May is a great month for books. Let me give you the holidays to prove it.
May is Get Caught Reading Month, which started in 1999 as a way to encourage the love of reading. Bonus: It can be a great time to read outdoors and make your reading visible to the world.
Children’s Book Week, which started April 30, continues through May 6 this year. This is one of the longest-running national literacy initiatives, beginning in 1919. The official posters for Children’s Book Week are collectible items, and this year’s poster was created by Jillian Tamaki with the slogan “One World, Many Stories.”
The picture book illustrators chosen for each year’s poster are great choices for celebrating Children’s Book Week. Take a look at Tamaki’s They Say Blue as well as Last Stop on Market Street (written by Matt de la Pena), illustrated by Christian Robinson, the 2017 poster illustrator. Hooray for Books! is a delightful picture book about a turtle finding its favorite book, written and illustrated by Brian Won, the 2016 poster illustrator.
How are your limerick skills? Can you talk in limericks all day long? Don’t miss National Limerick Day on May 12. Need a limerick refresher? It’s a five-line humorous verse using the rhyming scheme AABBA, with the first, second and fifth lines longer. To give you a taste for the day, try the fun collection of limericks in Sure Smells Around Here by Brian P. Cleary and There Once was a Man with Six Wives by Mick Twister, which gives you a rhyming twist on British royal history.
If you were wishing for a day to honor Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’re in luck with Towel Day on May 25. How to celebrate the occasion? Fans are encouraged to carry towels with them everywhere. Adams wrote: “A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value —” Maybe on this day you can figure out a few uses for a towel, maybe try a pan galactic gargle blaster (not recommended for your health), or sit down and enjoy a book by Douglas Adams. Hitchhiker’s Guide will give you many ways in which to use a towel as well as a hilarious story about a man who hitchhikes through space after Earth is demolished for a new hyperspacial expres
sway. It is very quotable.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a humorous detective novel by Adams that he described as a “thumping good detective-ghost-horror-whodunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic.”
The Geeky Chef Cookbook by Cassandra Reeder has a lot of fun recipes for many different fandoms but let me direct you specifically to the infamous Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
Enjoy your May! I’ll have more literary holidays for you in June.
~ Posted by Meranda T.
Shelf Talk 