This Is Helpful Advice!

Ello just passing spreading love ❤️🍓

hi flaym! thank you for dropping by, have a great day! ❤️🍓

Readers are the best weightlifters, then.

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them.”

— Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Books with cats make the best reading environment ♡

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” ― Ernest Hemingway

We need more diverse books in literature. More voices need to be represented.

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center has released the results of their 2019 survey on diversity in kidlit/YA.

We thank them for this invaluable work, note their commitment to adding Arabs/Arab Americans in future surveys, and present these graphs of their findings.

The 3,716 books surveyed have this many main characters total for the following groups:

Black/African: 11.9%

First/Native Nations: 1%

Asian/Asian American: 8.7%

Latinx: 5.3%

Pacific Islander: 0.05%

White: 41.8%

Animal/Other: 29.2%

LGBTQIAP+: 3.1%

Disability: 3.4%

“Taken together, books about white children, talking bears, trucks, monsters, potatoes, etc. represent nearly three quarters (71%) of children’s and young adult books published in 2019.” - librarian Madeline Tyner

When we looked at the breakdown for IPOC creatives who wrote and/or illustrated stories with characters of their own race, we found the following:

First/Native Nations: 68.2%

Pacific Islander: 80%

Latinx: 95.7%

Asian/Asian American: 100%*

*NOTE: these percentages include both authors and illustrators and, as pointed out by author Linda Sue Park for past surveys, Asians/Asian Americans are frequently illustrators but not necessarily authors of their own stories, meaning this is not fully reflective of #OwnVoices representation.

Black/African creatives wrote and/or illustrated only 46.4% of stories featuring Black/African characters.

This is the work that still needs to be done.

the feeling when a book fucks you up so hard you have to put it down and take a break because your emotional threshold has reached it's limit

I honestly think that crying over a book is one of the most prominent sign of compassion for humanity. You’re crying over someone who isn’t really there, doesn’t really exist, but you still feel for them as if you have known them your entire life.

Leo Tolstoy sure does know what happiness is!

“Rest, nature, books, music… such is my idea of happiness.”

-Leo Tolstoy

I've been seeing a lot of memes about readers hoarding books and buying some more even through they don't read them, while there are others complaining how they have a huge pile of books to be read. I'm just going to say:

Hoarding books isn't a bad thing – in fact, it could be a sign of intelligence.

A writer from Medium, Michael Simmons, wrote this golden post about the habit. This is for all of you readers out there: boy, you are some smarty-pants.

"We read to get lost, to forget the hard times we're living in, and we read to remember those who came before us who lived through something harder."

– Jacqueline Woodson, YA fiction writer, from her TED talk: What reading slowly taught me about writing