When you run a business, you try to keep things steady and predictable. It makes life easier when things happen at a regular and predictable pace. This is true both in terms of the internals of the business and the externals, including things like how often we have new books for you. But in reality, while new books come to us regularly, they do so at their own pace. Sometimes a drip drop, and sometimes a torrential rain. At least for a little while, rainy season has begun. The season starts today with a huge “shipment” of new books – 23 new ones to be exact – from our good friends at Charlesbridge Publishing.

Megan from Charlesbridge Publishing is one of our earliest supporters here at A Story Before Bed. She’s as well as her colleague Connie are responsible for continually delivering incredible content for our customers. What you don’t know is that Megan and Connie are also an absolute pleasure to work with. As I’m sure you know, in life you run into all kinds of people, we’re lucky that people who get excited about our service are generally sweethearts, but not all of them have to deal with our constant requests (for new books, tweaking formats to make them easier to import into our site, contract updates, etc.). And despite all our requests, Megan and Connie from Charlesbridge are constantly positive and super helpful. Thanks guys.

Now onto the books they (and all the people who help make these books – the rest of the folks at Charlesbridge, the authors, the illustrators, etc.) worked so hard to put in front of you. Did I mention there are 23 of them??? (Our partner Walter hates it when I overuse punctuation, so please know that the extra question marks are there to tweak Walter.)

There are so many I don’t know where to start, but here are some highlights… The Ace Lacewing Series, three detective stories where the stars are bugs.Aggie the Brave, another Aggie the dog book for our collection. Stuart Murphy’s collection of four books with things to teach us including one of my favorite book titles – Emma’s Friendwich. The beautifully illustrated Sitka Rose, and Brave Donatella and the Jasmine Thief. And cool new nature books including Turtle Turtle Watch Out, and Meet the Howlers (coincidentally the name of my new favorite Fox sitcom). ;) And then there’s my vote for most adorable books of the bunch – Boo Cow, and Piggies in the Pumpkin Patch. See… there are pigs in a pumpkin patch. It doesn’t get much cuter than that. :)

And of course, the ever prolific Iza Trapani has provided us with a whole bunch of excellent renditions of classics including the richly illustrated Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Check out that sparkly night sky – beautiful!

Whew… that’s a lot of new books. Thanks to all the authors and illustrators and the folks at Charlesbridge for sending us so many great books!

And like I said, while the sun is out in force here in Seattle, on A Story Before Bed it’s raining – raining books. Look out next week for even more books coming your way. (And don’t forget the freebies while they last – Itsy Bitsy Spider and Jabberwocky still there if you haven’t recorded them yet.) Happy reading.