’m quite sure (but don’t remember which one).

My Young Adult Contemporary Novel choices were solid choices, but The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is the one I’d most like to reread. (And its eaudio version is available without a wait.)

As for the Young Adult and Children’s Classic Rereads, well, I did a project (unfinished) to reread all of L. M. Montgomery’s books in 2019 before an incredible visit to her home in Prince Edward Island.

Probably my favorite review I’ve written – at least my favorite of the ones I’ve revisited – is my “Reflections on Winnie-the-Pooh,” about how that book has been an important part of my life for decades.

In Children’s Nonfiction, which you’ll notice isn’t my favorite category, I still believe that Greg Tang’s The Best of Times is a vital resource for teaching kids to think about how multiplication works, beyond just memorizing facts. It’s still in print, and I recently ordered fresh copies for our library system.

In Fiction for Grown-ups, the top two are two of my favorite authors. I read The Sand-Reckoner, by Gillian Bradshaw, for my 2001 Revisit, so I’m going to hold off on rereading Cleopatra’s Heir. And Quentins, by Maeve Binchy, is another one I’m now wanting to revisit.
To this day, the title Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris, makes me think of driving through the French countryside to Paris (when I was reading it) and the amazing chocolate shop we found there. Okay, the review says I read Chocolat on that particular trip. But anyway, Joanne Harris transports me to France.

All the Fiction Rereads are All-Time Favorites, and it was Caravan that I chose as the one book to revisit from 2002 – with a bit of disappointment I’m afraid. The other three are, you guessed it, available as eaudiobooks, and I’ve already started in on Watership Down.

For Biographical Nonfiction, again it’s the top two that I would dearly love to reread (I own both) – Angles of Reflection, by Joan Richards, and In Code, by Sarah Flannery. The rest were good, but the one I’d be most interested in rereading from those is #7, Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich.

But the Biographical Reread? Oh, I need to pick up Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson, (which I own) to give myself some good hard laughs and a renewed outlook.

In Other Nonfiction, Barbara Kingsolver is always good, but I’d probably rather reread her fiction. If I still had kids in my home, A Mind at a Time, by Mel Levine, feels vital. And this project reminded me to pull out my copy of Storybook Travels and now look for sites in America instead of in Europe.

The Other Nonfiction Rereads are all beloved Christian books I’ve read multiple times since writing these reviews. You may have noticed there are a lot of Rereads included? Back when I was doing ezine issues of Sonderbooks, in 2002, I started including an “Old Favorite” with every issue – so I was rereading a beloved book every couple weeks, something I don’t have the luxury to do now that I’m working full-time and reading for award committees. As I was starting Sonderbooks, I wanted to include my all-time favorites, so that gave my reviews a nice foundation.

And that brings us to New Picture Books. I chose these before I was a children’s librarian, and honestly probably the only one today that would still make my list is Hungry Hen – I’m a sucker for picture books where someone bad gets eaten. Or, well, where anyone gets eaten. I was able to find all the books in Fairfax County Public Library (and enjoyed them) except for Elephant elephant, which was a very quirky French import.

So there you have it – My thoughts on revisiting my 2002 Sonderbooks Stand-outs. I hope you’ve found or been reminded of a book to enjoy. They are all well-worth your time.

I’ve already decided on the book to revisit from my 2003 Sonderbooks Stand-outsBeyond the Limit, by Joan Spicci. But I’ve also put a few of the others in my eaudiobook holds queue. I hope you’ll hear about them in only a few weeks this time, rather than a few months. Until then, Happy Reading!

Sonderbooks25: Looking Back at Caravan, by Dorothy Gilman

Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

Doubleday, 1992. 263 pages.
New Review written March 31, 2025, from my own copy.
Original review written January 19, 2002.

Oh dear. I am now embarrassed that Caravan, by Dorothy Gilman, has long been one of my all-time favorite books. It’s not that it didn’t hold up; it’s that my eyes have been opened to cultural stereotypes. And I’m a little bummed! Shout out, though, to Pam Margolis and the Cultural Competency Training that everyone involved with the Cybils Awards takes.
They opened my eyes.

Here’s the background. I’m running a series of posts I’m calling Sonderbooks25, celebrating my 25th year of posting Sonderbooks. As part of the celebration, I’m choosing one book from each year’s Sonderbooks Stand-outs to reread. In the case of my 2001 choice, The Sand-Reckoner, by Gillian Bradshaw, I wrote a new review and posted it in the newer format. (The first five years of Sonderbooks were posted in a different format and you won’t find them listed in the current indexes.)

