I did it! I revised my 2003 Sonderbooks Stand-outs to a phone-friendly format!
I’m celebrating my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks with #Sonderbooks25.
My original plan was to reread *one* book from each year’s Sonderbooks Stand-outs, revise the early years’ Stand-outs pages to the new, phone-friendly format, and blog about all the other books in this series.
Well, my plans are changing. First, I can’t resist reading *all* the reviews I posted each year. In the early years, they were “issues” of Sonderbooks – and 2003 went from Sonderbooks #45 to Sonderbooks #69. (You can find all the back issues on the Back Issues page.) And I’m rereading my Project 52 posts. 2003 was the year I was 38 and 39. We still lived in Germany, still thought I had a happy marriage, my kids were 15 and 9, and we took a family vacation to Scotland. I still worked half-time at Sembach Base Library.
Another thing that’s slowing me down is it turns out I made a *lot* of books Stand-outs. (I read and reviewed even more – I was only working half-time.) And it takes a very long time to revise the webpages because I pretty much have to do it from scratch. This will get easier after I finish 2005, when I can do more simple copying and pasting.
So – I did reread and review Beyond the Limit, by Joan Spicci, as part of this project, but I also found some other old Stand-outs available on eaudio and listened to them. And I’m finding I want to reread everything! It won’t happen – but I read some wonderful books back then.
So instead of blogging about all the books I didn’t reread – I’m trying to post on social media most days about those old Stand-outs. That way I can think about them one at a time and present them to people one at a time. But meanwhile, do check out my new webpage for the 2003 Sonderbooks Stand-outs!
I do love that Fairfax County Public Library still owns a copy of almost all the picture books I named as Stand-outs in 2003. I maintain this is not because our picture book collection is too old but because those picture books were and are truly wonderful.
I’m having lots of fun celebrating #Sonderbooks25. I hope some of the fun will spread to readers!