It's Monday! What are you reading?

It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a meme hosted by Kathryn at Book Date. It's a great way to recap what you read and/or reviewed the previous week and to plan out your reading and reviews for the upcoming week. It's also a great chance to see what others are reading right now...you just might discover your next “must-read” book! 

Kellee Moye, of Unleashing Readers, and Jen Vincent, of Teach Mentor Texts decided to give It's Monday! What Are You Reading? a kidlit focus. If you read and review books in children's literature - picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, young adult novels, anything in the world of kidlit - join us! We love this meme and think you will, too. We encourage everyone who participates to visit at least three of the other kidlit book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them. 

If you want to see more of my reading, visit my Goodreads shelves here. 

The Past Week in Books: 

Midnight at the Electric by Jodi Lynn Anderson is quite an interesting book. I read it for a YA book club or I may not have discovered it. The main character is alive in the future and is learning about people from the Depression era and the generation just prior to that. It was cool to see the different generations. If I taught high school I think it would be cool to read that with teens and then have them do some kind of project about generations like Millenials, Gen X, Z etc... and how they see the world in different ways based on their experiences. 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (translated by Geoffrey Troussalot) also has an element of history and generations to it. In this book, there is a coffee shop where you can time travel, but there are very specific rules including the fact that you have to return before the cup of coffee on your table gets cold so it's very brief. I found this to be one of the more compelling time travel stories I've read. Each of the stories are vaguely connected and gave me a lot to think about. This was also for a book club, but it is an online one through the podcast Books and Boba. 

Wave by Diana Farid is an excellent novel in verse about a young girl and one of her friends. I loved the artwork that accompanied it too. I did end up crying with this one. It takes place in the 80s and since I was a teen then, it brought back a ton of memories. It also has a ton of music references. There is are Spotify playlists to go with the book if you want to listen as I did. 

Cafe con Lychee by Emery Lee is a fun rom-com and it was easy to enjoy.

Like the past weeks, I am still reading a lot of picture books in Spanish and Korean. Goodreads is  US based so I not all of the books I am reading are represented there. I am still pretty solidly stuck in board books with my basic level reading skills, so it's great that so many exist. 책이 뭐야? It's a Little Book by Lane Smith is cute in any language. The books about the forest, shapes, opposites, colors, numbers and even homes, were great for me to practice vocabulary words. 

The longer picture books like 비야, 안녕! Hi Rain by 한자영 or 우리 가족입니다 This is My Family by 이혀란 are still a bit beyond my abilities, but technology is amazing. I have an app called Papago that you can use to scan the text on a page and it will provide a translation. The translations are sometimes rough, but with the combination of the vocabulary I know, the illustrations, and the translations, I make faster progress than when I had been looking up every word that I didn't know. I "read" through the whole book on my own, then I read a page and look at the translation and see if I missed it entirely or got the gist. The Rain book is a cute book about an earthworm wandering during a rain shower who meets up with a snail and a turtle. Nothing major happens, but it's fun. The one about family is a little bitter sweet. They are a family of four and then the grandmother comes to live with them. She has trouble eating, she has leaves dried fish in the closet, she wets her pants, and gets confused and the young child is very frustrated and angry about having to share life with her. At one point though, she and her father talk and she realizes that though it's difficult to have her with them, she is her father's mother and he feels about her like she feels about her own mother. It's then that they finally become a family of five in her mind. 

The Coming Week: I've mostly caught up on book club books, but I think I need to do some middle grade reading so I'll be looking for some good graphic novels and other MG books for this week. Have a great week!