I’m afraid I’m not going to do that for Caravan, because although I still love the book, and, wow, it stirs up all kinds of memories from who I was when I read it (I’d read it more than once before reviewing it in 2002.), I’m afraid with opened eyes, I’m not going to recommend it so heartily. So I will add this explanation to the top of the old review and leave it there for those who dig deeply into my website. And on this blog post.

The book is the story of Caressa Horvath, who’s sixteen years old when the story opens in 1911. No, let me revise that – the Caressa telling the story is old, at the end of her life, and revealing secrets especially for her granddaughter, but the tale she tells begins when she was sixteen.

Caressa grew up in a carnival, but her mother wanted her to be a lady, so she saved money and sent her to a school for young ladies in New England. But while she was a student, she picked the pocket of a rich gentleman who was well-traveled – and he caught her. He kept quiet about it, but took her under his wing and eventually married her, despite being twenty years older – to “protect” her. And he took her with him on an expedition to Africa, beginning in Tripoli.

After some time in Tripoli, where her husband made arrangements for their caravan and Caressa befriended her Muslim guide, who showed her around the city, they set off across the desert. They’ve paid off the Tuareg to cross. But before long, they’re confronted by a different group of Tuareg, and Caressa’s husband gets very indignant when they want payment – and the entire caravan ends up getting slaughtered – except for Caressa, who had been playing with her finger puppets to calm herself (one of which is named “Mr. Jappy”) – and they think she is doing magic, so they spare her life and take her with them.

So that’s where the cultural sensitivity becomes questionable. Caressa is much, much more culturally sensitive than her husband, seeing everyone she encounters as actual people. She goes on to live in the desert, among different desert peoples, facing different dangers, for three years. For most of that time, she has a friend and companion in a boy named Bakuli who learned basic English from Christian missionaries and calls himself a Jesus-boy. He was a slave of the Tuareg, but he is the one who warned Caressa that when one of the villagers is on their deathbed, that will be enough to convince them that her magic – which saved her from slaughter – is actually bad and she should be killed.

So Caressa and Bakuli escape together and have more adventures, with time living among different desert people. Later, they’re in a caravan again, and Caressa witnesses a man getting assassinated. She’s afraid the assassin will kill her, but instead when she’s sick from lack of water and the long road – he sells her into slavery. She convinces Bakuli to escape while she is still too sick to leave, and now she’s ready for a major part of the story.

All of that is far, far more riveting than it sounds in my brief summary. And the author makes individuals with names and personalities out of the people Caressa encounters and lives with. However, there are strong shades of the “Magical Negro” trope in the many spiritual encounters Caressa has along the way, finding there’s something behind the villagers’ beliefs. They are also portrayed as superstitious and sensitive to spirits – but Caressa senses the spirits, too, so maybe it’s not superstition? And the slaughtering, enslaving, and assassinating give the feeling that the “savages” stereotype isn’t too far under the surface.

Okay, but that’s a little vague and general. I don’t know what life was actually like at that time in Africa, and at least the author did enough research to know about the different people groups and languages and where they lived, and Caressa sees and names individual people.

But then came the part that made me blanch after “Me Too”:

Caressa had been enslaved, and they were taking her to a harem in Constantinople, when a stranger buys her. And the first thing he does is order her to take off her clothes (in Hausa), and he rapes her.

But Caressa’s mind is blown by the sex. “I was played on like an instrument, reaching sensations never dreamed of.”

Really? She’s just been sold as a slave, raped by the guy who bought her, she’s scared and alone, and you want me to believe that he’s so good at it that she enjoyed it?

When she says “Good heavens” after sex, he discovers that she speaks English and is shocked – her skin was dark by all the time in the sun. He is a Scotsman – who has the Sight, which is what led him to Caressa, though we don’t find that out right away.

She does confront him when he exclaims over her speaking English and asks who she is:

What does it matter to you who I am? You bought me for four gold pieces and now you’ve raped me and you’d have done it whether I was Tuareg, Hausa, Fulani or Arab, so why should it make any difference who I am, and I hope you speak enough English to understand that I think you a vulture – an ungulu – a monster and a bastard.

His answer comes in a hard even voice:

I speak and understand English and I paid four gold pieces for you for reasons I don’t care to mention just now, and I took you fast to put my brand on you because if you were a Tuargia you’d think ill of me if I didn’t, and be out of here by morning.

