Monthly Wrap-Up: August 2021 – A Wonderful Month of Fantasy Books and A Lot of Genshin Impact

Obligatory commentary on the fast passage of time: Can you believe that August is over and it’s now September, friends? The good news is that we’re doing our best to keep up our streak of monthly wrap-up posts, so here we are with another wrap-up post today!

So let’s talk about the books that we all read this month, and all the other fun stuff that we’ve been up to. Onward! ✨

Monthly Wrap-Up: July 2021 – In Which CW Read 30 Books Since the Last Wrap-Up, Joce’s New Fave Book, and Skye Indulges in Middle-Grade Comics

Friends, I think we have to admit something that we all know: we’re pretty bad at doing these wrap-up posts. To be fair, the last three months have been incredibly busy at the Pond. In May, we had Asian Pasifika Heritage Month, in June we had Pride Month, and July we were all having naps to recover from the sheer workload of it all.

But look: we made it to the end of July and we’re doing a wrap-up today! Look at us go!

Monthly Wrap-Up: March 2021 – CW Reads Wonderful SFF and Contemporaries… Where is Joce and Skye?

After dropping the ball on this a few times, we are finally back to our (hopefully from now on) regular wrap-up posts! Following all the awesome work that we did for Black History Month, March was a much more relaxed month where we mostly shared book reviews and book news.

It’s just CW wrapping up the books she read this month and the posts that she did. Where are Skye and Joce? Read on to find out. 💜

Monthly Wrap-Up: November 2020 – Joce Shares Pondsgiving, CW’s Favourite Middle-Grade Reads, and Skye Reads More Fantasies!

Joce Opens Pondsgiving & Shares a Story-Time

This year, and every year, we hold Pondsgiving to share a meal and the found family we have built amongst the inhabitants. In our everyday lives, particularly the American voices in the book community, we need to strive to decolonize Thanksgiving. This article by M. Karlos Baca (Tewa/Dinè/Nuuciu), an Indigenous Foods Activist, founder of Taste of Native Cuisine, and a cofounder of the I-Collective, explores ways to decolonize Thanksgiving and revive Indigenous relationships with food. The Pond is full of myth, magic, and lore, and in these traditions, we eradicate the false narrative we have been told about glorifying pilgrimage in American history, and retell history in the ways that stories should have been initially told.

We are taking special care to decolonize our Thanksgiving dinner at the Pond, using methods and ideologies from this interview with Chef Nephi Craig, a Navajo member of the White Mountain Apache tribe of Whiteriver, Arizona, and founder of the Native American Culinary Association.

We welcome you to our Pondsgiving dinner. We hope you’ll stay awhile.

Monthly Wrap-Up & Story-Time: October 2020 & Story Time – The Pond Friends Celebrate Pond-O-Ween!

It’s the last day of spooky season, friends! And that means… it’s finally Pond-O-Ween! Last year, the Pond friends celebrated Pond-O-Ween and dressed up in costumes handmade by our favourite toad, Varian. This year, the Pond friends are back with new costumes, and we are so excited for you to see them.

Seeing that it’s the last day of the month, we thought we would combine Pond-O-Ween with our Monthly Wrap-Up. We haven’t had a Story-Time post in awhile, and Joce wrote this year’s Pond-O-Ween post – and I know all of you are going to love it as much as I do.