It's Monday! What are you Reading?

Jen & Kellee over at Teach Mentor Texts host a meme every Monday that invites people to share the children's and young adult books they have been reading over the past week and what they plan on reading the following week.

You may find more complete information about what I am reading at Goodreads.com or by clicking on the Goodreads widget along the side of my blog.

The Past Week

Newbery Challenge - No progress. Ack!

Caldecott Challenge

Duffy and the Devil is a Rumplestiltskin story and it made me giggle. The pictures didn't wow me though. I thought they were unique, but not out of this world.

Picture Book

I finally got my hands on Laurel Snyder's Good night, laila tov. I had meant to read that awhile ago after we had a wonderful Skype visit with her in the spring, but my list of books just gets out of hand and I forget at least half of what I mean to read. I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it for bedtime - or anytime really.

Non-Fiction

Just Being Audrey was wonderful. I have read a few adult biographies of Audrey Hepburn and so finding this book made me smile. Reading it made my smile grow even bigger. I love the illustrations! The text informed and shared her light, but my only complaint is that I wanted more information. That is the difficulty of picture biographies though.

Novel/ Printz Honor

For NaNoWriMo, I am writing a story with two narrators. One is telling her story in verse. So, I have a stack of books in my house that are of the Novel-in-Verse variety. Keesha's House was a re-read for me and I loved it again. Helen Frost does such a fabulous job of making poetry speak volumes. In few words, her characters manage to express so much. On top of it, she also uses a wide variety of poetry forms in her books. This one had sonnets and sestinas. She includes the rules for those forms at the end.

I didn't read any lengthy books this week, but otherwise, it was an excellent week of reading. Many books brought a smile to my face and several made me really think. 

For the Coming Week: I am having a hard time getting many pages read while I am working on NaNoWriMo so novels-in-verse are just the thing. I will continue to read through Thanksgiving books critically each day and will try to start M.C. Higgins the Great for the Newbery Challenge. I am not sure that I will get to much else though I want to start Malcolm at Midnight soon. We will see what I can fit into my very busy life.