Living in Wisconsin, with hard and long winters, it is particularly conducive to spend time indoors and find a pleasant way to forget about the weather. Watching movies is one of my favorite pastimes and probably of many of yours. Blockbuster titles are familiar to many of you, so this time I chose to highlight some of the lesser known titles that we added to our collection hoping that they might inspire you to try them.

Our universe is full of mysteries and what better way to explore than in a book. Until space travel becomes commonplace, books may be the only way for us Earthlings to explore the starry skies.

In the world of children’s picture books, there still exists a lack of diversity in the illustrations and themes available to children. Improvement has been made over the last few years due to increased awareness through organizations like We Need Diverse Books. It is vital for children of all colors and cultures to read books with multicultural faces and characters that reflect the world around us. While there are multicultural picture books that are written and illustrated to reflect a theme specific to a culture there is also a movement toward books with everyday diversity that depict diverse characters doing everyday activities. The most famous and earliest example of everyday diversity is the book The Snowy Day by Jack Ezra Keats. Here a few of my favorite everyday diversity picture books.

Over the past two years, I’ve led a book club discussion once a month and I thought it might be interesting to share some of my favorite titles that we’ve read. My selections included some nonfiction as well as fiction. All of the titles were published in the past five years, and only a few were bestsellers.