It’s Monday What are you Reading… the mid-summer’s break edition

If you have never been to Jen’s blog at teachmentortexts or Kellee and Ricki’s at unleashingreaders you can go there to read many other reader’s terrific posts describing their reading weeks. Its a great way to see what is coming up (read about so many of the ARCs people are getting lately) or some older books that you may have missed.

I kind of missed doing this last week as I finally got away for a couple of days. Travelling in the BC interior is tricky lately with all the fires, but I am very grateful and fortunate that my summer has not been impacted as much as other who have been evacuated. I did enjoy reading a lot of the submissions once I got home. A lot of my reading lately is with my seven year old.

Completed Books:

I noticed this on someone else’s blog (I should take notes so I can give people credit) and picked it up at my public library. My students love Tedd Arnold’s Fly Guy books so I wanted to check this out. It’s silly, humorous fun. The origin of some of the tales is explained in an author’s note at the back and that made for interesting reading too.

Here is another book that is co-written with the more well known author seeming to get top billing and full disclosure, I pretty much try all of Scott Westerfeld’s books. This is a YA novel that is the second in the series that started with Zeroes. The Zeroes are a group that have “powers” that are really unlike conventional superhero powers. The teens find their abilities to be a blessing and a curse and their struggle to figure them out and how they can interact in the world with them is ongoing. I found this second book a little slow at first but it really built into an exciting last half and I would likely want to see how it all shakes out when the third book arrives in the fall. Certainly a YA title though.

I have been reading this series for the first time, just this year, after years of seeing them checked out of classroom and school libraries. It is quite an enjoyable series. The artwork amazes me (I can’t even draw stick men) and the story is engaging. Both my kids are huge fans and I am reading them with my seven year old right now. She seems to always have one of them around and just keeps running through the whole series from time to time.

As my youngest is so hooked on reading and re-reading Amulet and Harry Potter, I have wanted to make sure she does not miss out on so many other great books for kids her age. This was one I had really wanted to share with her. I had difficulty getting her to try this series, but once I did the humour pulled her in. I had to read the first few chapters though while she was somewhat captive. She was worried that the cover meant a lack of magic and it might not be as exciting, but in this book the magic is in Dory’s imagination. Abby Hanlon has so many perfect moments where she captures the imagination of a small child, the relationship between siblings (good and bad). If you haven’t checked this series out yet, I highly recommend it. Wacky, crazy, smart and hilarious.

This was another book that I shared with my kids, and my seven year old was happy to read it to me with a little help with the French words and some of the scientific jargon. This book is just so funny and I know I already wrote about it early in the summer, so I apologize if you are tired of seeing it here. We had a lot of belly laughs while reading this.

This was our family read aloud that we finished this week. We have read this entire six book series together and it has been kind of must read for us to see what would happen to the characters. There are so many memorable characters for us, and reading it out loud it often took on a performance/theater kind of element for my wife and I. With the usual year between release dates, we struggled to remember how we read the voice of certain characters at first but like any good series it all kind of came back. If you have read any of the Land of Stories books, which starts with The Wishing Spell you will know that they are filled with humor and action moving back and forth from a fairy tale world to what some characters refer to as the Otherworld. Great family reading and we were sad that the series has come to an end.

Like most reading groups, my family is constantly recommending books to each other, but as you all know there are so many that we often can’t get to them all. We decided that we would give each person a hard recommendation, something they would commit to reading within a week or two. This is the one I got from my ten year old. She loves this series and has read the three volumes. I struggled with it. There were some really exciting parts, but I felt like it was much longer than it needed to be and that the way some of the characters flipped between being heroic to hopeless didn’t always work for me. The premise is great, children are taken from a small village and placed on either the Good side or Evil side of the campus suggested in the title in order to be trained for a life in a fairy tale world. There is a lot of struggling to find one’s rightful place. There was a lot of of focus here on how people and things look, and I think that might make it a fun for someone to adapt to film. I also think the editing it would require to make into a movie would help the story as well. Curious what others found.

Currently reading

I was really pleased when my daughter wanted to read the second Dory with me. This time we are each reading it for the first time and she thinks it is even better than the first. She is reading me the fifth Amulet book. Our family moved back to Harry Potter (also the fifth book, no surprise it was the seven year old’s turn to choose). I am reading The Terrible Two to find more for early chapter readers. This one might be a little higher for reading level though. I am reading Posted for myself. I am only about 100 pages in and the writing is compelling (I have not read Ms. Bixby’s Last Day or any other John David Anderson books). For some reason it makes me think of Jerry Spinelli books.

On deck:

I hope to read Princess Academy or Black Swan Green this week, older books from my Must Read list for 2017. I also have Restart by Gordon Korman but I may need to return that to the library. PA may become the book I recommend to my 10 year old in exchange for School for Good and Evil. I also have this pile that I bought at my as local as it gets for me (1 hour drive) bookstore (Mosaic Books in Kelowna). I was mostly shopping the clearance section but I did buy the new Newts book for kids at school and Click Here to Start. Happy Reading everyone!