Reading Week 18

Go to Teach Mentor Texts to see what other educators are reading and recommending today!  I finished two very different YA books this week. I may join one of the various reading challenges I've seen the past few weeks or just keep reading the books my students continue to recommend.

The Thing About Luck by Cynthia Kadohata was a book I read aloud to my wife.  It would also be a great book to read aloud to a class of students, especially those with fewer rural life experiences.  Summer is a twelve-year-old daughter of Japanese harvesters who have been having a spell of bad luck for almost a year.  Usually her whole family, parents, grandparents and younger brother (who is intelligent but somewhere on the Autism Spectrum), spend the spring and summer harvesting wheat from Texas to Canada.  This year, her parents are in Japan helping dying grandparents and Summer must spend the entire summer with her strict but loving (and lovable) grandparents.  The kids help grandma with the cooking and the grandpa is a combine driver.  The challenges of the daily grind, family life in flux, trying to find friend for her brother, secret crushes, and fears (she did catch malaria from a mosquito the year before) are all compellingly told from Summer’s point of view.  She works to understand her grandma, her brother, the adult world, her own responsibilities, when to tell the truth and when to stand up for herself.  A few illustrations of combines, harvesting, and mosquitos help give the reader an understanding of some of the descriptions and also of Summer. A good story well-told and full of humor.

Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan weaves together the lives of several rural, gay, high school age boys around an attempt to break the world record for the longest kiss.  Craig and Harry have not dated for a year, but they are going to try and kiss for over thirty hours on the front lawn of their high school, broadcast live on webcam.  Two other boys have just met at a gay prom and are going through the initial excitement and palpitations related to first dates.  A third boy flirts online through a variety of gay hook-up sites while cutting himself off from the outside world.  The characters are wonderfully developed and told with such honesty that their emotions are relatable to all readers.  They deal with varying amounts of support or knowledge from their families and friends, bullies, and love won and lost.  The last character is the spirits or ghosts of all the gay men who have gone before them, many who have died from AIDS. They are written in second person and are an older, wiser and unheard voice commenting on the upcoming generation of gay men. They are cheerleaders, offering a mature perspective to the youthful up and down of emotions the living characters are feeling.  An intense book with mature content that does a great job of showing the human side of the characters rather than branding them with a broad a stereotypical brush.

Slice of Life - "Doing Nothing"

Doing Nothing

I’m reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt and it is amazing to me all that he did in his life.  It seems that he was always working one something, writing a book, running for office, attending or hosting a party, or just in general doing something.  How is it I just had seventeen “days off” from school and spent so much time doing nothing?

It’s not like I did nothing at all.  There was lots of family time as we celebrated four Christmases. I read nine books, got to be a full-time parent for a bit, played a round of disc golf, and did some stuff that needed to be done.  But I also spend so much free-time accomplishing nothing.  Maybe that’s my issue.  Not that I did nothing, but that I accomplished nothing.

I’m a night owl and it seems I spent hours, playing Candy Crush, surfing the web, reading inane articles about the Broncos (and the resulting comments/flame wars), or watching dumb stuff on TV.  “I should be sleeping! This is dumb, why am I staying up so late? At least do some writing or plan the rest of the school year.”  These were the thoughts I berated myself with often: and then I just kept on doing nothing.  While I did nothing, at least I was really tired the next day.  What was the point of it all?

I am still trying to figure that out.  It’s not like I do nothing only during breaks.  There are way too many wasted hours in my life and I have so much to do, or that I should do, or could do?  There are books to write, blogs to respond to, love poems to craft, art to practice, businesses to start, events to organize, dreams to realize.

Am I really taking time to recharge my introverted self after an extroverted job or am I actually doing nothing?

Winter Break Reading

Happy 2014!  I hope everyone had a great break with plenty of fun time, family time and reading time. Hopefully, some of those times overlapped.  I really enjoyed being able to plow through some books over break and read four (so far) that I will post here.  Other reading included two "Airplane Novels."  One was by Clive Cussler an the other by Saul somebody about a school for gifted kids that were then experimented on by trying to hook their brains to computers.  I'm in the middle of two books right now as well; about 1/3 of the way through a very interesting biography about Teddy Roosevelt, and halfway through A Thing Called Luck, a book my wife and I are reading aloud.

