A Week of Books

Went to the library. Most of the books I wanted were not there.  Came home with three books.

Me and Sam-Sam Handle the Apocalypse by Susan Vaught.  Neurodiversity plus small cute dogs plus bullies plus new kid in school plus deployed parent plus mystery involving at home parent plus tornado. It all adds up to a fast-paced awesome read.

Sea Sirens by Amy Chu. There is colorful and graceful artwork in this graphic novel I am still reading because I get distracted by all the pictures and my visual literacy is not the best.  Storms and dementia add texture to the story.  I will tell you more later.

So pretty!

The Cardboard Kingdom by Chad Sell. I finally read this graphic novel about  kids who spend their summer making costumes and acting out their favorite characters. The kids don't keep to gender lines in their play. Each chapter is a different child's story. Problems abound and problems get solved with imagination and fun. I miss this kind of summer and hope that neighborhood like this exist everywhere.

And then I  read some of the books I bought. Let's start with the book I bought for the subtitle.

Shipwreckers: The Curse of the Cursed Temple of Curses (or We Almost Died. A Lot.)  by Scott D. Peterson and Josh Pruett.
This is the first in a proposed series. Lots of puns, lots of death-defying escapes and traps and jungle animals of the fatal kind. This will be an action packed, fun, pun filled cinematic roller coaster ride of a series. It should be a little shorter. Just saying.

Pay Attention, Carter Jones by Gary D. Schmidt.    On the first day of middle school during a horrific rain storm, Carter Jones opens the front door to find a butler - a true English butler - standing on his doorstep.  The book has a Bentley, a deployed father, flashbacks to an Australian rain forest, and...CRICKET!!  After years of Lord Peter Wimsey's saunters on the cricket pitch, during which I despaired of figuring out the game, I think it might even make sense. I have been enlightened, and the game is so much more than a cucumber sandwich and endless runs.
Cricket is just a metaphor for the family drama that unfolds. I need someone to talk to about this wonderful book.

Update: This post was started a few days ago.  More reading has happened. I started Slay by Brittaney Morris. (due out toward the end of the month). Reading takes us to unfamiliar places and stuff we are not always aware of - or aware of only peripherally. One of only four black students at a upper middle class high school, Kiera hides the fact that she developed the online virtual reality, role playing game, Slay, from everyone around her. When a player is killed right before his appearance in a tournament online, Kiera's world tilts. That is where I am right now!
Just one thing.  Please don't hate me. But Malcolm? Um, no.
So far, the book is a page turner.

BOOKS INTENDED FOR ADULT CONSUMPTION.
Every now and then I read a book that I download from various "cheap e-book sites", like Early Bird Books or Riffle. I especially like mysteries and non-fiction for adults like me.

Murder on Amsterdam Avenue by Victoria Thompson. Charles Oakes is dead. His father suspects foul play. So, he calls Frank Malloy, a private detective, to find out what happened. Malloy gets help from his fiancee, widow Sarah Brandt. Set in NYC 20 or so years after the Civil War, the mystery is full of period details about lifestyles and social justice issues. It was edifying - also a good mystery and a new series to fill my vacation or escape reading needs.

Confession

I do not want to read books written for teens.  I do not want to read new books.  I want to snuggle down with Winnie-the-Pooh and Uncle Wiggily.

 I want to revisit the flood in which Piglet is entirely surrounded by water and the boat made of an overturned umbrella.

I can not get interested in road trips made by fledgling adults, or the struggles of young people whose best friends have all moved away.  I want to to find Goldbug on every page.  I want to meet Anne Shirley again for the first time.

And I want to sail on the pirate ship with Obadiah, the Bold, chant "Not I!" with the dog and the mouse and the cat - or is it a rooster?

It is the waning of summer, a time of nostalgia and I want to go back, go back, go back to the first time I opened Little Men.

This, too, shall pass.  Toddlers turn to school children.  Tigers turn to butter and I will turn to new books some time.

But not right now.

Summer Reading

This is the very first Summer in 30 years that I am NOT involved with a public library's Summer Reading Club.  Do I miss it?  Um..... Actually, yes, I do. 

