Robyn Skaley

All the art, all the books. Artist, illustrator, art educator. &

[Robyn Skaley @rskaley]

Hi #kidlitartpostcard and happy #worldbookday!
I’m Robyn Skaley, an illustrator, artist, art educator.
I love creating playful & humorous scenes with painterly textures and sweet details. Currently looking for rep and #kidlitart projects.

My portfolio:https://t.co/OTqBSwx47f

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

Lots of you have asked for our reading list, so here are a bunch of the key texts we'll be selecting from. Note: this also includes the 14 we've already read. The books in this image (chronological):

Homer — The Iliad
Homer — The Odyssey
Aeschylus — The Oresteia
Aeschylus — Prometheus Bound and Other Plays
Sophocles — The Three Theban Plays
Euripides — Electra and Other Plays
Aristophanes — The Complete Plays
Herodotus — The Histories
Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War
Plato — Complete Works
Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle — Metaphysics
Aristotle — Physics
Aristotle — De Anima
Aristotle — Rhetoric
Cicero — On Obligations
Cicero — The Republic and The Laws
Livy — The Early History of Rome
Virgil — The Aeneid
Ovid — Metamorphoses
Plutarch — Lives, Volume II
Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
Augustine — Confessions
Augustine — On Christian Teaching
Augustine — City of God
Boethius — The Consolation of Philosophy
Beowulf
The Song of Roland
Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica (Summary)
Dante — The Divine Comedy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales
Malory — Le Morte d’Arthur
Machiavelli — The Prince
Shakespeare — Complete Works / Hamlet
Cervantes — Don Quixote
Milton — Paradise Lost
Bunyan — The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers
Austen — Pride and Prejudice
Tocqueville — Democracy in America
Dumas — The Count of Monte Cristo
Brontë — Wuthering Heights
Poe — The Complete Tales and Poems
Melville — Moby-Dick
Tolstoy — War and Peace
Tolstoy — The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky — The Idiot
Dostoevsky — Demons
Dostoevsky — The Brothers Karamazov
Melville — Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories
Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray
Chesterton — The Everlasting Man
Hemingway — The Sun Also Rises
Lewis — The Screwtape Letters
Lewis — The Abolition of Man
Tolkien — The Lord of the Rings
Solzhenitsyn — The Gulag Archipelago
McCarthy — Blood Meridian

[Lily @lily_choudhury_]

William Zinsser taught writing at Yale, then wrote the book that has fixed more bad writing than every English class combined.

Here are 10 cuts from "On Writing Well" that instantly make your writing twice as strong.

1) Delete every word doing no work

[Robyn Skaley @rskaley]

Hi #kidlitartpostcard and happy #worldbookday!
I’m Robyn Skaley, a Cdn illustrator, artist, art educator.
I love creating playful & vibrant scenes with painterly textures and hidden details. Currently looking for rep and #kidlitart projects.

My portfolio: https://t.co/GQ91DCCk62

[Sophie Pedder @PedderSophie]

Because…there is so much bleak stuff going on, and this is heartwarming, and it’s made by a French animation team (not by AI), and it’s gone viral and everyone in France is talking about it.
Enjoy!
🇫🇷🐺🎄

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

The older I get, the more I realize that anything above zero compounds. Showing up consistently matters more than showing up perfectly. Small things become big things. Never allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial.

[Simon Smith @smithsmm]

Here are almost 40 of my favourite #MiddleGrade reads for 2025.

A fantastic range from wild fantasy, to gritty realism, historical adventures and more than a few scares. What a brilliant year its been for children’s books

[Impressions @impression_ists]

Claude Monet, Snow

[Kirkus Reviews @KirkusReviews]

Are you ready for 🎉 The Best Picture Books of 2025 🎉? Our list of 100 titles dropped today, and @DibblyFresh has an introduction. https://t.co/rcha2hz0sY #BestBooks2025 #KidLit @dsantat @randomhousekids @ClarionBooks @4NIKKOLAS @penguinkids @FlorisBooks @TundraBooks

[Maude Frome @frome_maude]

Fairies Dancing in the #autumn breeze, by Arthur Rackham, c.1900 #WyrdWednesday #BookChatWeekly

[Maude Frome @frome_maude]

Beatrix Potter, author, #illustrator & natural scientist, was born in London on 28 July 1866. She changed children’s literature forever. Here are the mice from the Tailor of Gloucester, who save the tailor’s fortunes. Costumes @V_and_A inspired Beatrix’s art. #FolkloreSunday

[Giuseppe Castellano @pinocastellano]

“The beginning seems to be more than half of the whole.”

—Aristotle

Start that illustration, that picture book dummy, podcast, newsletter, or whatever it is you want to work on. The simple act of starting something gets you halfway there.

[Buitengebieden @buitengebieden]

Some seats are worth everything.. 😂

[Robyn Skaley @rskaley]

This is a lovely thread! Thanks for sharing @jabberworks ! I love your description of the flow state, where we lose ourselves in the world of our drawings.

[Sarah McIntyre @jabberworks]

When people say they can't draw, I wonder if it's because they make one bad drawing and stop.

If it helps, my first drawing is often terrible, but it gives me a basis for working through a better sketch, and perhaps only then, making a third final drawing or painting.🧵

[Ryan Holiday @RyanHoliday]

"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best of yourself?" –Epictetus

[Giuseppe Castellano @pinocastellano]

In all my years at Simon & Schuster and Penguin, the inability to properly anthropomorphize animals was one of the top five reasons my team and I passed on (or “rejected”) illustrators.

FYI…

[David Frum @davidfrum]

"My friends who pursued academic careers in English – no more apocalyptically disillusioned class of person exists – feel they are heirs to a ruined inheritance. They were preparing to take possession of great mansions of learning only to find the windows have been smashed, the furniture looted and the electricity cut off." - great essay

[Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @five_books]

"I became a murder mystery fan at the age of twelve, going straight from Famous Five to Agatha Christie. I fell in love with murder mystery plots then, and have loved them ever since."
https://t.co/CPWftqSF0A

[Don Martin @DonMartinCTV]

Well worth reading to the end. A common sense Alberta voice unleashed. https://t.co/kmDOrPOHFA

[Ryan Holiday @RyanHoliday]

How do you comprehend anything important? By doing the work. By going to the source. By returning over and over again, bringing new experiences, new questions, new contexts. Refusing to settle for first impressions, remaining unsatisfied, ever curious.

[Michael Chong 🇨🇦 @MichaelChongMP]

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF:

“What price are we willing to pay for Canada?

Unless we fix what’s in our power to fix, the forces bearing down on us may make the Canada we knew impossible to sustain”

#cdnpoli

https://t.co/qNpY7MpBEq