I really enjoyed Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Several of my students recommended this book highly to me and I finally got around to it. It's one of the best YA science fiction books I've read and I hope to read more like it so I can help build a Sci/Fi section in my classroom that does not have to start with Dune.  In this book, the survival of the human race hinges on Ender, a young boy we first meet at age six, who is a potentially gifted military leader.  The humans are fighting against the "buggers," an insectizoid alien life form that have invaded the solar system a couple of times already.  The plot follows Ender through his military training. He struggles with being obviously different, being much younger than the other cadets, who are also children, and being obviously separated out by the military leaders.  He deals with bullies, friends, loneliness, his own inner demons, and not wanting to be a puppet of the adults.  Through it all, he shows himself to be a creative and exemplary leader.  One subplot involves his siblings back one Earth.  His brother is a gifted but scary child the reader expects to become some sort of serial killer.  His sister is brilliant and especially good at influencing people with words and writing.  This book deals not only with the struggles of gifted children in tough times, but is also a nice introduction into political influence.  While some are focused on the bugger war, others are positioning politically and militarily for after the war and humans don't need to be allied together against a common enemy.  I agree with my students and highly recommend this book!

Lunch-Box Dream by Tony Abbott follows three story lines through the South in 1959. A white family from Cleveland is on a road trip to Florida, seeing Civil War battlefields along the way.  A black family in Atlanta sends their nine year old boy to visit family in the country for the summer.  Each chapter is told from different character's perspectives and that makes this book a  little challenging, despite it's shortness and lower reading level.  This book poignantly shows racism both overtly and its more subtle institutionalized ways.  The white family is not a typical racist Southern family, but their fear of the "chocolates" and various comments they make mean they probably don't actually know any African-Americans personally.  The black family deals their fears of the actions of their lively, quick-witted, but ignorant boy. Acting "right" around white people is just part of their lives and is a clear sign of the times they are living in.  Overall, I found the story in this book hard to follow, although each scene was told well.  Since it's relatively short, it's a worthy read to glimpse race issues in an very personal and emotional way, but I did not get into this book like most I read.  It would be a good pairing with The Lions of Little Rock or perhaps Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry.

Everybody Sees The Ants by A.S. King is a great book about a fifteen year-old boy, Lucky, who is dealing with a bully, two parents he refers to as "The Squid" (his mom because she swims so much), and "The Turtle" (his dad because he hides from all conflict and spends most of his time cooking at his restaurant).  He has very odd dreams about his grandfather, who never came back from the Vietnam War, that mostly involve him trying to help him escape from a prisoner of war camp in the jungle.  They have conversations, and while there are plenty of "normal" dream qualities like the ability to have control or choose to do things, they are also abnormal in that they feel too real and there are some surprising after effects.  While the book is mostly realistic, there are a couple of magic qualities related to the dreams and then of course there are the ants; Lucky's little cheerleaders, that only he can see (so he thinks), who say and do the things he wishes he could in the moment.  Overall, this book is a wonderful read about a boy trying to deal with family secrets, disengaged parents, and a bully that's been bugging him since early in elementary school.  There are a couple of other great characters as well that the author does a great job of making us love or despise, usually for each character as we get to know them. This is probably one of the top five books I've read this year and I highly recommend it!


Legend by Marie Lu is the first in a dystopian trilogy set in futuristic LA.  The USA is no more and the western part of the continent is controlled by The Republic.  There is war with the Colonies, The Patriots and massive plagues that move through the city's poor neighborhoods that strike fear into the citizens and also help perpetuate a police state. All children take the Trial on their tenth birthday.  The resulting score sets the person's place in society and the disparity between the haves and have-nots is striking.  The book is told in alternating chapters by two teens around sixteen years old.  Day is a boy who can move like a ninja through the streets and works to take care of his mother and two brothers, who think he is dead.  He also takes care of Tess, a thirteen year old orphan who lives in the streets with him and is treated like a little sister. Day is the most wanted criminal in the area although he does his crimes and sabotage against the Republic without actually killing anyone and his ability to climb buildings is legendary. The other side of the story is told by June, the only person to get a perfect score in the Trial.  She is a fast rising military star whose mission it to capture Day.  She goes undercover in the streets after her brother is killed when Day tries to steal some plague antidote from a hospital.  As the book goes on, the propaganda of the Republic is found to have many holes in it and I was reminded of 1984 and how propaganda was used in that book.  Both main characters are likable, have faults, and the readers ends up rooting for both and hoping they can somehow end up on the same side.  I'm looking forward to reading Prodigy which is the second one in the series.

Up Next on my TBR List:
Finish - The Thing About Luck
Finish - The Rise of Teddy Roosevelt (This will take a few weeks I'm sure since it's think and dense)
The Prodigy  by Marie Lu
A Clockwork Three
Two Boys Kissing
Whatever else catches my eye!

Happy Reading!