So, hold on, he’s saying that if she were Black it would have been okay???!

The next day, although she “could not help but dislike the manner of his ‘taking’ me,” she realizes that as a slave, she could have had it happen with a Targui or by the Turkish sultan. (Again, it’s okay, because he’s white???) And then she starts remembering those new sensations she’d experienced – and they have sex again, and from then on, he’s basically her one true love.

And now I am embarrassed how much I’ve loved this book.

Mind you, the twist in the ending is fantastic, and that’s what I’m left thinking about. I am a romantic at heart, so I did love their undying love once it got started – pulled together by the Sight! By Destiny! (Not simply the Magical Negro stereotype, but also the Magical Scotsman.) Caressa’s not in a traditional marriage, and it felt subversive to me as a young married evangelical to love this book anyway. But reading it this time, the manner of their meeting takes my concerns about cultural insensitivity and multiplies them.

And I still enjoyed rereading this book! But when I finished it, I had a bout of insomnia because I kept thinking about young newlywed Sondy who first read it and how that worked out (or rather, didn’t).

So – I still love the book, but that love is dampened in my skeptical old age, and I no longer feel I can wholeheartedly recommend it. But reading it was still a trip down memory lane and I’m excited about the rest of the revisiting I’m going to do for Sonderbooks25.

Review of The Sand-Reckoner, by Gillian Bradshaw

The Sand-Reckoner

by Gillian Bradshaw

Forge (Tom Doherty Associates), 2000. 351 pages.
This review written March 13, 2025, from my own copy.
Original review written August 2001.
Starred Review
2001 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 Fiction

I’m revisiting this wonderful book – one of my all-time favorites – as part of #Sonderbooks25, my celebration of my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks. I’m rereading at least one book from each year’s Sonderbooks Stand-outs. And while I will probably not write a new review for all of them, the first five years of reviews were posted in a different format that isn’t phone-friendly, so I want to bring this book to the main site. Does this qualify as an “Old Favorite“? The first time I read it, the book was new! But I’m thinking that enough time has gone by, and it will always be one of my lifetime favorite books, so I’m going to add it to the Old Favorites page, too.

The Sand-Reckoner was reviewed in my very first issue of Sonderbooks (back when it was an email newsletter posted in issues), and the first time I read it was while I was on vacation in Ireland. Despite not being in an idyllic location this time around, I still found the book utterly delightful.

It’s all about the character of Archimedes. He’s portrayed as a genius who gets so wrapped up in his work, he forgets about anything else – which totally fits the historical anecdotes about him. This book shows Archimedes as a young man, returning from the intellectual company of the Museum of Alexandria back to his home in Syracuse, because his father is very ill, and Syracuse is now at war with Rome.

Because of Archimedes’ geometrical genius, he’s better than anyone at building machines – including machines of war, and as he arrives, his first task is to convince the leaders of Syracuse that he can build bigger and better catapults for them. After that, the tyrant of Syracuse (He’s a good guy, but that’s what the leader was called.) must figure out how to entice Archimedes to stay, instead of going back to Alexandria, where more understood his philosophical discussions.

There’s a major subplot about Archimedes’ Roman slave and a romantic subplot as well, and the whole book immerses you in the world of ancient Syracuse with a lovable naive genius.

And, yes, this is one of my all-time favorite books. I’m a math person myself, though never as genius as Archimedes, nor so single-minded. But I do have a big soft spot for sweet nerdy engineers like him.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/sand_reckoner.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

#Sonderbooks25 – 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs

I’m celebrating my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks with #Sonderbooks25! Tonight I’ll be looking at my 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs.

I already talked about my plans for #Sonderbooks25. I’m afraid it’s going to take longer than I thought, especially the first five years, before I switched formats. I’m redoing the format and now the 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs page takes you to a phone-friendly page. Here’s the original version. Though I’m afraid all the reviews are still in the original format, better read on a computer.

Now, my plan was to look at all the Sonderbooks Stand-outs reviews and choose one book to reread from each year’s Stand-outs. For 2001, that’s got to be The Sand-Reckoner, by Gillian Bradshaw, from my very first issue of Sonderbooks, and what may have motivated me to finally start writing Sonderbooks because I wanted to tell people about it.

(It’s going to take me a couple weeks to get to read it. I’m doing a program about this year’s book award winners for other librarians on February 19th, and I’m trying to cram as many more award winners as I can before that program.)

