It's Monday! What are you Reading?

Sheila over at Book Journey started  

This led Jen and Kellee over at Teach Mentor Texts to start 

 

We went back to school so I have not been reading as much this past week, but I am still hard at work on my reading goals for the year. 

This past week I read the very first Newbery Award winner - The Story of Mankind by Henrik Willem Van Loon. Whew that was a long book. It wasn't that there were so many pages, but it was a history book that was almost like a textbook.  I couldn't just zip through like with a novel. 

I have also been reading books from the Caldecott Award list.  Swimmy and Frederick are cute books by Leo Lionni and inspire me to make a collage.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Wanda Gag totally reminded me of my childhood when I had read it.  I have never noticed how much Snow White is like Goldilocks before though.  A Story, A Story by Haley was a fun Anansi story that also reminded me of another story - Tar Baby.  One Morning in Maine was wonderful and had the character Sal from Blueberries for Sal.  I didn't know McCloskey had written more about her.  I read a nursery rhyme book called Four and Twenty Blackbirds and it had some of the grimmest nursery rhymes I have ever seen.  The final Caldecott of my week was Barkis, an adorable dog book.  The story was just okay, but the dog was cute.

I also read one book from the Nerdies nominations - a historical fiction book called Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys.  This book is emotionally challenging as it shows the struggle and journey of several families from Lithuania as the Russians take over their country and send them off to work camps.  It was a part of history that I never knew and Sepetys did a fabulous job.

One of my favorites of the week was Dragon Castle by Joseph Bruchac.  This was a wonderful fantasy and I am not even sure when or where I heard about it, but I am glad I picked it up.  I felt like I could see the surroundings of this Slovakian story.  Bruchac drew me right into the midst of the story.

For the coming week, I will be quite busy at school so I am not sure what I will get done, but on deck I have The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle (for Newbery Challenge), Animals of the Bible, Madeline's Rescue,  and a few others (for Caldecott),  and Stars (for Nerdies). 

I wish you a fantastical week of reading!

It's Monday. What Are You Reading?

Sheila over at Book Journey started  

This led Jen and Kellee over at Teach Mentor Texts to start 

With this meme, the aim is to get people to reflect on the reading they did during the past week, and to also make a reading plan for the coming week.  Sheila had a great idea and Jen and Kellee just tweaked it with a kitlit focus. It's a great way to see what other people are reading, but I really like that this might just get me to make a plan for the week.

During the past week, I have had the chance to read some hilarious picture books. I finally got my hands on A Pet for Petunia by Paul Schmid and loved it.  Petunia is adorable.  I also got to read Baxter the Pig Who Wanted to be Kosher by Laurel Snyder.  It was fantastic and educational (in a good way).  A Runaway Wok: A Chinese New Year Tale was entertaining and the board book Welcome to the World looks like a very nice book for little ones.  They always seem to enjoy looking at the faces of real babies.        One final picture book was Oops by Arthur Geisert that totally reminded me of a Rube Goldberg experiment gone awry.  It wasn't my favorite, but was fun.

I was also making an attempt to catch up on some non-fiction reading so had several on my list. Reading Jim Henson: The Guy Who Played with Puppets, The Case of the Vanishing Golden Frogs, Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature, and Can We Save the Tiger? helped to make a dent in my TBR pile.  Swirl by Swirl was my favorite of the bunch. I loved the illustrations and the text weaving throughout.

Anya's Ghost was the only graphic novel that I got to read, but wow it was amazing and creeptastic. It was one of several young adult books that I was lucky enough to read.  Beauty Queens by Libba Bray was simply hilarious on audio.  Libba Bray does a phenomenal job with the characters.  My Name is Not Easy was the most serious and challenging book of the week, but was also quite moving.  Daughter of Smoke and Bone was one of my fantasy-adventure jaunts that certainly kept my attention and left me waiting for more with a seriously annoying cliff hanger.

My only two middle grade reads were Liesl and Po which was an excellent fantasy and The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales, which contains some rather bizarre short stories that are very intriguing.

Now for the week ahead.  I am in the middle of Jefferson's Son by Kimberly Bradley and am finding it fascinating.  It is definitely a book to make a reader wonder many things.  I am also in the middle of Wisdom's Kiss by Catherine Gilbert Murdock.  I am going to try to finish both of those.  Then I will plan to read a bunch of picture books and those below:

Diamond Willow by Helen Frost

Ashfall by Mike Mullin

Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet by Kashmira Sheth

Wheels of Change: How Women Rode they Bicycle to Freedom by Sue Macy

Dragon Castle by Joseph Bruchac

How They Croaked by Georgia Bragg

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos

Around the World by Matt Phelan

I am excited to be reading so many great books over vacation and being able to fit in more than one book a day is fantastic.  Happy reading!

  

Reading Stacks!

I am eagerly anticipating my winter break. Of course I want to spend time with my family, but I also have a plan - a reading plan. I have a stack of books from my own school library, a stack from the public library, and some from my son's high school too.  I have gathered them and ordered them from all over. Some from the public library are still yet to come on loan from many miles away. A lot of them are sitting in our office waiting for me to get out of school on Thursday and begin my winter reading break.  Here are some of them. Oh, and the knitting I hope to get to while I listen to a couple of audio books.

Not surprisingly, many of them are on my TBR list based on recommendations from Twitter friends. Some of them will also be read as a result of the Nerdy Book Club and in particular the very first Nerdy Book Club Awards. I tried to read many of the nominations before voting, but there were simply too many fabulous books to get through in a short time so now that I will have some extra time, I think I can catch up.

Next year, I hope to be better prepared.  This summer I signed up for the 2011 Reading Challenge, but half of the year was already gone.  This coming year, I will be in it for the whole year and so hopefully I will not be so far behind. I look forward to a fantastic year of reading and anticipate reading more books than ever before.

So I hope you are making your reading plans. I wish you many wonderful pages.