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?