Are you ready for picture book madness folks? It’s time for the 4th Annual Dad Suggests Picture Book Bracket! It’s the picture book event you’ve all been waiting for! This is the second year of the Dad Suggests Picture Book Bracket since we’ve opened our bookstore in Fayetteville, AR, and we’re going to stick with the same alternative prize if you are a local winner! If the bracket winner this year is local to Fayetteville, they can come in and choose any 4 picture books under $19.99 straight from our shop. On the other hand, if the winner is somewhere else in the US and chooses to have their ..read more

This month on Dad’s Bookshelf we have some very beautiful and very thoughtful picture books that I think you’ll enjoy very much. We also have what I believe to be the first appearance of a board book in Dad’s Bookshelf history. It goes without saying that this speaks very highly of this board book - and how much it tickled our funny bone. One of the books on this month’s list is a picture book that releases on March 5th from one of our favorite publishers - and it’s written by our friend Victor D. O. Santos. I’m excited about this book - not just because it’s a beautiful and wonderful picture ..read more

January is always the trickiest month for Dad’s Bookshelf, because it comes immediately after our list of the best picture books of the previous year. Sometimes it can be a challenge to find more books to write about after listing so many great books in one article - but thankfully that isn’t the case this year! It wasn’t hard to find three books I’m excited about, primarily because we just got a new shipment of several books to sell in our store from Eerdmans. Up until this point they’ve been criminally underrepresented in our store, but I won’t be making that mistake going forward! They make ..read more

Welcome to the 6th Annual Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards! Once a year we take a look back at the previous year of picture book publishing, pore over mountains of books, and put together our definitive top 10 list of the year. And the time has come for 2023! It’s the top 10 picture books of 2023 in the 6th Annual Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards! #kidsbooks #picturebooks #dadsuggestsbooks #kidlit #bestpicturebooksoftheyear All year long I’m taking notes and making stacks and thinking about which picture books are my personal favorites - and which might end up on this list in January. If a go ..read more

It’s the very last edition of Dad’s Bookshelf for 2023, and I think we’re finishing the year off very strong. These three picture books are in serious consideration for next month’s Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards, and there’s probably a good chance you’ve seen them being advertised around social media recently. There are a few artists being featured here that are household favorites for us as well - particularly Oliver Jeffers and Sara O’Leary. Those two authors have a proven track record over the years cranking out picture books that we love every single time. Which of course means I’m very ..read more

By the time November comes around, choosing the books that go on Dad’s Bookshelf just keeps getting harder and harder. I have piles of picture books all around the house getting ready for our Halloween list, our Christmas list, and then in no time at all it will be time for the Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards. All that means that I have lots of brand-new, high-quality picture books on my mind, and narrowing that down to just 3 that I’m excited about isn’t an easy feat. And I think that means there’s a pretty good chance that if you make Dad’s Bookshelf in November, you must have a pretty fair ..read more

My wife and I have been dutifully keeping up with our newest tradition of playing one board game each Sunday to help us decide our chores. Originally it was called our Laundry Game, but we’ve since changed the name to Trash Game - because now it decides who has to get all the trash and recycling ready and take it down to the curb every week. And Splendor Duel is far away the game we’ve chosen the most for our Trash Game. To be fair, that’s mostly my fault. The loser gets to choose next week’s game, and my wife continually beat me in Splendor Duel - many weeks in a row. On top of this, I refuse ..read more

This weekend the family all went to our local movie theater to enjoy the the latest live action offering from Disney - The Little Mermaid. I am neither a huge supporter nor hater of Disney’s ongoing strategy to remake all of their classic animated movies in live action - but I will say this. The Little Mermaid is the best one yet, and probably by a mile. Before The Little Mermaid, I suppose I enjoyed The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast just fine. And I think perhaps The Jungle Book had the best transition to live action thus far. But there is a key difference between my enjoyment of those m ..read more

Update August 1st 2023: Where’s Waldo Fayetteville 2023 has now concluded! Thank you so much to everyone for participating, and for all of the locations around town that made it such a special event. The winner of the drawing for this year’s grand prize is Katie K. and family! Congratulations team! We’ll reach out through Facebook. Find Waldo Local is a nationwide “shop local” event cosponsored by the American Bookseller’s Association and Candlewick Press - the publisher behind the famous Where’s Waldo? books. And this year this exciting event is coming to Northwest Arkansas for the first time ..read more

We are officially in the last week of school around here, and you know what that means. It’s time for summer reading! Taking part in summer reading programs every year at my local public library gave me some pretty wonderful memories when I was little. And this tradition of putting out a Dad Suggests summer reading list makes me feel like I’m a small part of that tradition in some way - and that makes me pretty happy. As is our tradition, this is a picture book summer reading list, and it’s primarily our favorite picture books released over the last 2 years. But there is one other way we get t ..read more