It’s Monday, Dec. 9/19, what are you reading?

A little bit of a slow reading week in terms of novels finished, but I was really happy with the one that I did finish and pleased to link up this post with others at teachmentortexts.com and unleashingreaders.com (Thanks to Jen V, Kellee, and Ricki for hosting).

 

Books I Finished This Week

I have really enjoyed the two books in this series I have read (Alligator to School, and Circus to Library) and bought two more. I did not enjoy this one quite as much, but it was still good and certainly timely right now. Tomorrow, I will read another one, If You Ever Want to Bring a Piano to the Beach, Don’t. I meant to bring it home for the weekend and did not. These (the series is called Magnolia Says Don’t..) are very funny books, and I get requests to bring in more of them.

Thanks to the publisher and my friends in Book Portage for this copy to read and review. This book delivered exactly what I thought it would. A freaky beginning to an upper MG series in the vein of some of Kenneth Oppel’s earlier novels The Nest and Airborn, but with other influences and ideas of its own. Bloom launches right into the action with a flash forward scene that tells you how serious things might get. We head back to the beginning and strange plants are beginning to grow around Salt Spring Island near Vancouver and it quickly becomes clear that the invasive species is causing huge problems. Three teens find that it also has a peculiar impact on their lives as well. This was a page turning sci-fi that I can’t wait to share with my students around the release date of February 4, 2020, but it will a long wait until book two comes out in the fall of 2020.

Super cute book about the annoying and adorable things a baby can do from the perspective of an older sibling. This one was published about 10 years ago, but I recently picked it up because it appeared on a list that a colleague was using for mentor texts around memoirs. It reminded me a bit of Julius: The Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes. Speaking of Kevin Henkes…

This is another book that has been around close to a decade that appeared on a list that a teacher at my school uses when working on visualizing with her class. I really loved the pictures and the child’s idyllic view of gardening and what they would do is pretty funny.

Currently Reading

I am about half through Warcross by Marie Lu and really enjoying it. I did not read books like this at all when I was a teen, but I think I would have if I had known they were out there. In college, I started to get into William Gibson, and this book reminded me of his books, or for some of Phillip K. Dick’s that I have read, or a little of Ready Player One. My family and I are about a quarter of the way through Race to the Sun which we are enjoying. My kids are big Rick Riordan fans so I picked this one for us to read from his impring Rick Riordan presents because both of these books are on my Must Read in 2019 list. I have been ignoring that list the last few months, and 2019 is almost over!

On deck

I intend to find a few more books from that list and start re-reading some of my district’s Battle of the Books titles for 2020, which we just released to our students. Here are some of the options from my 2019 list that I hope to get to (not all this week).

Thanks for stopping here, and I hope to read what you have been up this week.