So in memory of 30 Summer Reading Clubs - which doesn't include the ones I belonged to as a child or helped with as a teen library page - I will offer you some online Reading Clubs.

JetBlue and Random House offer Soar with Reading.  This year, Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House series is the inspiration behind the club.  Readers are encouraged to dream of places that Jack and Annie can go in future Tree House Adventures.  The website offers activities based on the Magic Tree House series and a sweepstakes for parents and kids.  Each entry into the sweepstakes earns a book for under-served classrooms.  And the prizes for the sweepstakes include round-trip arifare.

This reading club doesn't ask much of participants.  The only things parents and children need to do to participate is fill out a sweepstakes form online.  The website doesn't even offer age ranges for the participants.  I'd guess first through fourth grades - 6 through 9 years old. 

Here's  a summery book - Kate Coombs' Water Sings Blue.

Don't forget the Summer Reading Club at Barnes & Noble.  Children in pre-K through grade 6 earn a free book by filling out a Barnes & Noble booklog with the 8 books they read this summer.  The link gives you all the necessary paperwork and rules.

Scholastic offers a great summer program and they partner with classroom teachers as well.  Readers log the time they spent reading and win virtual prizes.  There is also a sweepstakes.  Classrooms can  "compete" if the teachers log the children on early enough. 

Scholastic's child and teen friendly web pages are always fun to navigate with author info, games, book trailers, and lots of familiar characters.  Parents and children should check the FAQ if they have questions.

I suspect that the TD Summer Reading Club is limited to the residents of Toronto - I decided not to delve too deeply  - but the website is awesome.  Check it out.

And check with your local bank.  In past years, TD Bank, and other local banks have offered money to children who finished a minimum number of books.  The money has to go into an existing account at that bank, but hey, it's free money, right?

Friday Sighday

I have been very busy this week with non-bloggy things - sitting for a grandchild; following my Dad from the hospital to Rehab to another room in Rehab; catching up on Committee work for my worship community; and reading.

Ah, reading...  It is a salve to my weary - and sometimes restless - soul.  Over at Battle of the (Kid's) Books, you can now vote for the one book in the entire contest that you want to return to the Final Round if it gets voted off.  I LOVE this part of BoB because sometimes a worthy book falls short of a worthy judge's expectations.  Ya know what I mean?  Judges are human.

Here is how my reading and Battle of the Kids' Books stands.  I have ONE book yet to read in the first match-up of Round One.  I need to get hold of Bomb! by Steve Sheinkin before March 12th.

In the next set of match-ups, I have to read two books, Endangered by Eliot Schrefer and Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage.

Round one continues, and I must read Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin.

In the next set of four contestants, I haven't read THREE of the books; Moonbird by Philip Hoose, Seraphina by Rachel Hartman AND No Crystal Stair by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson.

Some very heavy reading will be going on in this house.

If you would like to see all the books in the competition, and by elimination the books I've already read, click here.

I've voted for MY Undead Choice.  It was a close call.  Join in the fun, today.

KBWT - Bookwink and SW snowflakes

Oof!  I have been reading a lot lately* and right this very minute I do NOT want to share a kids' book website.  Instead, as a nod to the start of Hanukkah and the fast approach of Christmas - and to the fact that I live in the Northern Hemisphere where the possibility of frozen precipitation is ever present - I will share this super website...DIY Star Wars Snowflakes!  And notice, please, that there are SIX points to this snowflake.

These people are geniuses - or is that genii?  Just print, fold, and cut and you have winter decorations that are also...nerdy!  And Sci-fi-rific!

KBWT - Kids' Book Website Tuesday will now resume!
SOOOO, that minute passed.  I found a new Kids Book Website that looks very exciting.  It's called Bookwink and it features video booktalks and graded booklists for readers in grades 3 through 8.   There are also booklists by subject and THOSE booklists are broken down into sub-categories when necessary.   For instance, the list on Families includes sub-categories for Father, Mother, Sisters, Brothers, even Twins.

Bookwink offers an archive of past video booktalks and readers can subscribe to Bookwink podcasts.  The American Library Association's Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC, of which I was once a member) features Bookwink on their list of Great Websites for Children.
 

