Day: September 30, 2025

Books Read in September, 2025

*book group selection | bolded means favorite

Picture Books

*The Littlest Drop by Sascha Alper, Jerry Pinkney and Brian Pinkney
*Sundust by Zeke Peña
*The History of We by Nikkolas Smith
*A Place for Us by James Ransome
*This Year, a Witch! by Zoey Abbott
*Don’t Trust Fish by Neil Sharpson and Dan Santat
*Dancing With Water by Gwendolyn Wallace and Tonya Engel
*The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio
*In the World of Whales by Michelle Cusolito and Jessica Lanan

Middle Grade

*A Hero’s Guide to Summer Vacation by Pablo Cartaya
*The Winter of the Dollhouse by Laura Amy Schlitz

Grownup Fiction

The Blue Bistro by Elin Hilderbrand

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon

Turns out that Yoon doesn’t only write great YA fiction, she also writes incredibly readable thrillers.

Young Nonfiction

*The Black Mambas: The World’s First All-Woman Anti-Poaching Unit by Kelly Crull

Grownup Nonfiction

[Turns out that this book was so nice, I reviewed it twice. There’s an August review, too.]
SEW . . . The Garment-Making Book of Knowledge: Real-Life Lessons from a Serial Sewist by Barbara Emodi

I’ve read or paged through a lot of sewing books this year. They are mostly all the same. This one is different. It gives an overview of how to make garments and it also includes practical tips about various things you didn’t know you need to know.

I was hoping this book was one sewing book of many by Emodi, but she seems to have switched over to writing fiction. Too bad.

Newport: Biking on the Beach and Sea Lions

We had an open window of about an hour with no rain forecast, so we rented fat-tire bikes at Bike Newport and had a very fun ride on the beach.

The riding was great because all the sand was very wet from the torrential rain the day before. It was my first time riding a fat tire bike, and I had a blast.

It was also significantly harder than riding on paved streets. I got very sweaty.

From there, we went to check out the sea lions, who were living their best sea lion life on the Newport docks. You can see them for yourself on the livecam.

They were incredibly fun to watch.

So much so that we ate at the Clearwater Restaurants so that we could continue watching them.

I got fish and chips, my favorite thing to get at the beach. Both fish and chips were delightfully hot and seasoned and I felt I had made a good choice.

After lunch, we stopped by the exterior of Ripley’s Believe it or Not so Matt could get a picture with the Hulk.

From there, we went to the Oregon Coast Aquarium where it wasn’t very cold, but it was raining. I made the unfortunate choice to not wear my rain jacket. It’s a mostly outside aquarium.

We did, however, time it perfectly, fun-wise. We first watched the birds get fed, then continued on to the seals and sea lions’ feeding, and then finished up with the sea otters’ feeding.

I have no pictures, but I had a great time.