First Book Of the Year 2016!

BookJourney has a lovely starting post, where everyone posts their first book of the year. Apparently many people plan their reading more than 30 seconds in advance. I, alas, am not among those vaunted people, and so I did not sign up in advance for this.

However, now that the first day is almost over, I know what book I started reading first on this January 1, 2016, and I also know what book I finished first, and of course, they are not the same books.

When I woke up, I ran over to the Cybils page to see what the finalists are this year and started cross-checked them against my lovely library, KCLS.  So far my fabulous library already has all but one of the books, and several ebooks were available for instant gratification. So the first book I started was  How It Went Down, by Kekla Magoon, one of the 2015 Cybils YA fiction finalists.


It's a story of the shooting of a black boy by a white man, told through the perspectives of the witnesses and people affected, but never by the boy or the man, and it's tragic and heartbreaking and a good example of why witnesses are so awful at telling you what happened.


Sometimes during the day I want to read something in paper format, and so at some point I picked up a library book that is due next week and finally started reading it. The Twin Spica books by Kou Yaginuma follow a young girl through her Space Academy high school and (I hope) eventually into space.

I'm enjoying this manga, even though I have my usual problems with face blindness and graphic novels, in which everybody looks the same to me. Luckily the main character is very short, so I can usually spot her. And of course, I have to read it right-to-left, which I find a bit of a strain, so I'm not getting the full strength of the story, but enough so that I'm enjoying things and hope to continue on with the story. Well, I finished part 4, so I'll look around for part 5.