But I didn’t realize I’d be compelled to read *all* my reviews and pages from 2001. That was the year I turned 37, so I also reread my Project 52 posts from the year I was 36 and the year I was 37. Yikes! That’s exactly the age my oldest kid is now, in 2025! My kids then turned 13 and 7 in 2001. I was reading to Timothy’s 1st and 2nd grade classrooms every couple weeks, so the picture books I read were more geared to that age. I was still very much in love with my husband, and we were reading books to both kids at bedtime. I was then a big fan of J. K. Rowling – before she revealed herself to be a transphobe.

I began writing Sonderbooks on August 4, 2001 – so the 25th anniversary won’t happen until August 4, 2026 – which gives me time to complete this project! But 2025 is the 25th year I’m choosing Sonderbooks Stand-outs, so it seems good to start celebrating!

Sonderbooks began as an email newsletter – an “ezine” I called it. Based on the fact that all the early pages have “Copyright 2003” at the bottom – I think I didn’t make it a website until 2003.  I was working half-time at Sembach Base Library in Germany, while my husband was stationed with the USAFE Band.

So because it was an ezine, I’d write five or six reviews all at the same time, every week or two (Really! I was only working part-time then and working at a library got me reading a lot. No TV because we only got German TV.) – and the reviews were a lot shorter than what I write now, each for their own page. Here’s a page of all the Back Issues of Sonderbooks. In 2001, beginning in August, I wrote the first 18 issues.

Some interesting things about those early issues:

On Sonderbooks #7, I started posting an Old Favorite with every issue. Now that I was writing about books, I wanted to mention the books I’d come back to time and time again. I didn’t necessarily reread them for the issue, but it looks like posting about them usually got me to go back and reread them. But there were so many great books I reread in 2001 because of that, I gave them separate listings in the 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs.  [And I want to reread them ALL again now!]

I also posted a Picture Book Pick every issue – but wasn’t as careful about designating which were favorites I’d been reading to my kids for years and which were new. The 2001 Sonderbooks only listed new picture books from 2001 – so I didn’t honor the beloved books The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, Rainy Morning or Clever Cat.

Reading through the back issues, I do think I did a good job picking Stand-outs – as those are the ones that still stand out in my mind 25 years later. I had forgotten that of course, shortly after beginning Sonderbooks, September 11 happened. So there were some books about that, and a book about Saddam Hussein and a book about the Taliban.  Little did we know what was to come.  I don’t find myself wanting to reread those.

Something I miss from the old ezines is that starting with Sonderbooks #9, I put a Quotation of the Week at the end of each issue, a quotation from that week’s reading. (This later evolved into my Sonderquotes blog.) By far my favorite from the first batch of Quotations is the one from Sonderbooks #17:

“Always my days have seemed to me too short to achieve my desire.”
–Aragorn, in The Return of the King, by J. R. R. Tolkien

I keep chanting that to myself as I’m staying up too late – and I feel suddenly noble of purpose instead of just someone who’s trying to do too much.

For the Stand-outs – there were so many “Old Favorites” that I still love so much! I want to reread them all! (Though most I’ve read again sometime since 2001.)

And there were some new favorites that I didn’t remember I’d discovered in 2001 – notably The Thief and The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner; Enchantress from the Stars, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl; and Dark Lord of Derkholm and Year of the Griffin, by Diana Wynne Jones.  Yes, I’ve read those again in the time since.

That was when I loved reading memoirs about moving to a place with another culture, and I gave those books their own section on the 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs page, beginning with Extra Virgin, by Annie Hawes. I want to read more of those again! And that reminds me – many of my favorite books from 2001, I’d read before I started writing Sonderbooks, so they never did get reviews, and the link just goes to their Amazon listing. Now I’d love to read all of those and give them a review!

A nonfiction book that stuck with me all those years and I still think about frequently is Suburban Nation. It explains why your typical suburban neighborhood, built for cars instead of people, doesn’t feel inviting to pedestrians (and why places built like German villages do – though they didn’t use those words).

And probably still the best travel book I’ve ever read is For the Love of Ireland. That was the year we got to spend three weeks and traveled all around Ireland – and for me the trip was accompanied by stories and essays from each region, thanks to this book. It made me feel like I was going deeper. I want to read the book again – though then I may be compelled to go back to Ireland.

I did reread all the picture books listed in the Stand-outs – they are all still available in my library. And they all still bring me a smile. Well, except maybe The Three Golden Keys. Maybe I was in too much of a hurry when I read it this time? I suspect I loved it in 2001 because that was also the year I got to hear Peter Sis speak at a writer’s conference in Paris. So I was well-disposed to love his book. My favorite picture book this time around was probably The Three Pigs – and I’m proud that we discovered it before it won the Caldecott Medal, so our family copy has no medal on the cover.

