It’s 1/21/19, time for another Monday reading update…

I am happy to be able to link this post up to other Monday reading updates at unleashingreaders.com and teachmentortexts.com, where you will find many of the guilty parties responsible for the excessive length of my to-be-read list. Here are some books I was happy to take off of that list this week.

Books I Enjoyed this Week

The last few times I read a Dan Gemeinhart novel I have finished saying, “I have no clue which of this guy’s books is my favourite.” And it happened again with this book. I guess it is pointless to compare, but I can’t help it.

More to the point, THIS book is excellent. It has amazing characters whose thoughts and feelings become part of you. It’s a great adventure with all of the feels represented. All of the great comments I heard about this book before reading it were accurate.

Another Washington State writer with an outstanding January release full of emotional text. This is just a beautifully illustrated and written book. I really loved The Book of Mistakes, but I might have enjoyed this one even more.

I finished this read aloud with my class. We got to do a number of different things while reading it that were fun. We made predictions, we wrote questions that we could use in Internet searches to check our predictions, we cheated and googled before the stories were all finished (well, some people did). This book has nine chapters and each tells three stories, two of which are true. Great fun. We have done some writing based on this premise now too.

I enjoyed this story quite a bit. It has interesting illustrations, and it is a realistic, yet humourous story. I wondered as I read if the number of words per page were too high for the students that I would think are most likely to sign it out (gr. K-2). I will have to test this theory by reading it with kids soon.

While playing and attending school in her small town, which I think is in Iqaluit, Nalvanna notices some of the abilities of her friends and believes they have superpowers. She spends much of the book trying to find her own superpower.

Spoiler coming, but in the conclusion, her mother is able to make her feel really good about herself and tell her about something that makes her special.

These are two of four books that this author has detailing one day in the life of a baby animal in a specific habitat. There is one featuring a baby penguin in the arctic and another with a dolphin in the ocean (I haven’t seen that one yet).

Each reads like narrative non-fiction that fills the reader in on what the cub or spider monkey might do, and how it is supported by the pride/parents. Both have engaging illustrations throughout but before and after the main part of the story there are two pages with many of the animals that inhabit the Savannah and Rainforest during the day and in during the night in the former case and above or below the trees in the latter. Other animals are labelled for easy identification in the rest of the story.

This is a Battle of the Books title at my school and I am re-reading it. A story with an interesting premise, what would happen if the world’s computers were somehow shut down. How would society cope? How would people get by? Once the reality of the situation sinks in it, there is plenty of action (some requiring suspension of disbelief) but also scenes where knowledge and ingenuity become practical tools for survival. This is a trilogy and I am likely to start reading the sequel soon.

Currently Reading

The Lost Hero is our family read aloud, it is a re-read for me, and I enjoyed this whole series. My oldest daughter and I wanted to read it with my wife and our youngest. The Forsaken was loaned to me by a former student, I just started it, and the beginning has me somewhat interested in the dystopian world of an girl who was orphaned by the totalitarian regime of the UNA (United Northern Alliance- basically Canada, the US, and Mexico).

On deck

I have some ARCs on my NetGalley account and some on the way from my ARC sharing group, Book Portage, and I am re-reading Battle of the Books titles too. I am thinking I am likely to read some of these books The Forsaken.

Thanks for checking out my reading week, hope you had a great reading week as well.