New in the Library! November 2024

Would you believe we have added over 500 books to our library since New Year’s Day? I could hardly believe it when I had a look at our LibraryThing account and saw that. We currently have over 3,600 books available for borrowing, plus a few hundred double-ups or others that we chose not to make available for one reason or another. I thought it would be nice to do a post once a month to show our new arrivals. So, here is the first edition!

We have acquired all the other books in the Hidden Heroes series when Sonlight offered them on their clearance sales, but they don’t use Witness Men in their curriculum. Esther and I decided we needed this one on the shelf to complete the collection! I’m looking forward to reading it aloud some day. The others have been great stories about little-known missionaries and places. See our reviews of some of them here.

For a little while after I started this post with that first title, I wondered if this would be the month we didn’t accumulate more books–what irony! I shouldn’t have wondered about that, though. The middle of the month, I took the little girls to town. We didn’t manage to accomplish our primary goal for the trip, but we went to a couple of op shops and came home with several books.

Little Miss was delighted to find this collection of Beatrix Potter’s little Peter Rabbit books. The cover is rather rough, but inside is beautiful.

I always snatch up Jungle Doctor books when I find them. These fun stories are based on the author’s experiences as a missionary doctor in Africa. We now have eight of these books.

I found these two fun easy readers–just the kind of stories Miss Joy loves right now! We have a large collection of easy readers, because I spent so many years trying to teach my older boys to read and hoped that they would help. I don’t add to that shelf very often, but when I saw these…

Little Miss loves to peruse children’s cookbooks, so when I saw this one, I picked it up for her. It has step-by-step line drawings with the instructions in each recipe.

When I found this book illustrating several of Shakespeare’s plays, I snatched it up. It looks like a great way to introduce the Bard. I need to go through it myself, though, before I put it out for the children to read.

Rich Dad Poor Dad is one I’ve heard of a number of times, so when I found it for less than a dollar I decided to get it and add it to my pile to read *someday*.

And then, there are the usual few that looked like they might be good but I need to read them myself before adding them to the shelves. City Night and The Wild Boy in the Bush are set in New Zealand. Jenny’s Cat and Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine just look like fun ones. We’ve found that a lot of the older Scholastic books are fairly good. I got Little Foxes because I’ve heard a lot of times that Michael Morpugo is good but haven’t read any of his books yet.

Elijah didn’t know what to give me for my birthday last month, so he told me to think of a book I wanted. I didn’t have anything in mind then, but a few weeks ago I read a newsletter from Living Books Press in Australia. They had just published The New Zealand Bird Book, similar to The Burgess Bird Book, which was one of my favorite books as a child. I thought, “That looks like a book to get one of these days,” and immediately forgot about it. The next morning, a local friend emailed me a link to the advertisement–she was going to buy one of the books. So, I asked her to get me one, too, to save postage, and asked Elijah if he would pay for it for my birthday present. When the book arrived, Miss Joy was immediately intrigued, and wanted me to read it to her. It is beautiful inside! So nice to have a book with our local birds in it!