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Lynn:  I am just home from attending the L.A. Times Festival of Books last weekend.  What an amazing event!  We started Friday night with the awards ceremony where the winners of this year’s L.A. Times Book Prizes were announced in the gorgeous Bovard Auditorium on the USC campus.  I was lucky enough to be one [...]

Cindy and Lynn: Bookends is on Spring Break this week. Keep Calm and Pretend You’re at the Beach…with a good book! Cindy has this poster on her front door and is trying not to whine about not being on the beach. Instead, this year, she is launching a kitchen remodel project and instead of sand [...]

ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim in less than a week away!  Both of us at Bookends will be attending so stay tuned for lots of conference reports and information on the great new books we discover.  We are faithful attendees at the Booklist Youth Forum too.  It is always a wonderful program and this year [...]

Cindy: You never know WHAT you will find during locker clean out. As the school year drew to a close last week, I helped monitor the 8th grade wing of locker clean out and had a cart with me to collect any last library books that hadn’t been returned. As I rolled it back to [...]

Cindy: I am still recovering from a fun weekend in L.A. attending the L.A. Times Book Prize and Festival. That article will give you an overview of all the fun I had at this festival that draws 140,000 visitors to celebrate the world of literature. Families, aspiring authors, teachers, and book lovers of all sorts [...]

The tulips are blooming a month early in Holland and Bookends is on spring break.  See you on April 9th.

Cindy: Do you have a way to gather reading suggestions from your children, teens, students? If not, find one. Even though the media keeps ringing the death knell for books my piles of to-read new titles has not diminished any. I do my best to sort through what the publishers generously send us, what I [...]

Cindy: Months behind the rest of the book-reading world, I finally read The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton 2012). I did not preorder the book–like the thousands of other true nerdfighter fans–because I could not trust myself to have the new John Green book in my house and stay focused on my 2011 L.A. Times [...]

Lynn: Our focus group loves science and I think they share that love with lots of kids.  We’re always looking for great new science-related books for the younger set and this week we have something a little unusual – picture books that are fiction yet also present scientific topics.  These two are ideal for common [...]

Cindy: I picked up Pie (Scholastic 2011) a few months ago to read as a palate cleanser between review books. It had a pie and a cat on the cover and looked like a lighthearted read. I live in Michigan and it was prime berry season when I started writing this post in early August. I didn’t know [...]