*For anyone who cares, I recently read Cinder by Marissa Meyer (so very good!), Small Persons with Wings by Ellen Booraem (to be read with a French accent)  and I am working on The Apothecary by Maile Meloy. ("Spiiies!  You are all spiiies!"  Apologies to Smiley's People).  I hope to have time to review them soon.

Whenever I see "Click here to get a free copy of this book", it's a real struggle not to click. And this is why I have piles of advanced readers' copies all over my house.

And it's also why I started reading Retail Anarchy : a radical shopper's adventure in consumption by Sam Pocker (Running Press, April 2009).

Pocker calls himself a "stand-up economist". This book is basically a rant about retail turned rancid. Pocker tells story after story of how he finds ways to get stores and manufacturers to "pay" him for using or, as the opening story shows, throwing away their products.

There are some interesting stories about couponing on steroids in this book. Two-thirds through the book, I lost interest. Pocker announces in the intro that the book has no plot. It doesn't. And it doesn't seem to have much purpose either.

So, I picked up my latest acquisition, When Skateboards Will Be Free : a memoir of a political life by Said Sayrafiezadeh, (Random House, due out March 24, 2009). Sayrafiezadeh's parents were loyal members of the Socialist Party. His father relished the thought of the violent overthrow of capitalism. His mother sacrificed everything, her career, her talent, even her needs for material things to work for the party. Said was their youngest child and spent most of his childhood with a "single" mother. Still married to her absent Iranian-born immigrant husband, his mother lived a lonely and destitute life with Said.

The book is written in shades of gray. There are some happy times in Said's childhood but he glosses over them. Happy stories are all alike but miserable tales are each miserable in their own peculiar ways - to paraphrase a classic quote. Growing up as a "young revolutionary" doesn't sound like a picnic. Said's story about going for months without grapes during the grape boycott made me wince. I didn't buy many grapes back then, either. I didn't allow my son to steal grapes as Said's mother did. Said justified these thefts as blows against capitalism while still in elementary school.

I am halfway through When Skateboards Will Be Free. I might put it down and read beach novels for a few days before I continue.

I hope Said ends up happy but his childhood experiences are keeping me awake.

Good night. Or good morning.

St. Martin's Press has an online book club for fiction lovers. Every morning, members get a portion of a new book delivered to their inboxes. Every week, members get to sample a new title. If the reader likes the book, he or she heads off the the bookstore - OR preferably, the public library - and checks the book out.

I found a new author using this book club, Louise Penny. Her series about Inspector Armand Gamache of the Qubecois Surete has given me several days of reading pleasure. The first three books concern the inhabitants of a small town close to the Canadian/United States border. The small town, Three Pines, is delightfully portrayed and the people are so nice - except for the murderers - what's THAT all about? - that there's a touch of fantasy. Remember "Murder She Wrote"? Yeah, like that. Gamache lives in the city - and is called to this idyllic small town for first one murder and then another. In the latest book, A Rule Against Murder, Gamache is on vacation and finds himself immersed in yet more mayhem - of course.

I've read Still Life and Fatal Grace. There is a third book set in Three Pines before Gamache gets to take his vacation is the latest book.

Check out Read It First. You might find a book you have to read to the very end.

Last Saturday's storytelling event at the Charles Brown Ice House was pretty well- attended and a lot of fun. The photo above was taken of the crowd. I did not use the stage. I am standing in front of it all the way to the right. That set was made by Doug Roysden of Mock Turtle Marionettes for his field trip show. Cool, isn't it?

Tonight, I attended the Lehigh Valley Drum Circle's Community Drum Circle at the Allentown Dave Philips Music and Sound. I am a lousy drummer but who cares? There were over 50 people there of all ages, shapes, sizes, genders, colors. With that many drummers no one could hear me anyway. Drumming is a great stress reliever and I hope to make this a monthly event.
I sat next to a great little kid - about seven years old - maybe younger and across the circle was a family of five. If you live in the Lehigh Valley, this is a great way to spend the first Wednesday evening of the month.