In reading Newbery Award winners, I have come across some ideas hidden in those books that I am going to call “Newbery Nugget Notions.” I will address them periodically in this blog.

In It’s My Whole Life, Susan Wider has written a book destined to sit beside The Diary of Anne Frank on any library bookshelf. The author takes her title from words that German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon said about a series of paintings that she did while hiding from the Nazis in the south of France.

For years, I’ve used the phrase, “If I live to be a hundred,” to indicate something that is never going to happen. This weekend we celebrated the second family member to reach that milestone with Uncle Leo. I remember quite a bit of unease with his entrance into this family when Aunt Ruth selected him for membership.

Being baseball fans runs in our family from generation to generation. How and why we choose our teams varies.

When you look at the date on my first picture, I am sure I will not need to explain why the JambaLAya event was cancelled or why there has not been another scheduled in the last two years.

I couldn’t turn down an offer from Bloomsbury to send an advance reading copy of the historical fiction account of Johann Sebastian Bach’s composition of the “St Matthew Passion” in 1727. James Runcie, in The Great Passion, uses the reality of Bach’s faith and proficiency and the known people who surrounded his work and creates a story that feels true.

These steps recall a journey that began right here twenty years ago. In the early part of 2002, I climbed for my first time. I had heard about the extensive de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection in a kiddie lit class and wanted to see for myself. I had no idea as I entered the McCain Library how big it would become in my life.

I just happened up on an offer for an advance reading copy of a book that has many levels of being intriguing. The first to hit my eye was the title, Honeybee Rescue: A Backyard Drama, by Loree Griffin Burns with photography by Ellen Harasimowicz.

I first became acquainted with the Gulf Fritillary butterfly, which is not nearly as famous as the Monarch, quite by accident. I had ordered some passion flowers, aka maypops, and paid good money for them from a garden bulletin, because I loved the flowers, and the maypops reminded me of childhood.

Three generations of Hannahs rarely traveled far from their rural home in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, officially homesteaded with the deed signed by President Buchanan. There were cows to be milked morning and evening – couldn’t get too far away.

If you raise your only daughter to be a reader without banning what she reads and she grows up to be a librarian, you can never tell what kind of books she is going to recommend that you add to your reading list.

The May/June issue of The Horn Book Magazine turned my thoughts to the Newbery Award given by the American Library Association annually for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published in the previous year.

My first memory of a dragonfly came when I was about six years old. As the oldest grandchild, I accompanied my uncle, who was nine years older, when he took the wheelbarrow down to the artesian spring to retrieve the watermelons Papaw had placed there for the ritual afternoon cutting on the long front porch.

Another writer once compared memories of someone you loved to a recording of a beautiful concert. She said the recording could never be as good as the concert, but it was the next best thing.

I’ve known Calliope Kate since she was just a puppet, born on the Mississippi River and swimming like a catfish.

I heard the old adage in my title a while ago, but this week turned out to be a perfect example. My project editor at University Press of Mississippi (UPM) for Becoming Ezra Jack Keats had alerted me that the copy editor would be finished with her work on the manuscript-in-progress and have it to me by June 16.

I first met Frances O'Roark Dowell’s writing with Dovey Coe, which I loved, so an offering of an ARC of her newest work by Net Galley was an automatic answer. Hazard, her latest offering is very different but equally outstanding.

Feeling comfortable wandering around in my local library has been one of the perks of being well-vaccinated with coronavirus numbers going down. This week after two years of ordering ahead and picking up at the window, I was really pleased to go inside and see that Oak Grove Public Library is getting things right.

A book set in a bookstore for new and rare books in 1950 sounded good even before I opened it and saw a list of the books’ characters with a brief description.

The road to getting a book published may have many potholes and twists. Sometimes it has a complete U-turn. It helps to have directions when you hit the road.