So yes!  Those are my thoughts on celebrating my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks by revisiting the reviews I wrote in 2001 and my 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs.

What were you reading in 2001?  Have you read any of my Stand-outs?

Announcing #Sonderbooks25!

This is my 25th year of posting Sonderbooks! And I’ve decided to celebrate.

Well, okay, I’m jumping the gun a tiny bit. But my 2025 Sonderbooks Stand-outs will be my 25th best-of-the-year list. Since I begin working on that list when I begin reading for the year, I figure I’m officially in my 25th year.

Here’s how I plan to celebrate: I’m going to make 25 posts featuring each past year’s Stand-outs. My plan is to read all the reviews, and choose one book to reread. I may or may not write a new review of the chosen book, but I’d like to at least write a blog reflection on looking back at it.

Mind you, choosing just one book is going to be incredibly difficult! I’ve already begun looking at my 2001 Stand-outs and made a list of over 30 books that I’d love to reread. (Though when I realized I really would need to only plan on rereading one book, it was an easy choice.)

While I’m at it, I’m also going to put the Stand-outs pages into the newer phone-friendly format. That’s going to especially take some time with the first five years of posts. But I plan to redo a Stand-out page every couple weeks and then post about that year’s books and what was going on in my life that year. The whole project will take me through most of 2025.

Here’s a little history of Sonderbooks:

I started working half-time at Sembach Air Base Library in Germany in 1998 and started reading more than I ever had before. I was having trouble remembering all the wonderful books I was reading and wanted a way to share them with others. The name was always a no-brainer, because one of the first German words I learned is that “Sonder” is a prefix that means “special.”

So on August 1, 2001, I began writing Sonderbooks. It started out as an email newsletter, and even when I made the website to go with it, only a few issues in, I still called it an ezine. For each issue, I tried to have a reviews in a variety of categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Young Adult Fiction, Children’s Fiction and Nonfiction, and Picture Books. I like to reread (especially back then when I had time for it), so beginning with Sonderbooks #7, every issue included an Old Favorite. I also included a quotation from my current reading at the end of every issue – or, okay, it looks like I started that with Sonderbooks #9. I really did post every week or two (remember, I was only working half-time) and reviewed pretty much every book I read.

When I began, I still had hopes of making a little money as an Amazon associate. (Their rates have gone way down since then, so though I am still an associate, it never even covers the cost of web hosting. I do it for the love of it.) With that in mind, I made a tagline for my ezine:

Discover new books. Discuss old books. Order more books.

So that was all well and good while I lived in Germany. In 2006, my then-husband’s time with the U.S. Air Force Band in Germany was up, and he got himself sent to Japan so I couldn’t follow him. I came to Virginia, got my Master’s in Library Science, and began working full-time in libraries. In 2006, I took a class in library school on web design, and revamped my website. And my friend Deborah Gregory made the lovely logo that I still use today. That was when I added the blogs, because blogs were now a thing. (Hadn’t heard of them in 2001.) I use this main blog, but also included Sonderquotes, which is where I now put quotations from the books I read, and Sonderjourneys, for musings and meditations and stories of travel.

Now instead of ezine issues, I used the blog for those who like to follow my current reading, but the website is great for my own reference when I want to recommend a great book I’ve read. So to this day, reviews show up on the blog, but also get their own webpage. Well, except when I’m in a hurry and trying to catch up on back reviews. I currently have 103 reviews written but waiting to be posted, which is down from 270 last year in February, so I may do some of those blog-only reviews to catch up.

Of course, my 25th year won’t really begin until August 1st, but I thought it would be more fun to celebrate #Sonderbooks25 throughout 2025, since after all, it’s my 25th calendar year of writing Sonderbooks. But I figure I can keep the celebration going all the way until August 1st, 2026, which is the actual 25th anniversary of when I started Sonderbooks.

So – to really get started, I will revamp the webpage for my 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs and write a blog post about those wonderful books and what was going on in my life at the time. I’m looking forward to revisiting some fantastic reading! And I’ve begun looking at the books and am pleasantly surprised how many are still carried by Fairfax County Public Library and how many are still in print.

But more on that in the next issue of #Sonderbooks25!

And I’d love it if readers will add to the celebration by commenting about when you first heard of Sonderbooks!