I missed one book club this week (had an conflict with the Foolscap Concom meeting), joined another, and made it up to the local Sword and Laser meet-up and then the following clubs. It's a long drive for me, but the people are fun and it's a three-in-one book club so there's a lot of book talk.
Now I have to finish my Tuesday book and my Friday book club is coming up, and next week is the elementary book clubs. No wonder I don't have time for golf.
Actually I don't have time for much, because as a Round 1 Cybils Judge for High School / Junior High nonfiction I've got a large stack of reading to get through. I'm also hoping to get closer to finishing the shortlists from 2017 and 2018, but priorities!
Actually, the list seems manageable. Help me fixt that -- everyone should go nominate their favorite new books!
My currently reading shelf has ballooned up to 21, but that's mostly a timing issue. This includes six I only touch in between other books, one from my shelves, a serial audio from Baen, an audio CD for the car, a KINDLE app book, a Cybils longlist pick, a possible Cybils nominee, a previous year's Cybils book, and two book club picks, one for last month's meeting and another I'm reading on time. Also five books I'm only pretending to read.
The Book Date does a weekly roundup of what people are reading, want to read, or have read each week called It's Monday! What Are You Reading so I'll sign up there. There's also a version that is kidlit focussed at either Teach Mentor Texts or Unleashing Readers and I'm certainly eligible this week!
Started:
Boots on the Ground, Elizabeth Partridge. Cybils nonfiction finalist. 2018 I think?
Need to Know, Karen Cleveland. For the Renton Library Mystery book club.
Chasing King's Killer, James L. Swanson. Cybils nonfiction finalist.
The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo. 2018 Cybils poetry finalist.
The Stonewall Riots, Gail Pitman. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist.
Taking Cover, Nioucha Homayoonfar. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist.
Shakespeare's Landlord, Charlaine Harris. Having completed the Aurora Teagardens, I am continuing on to the audio Lily Bards.
Dreamland YA Version, Sam Quinones. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist.
Born Just Right, Jordan Reeves. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist.
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse. Sword and Laser September pick.
Unpresidented, Martha Brockenbrough. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist.
Fake News: Separating Fact from Fiction, Michael Miller. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist possibility.
Completed:
Facing Frederick, Tonya Bolden. 2018 Cybils JH nonfiction finalist. I liked this biography of Frederick Douglass, and I really appreciated the inclusion of as many photographs as Bolden could find; apparently Douglass had a hobby of getting his portrait done at photography studies so she had a rich selection. As an adult, I wanted to go deeper into some subject, so I viewed it as more an introduction than a definitive work, but I learned a lot more detail about the man.
The Stonewall Riots, Gail Pitman. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist. At first I was bothered by the loose chronology, where from one short chapter to another I wouldn't be sure where on the timeline I was. But then I relaxed into the driving metaphor -- each chapter is based around an object or photo, and couldn't always be constricted into its position. Instead the differing facets added up to a complete story, but one that changes depending on which item is in focus. Pitman works with this construction within the text as well, talking about which details are in doubt and which have conflicting statements and how these arise and are dealt with by historians.
Taking Cover, Nioucha Homayoonfar. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist. The setting was fascinating -- a girlhood lived in Iran as the ayatollahs attacked women and other lesser beings and war brought bombings and fear to their basements. I found her childish perspective a bit limiting, but perhaps I'm being unfair because Persepolis lay in the back of my mind like a beacon. I did get pulled in more deeply when the family fled, as the suspense and fear gripped the family.
Dreamland YA Version, Sam Quinones. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist. I have officially moved into the depression end of the nonfiction pool. Quinones documents America's opiate crisis, from the enthusiastic sell of prescriptions by drug companies to the cheaper creep of heroin distributors, both very deadly. He also looks at issues of class and race; when conservative lawmakers realize that the addicts aren't poor people of color, but their white colleagues, wives and children, suddenly the advantages of treatment over incarceration become apparent. He even makes the heroin dealers understandable, documenting how many come from poverty in Mexico to work for a few months for what seems to them a fairly safe trade (they rarely see people die), and how for them, it's even more dangerous to work regular jobs (since they are illegal immigrants anyway). Yikes.
Boots on the Ground, Elizabeth Partridge. 2018 Cybils nonfiction finalist. This was an incredibly powerful mix of photographs and essays based on personal interviews, mixed with context providing sections on the politicians of the time. The people came vividly to life, showing the horror and fear of being shipped off to war with so little support, and the final sections on the Vietnam War Memorial brought things closer to the present while also showing how long-lasting the effects are. Wow.
Need to Know, Karen Cleveland. For the Renton Library Mystery book club. OK, I didn't actually finish this -- I started it, then skipped ahead in big sections, read the end, and then skimmed back through some parts. I did well enough to go to the club meeting! We talked about what really happened (this was tough!) and what would go next, and whether the characters made good decisions on various levels -- moral, compassionate, etc. I liked when we tried to weigh positives and negatives -- okay, the husband was a Soviet spy who had lied to her for a decade, but he did the dishes! I mean, dishes matter a lot in a marriage.
The Grief Keeper, Allesandra Villasante. I finished this in time for my Torches and Pitchforks book club meeting! I think it's a solid YA that uses an SF gimmick to tell a story about young love as a lesbian and immigration and sacrifices. Since many of us have an SF background it was a bit hard to get over the goofiness of the SF gimmick, but once it's magical nature is accepted the story itself works. I found the love story dull, but that's because I'm a grouchy old person who finds teen love in general more exhausting than uplifting. Marisol's dedication to her sister and her strength in pulling herself through trauma are what makes the book.
Born Just Right, Jordan Reeves. 2019 Cybils nonfiction longlist. This memoir from a tween girl with a truncated left arm reads as very authentic -- the words and phrases sound like they came fairly directly from the author. She's a bit relentlessly cheerful, but then she's telling the story of the great opportunities she's had rather than the frustrations she's conquered, if that makes sense. It's a great peek inside the life of someone just a little different, and a way to learn how to meet people with differences even if you have all your limbs.
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse. Sword and Laser September pick. I finished just in time to drive up for the local meet-up. This was a tense story set in a future Navajo nation, where most of the world has drowned and gods have returned to walk again. We talked about the moral cloudiness of most of the characters, the issue of abuse and consent and love, and then the meta issue of who has the right to tell which stories, as there is some controversy of Roanhorse's use of Dineh religious symbols and places in this book.
The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo. 2018 Cybils poetry finalist. I liked this book, but I didn't think it did what it thought it did. It read as a verse novel, the kind that is mostly pretty pages with lots of white space but doesn't have any poems I want to keep. But it's a powerful story of a young poet whose mother wants to stop her words for fear of where they will lead her, of a family built of love and fear. It was a book about the power of poems, and that power came through strongly, but those weren't the poems on the page. So I rate it much higher as a novel than as a poetry selection.
Bookmarks Moved In:
Son of the Black Sword, Larry Correia. 61-2/? Baen's podcast serial. Our
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan. 3/10 discs. The guy is making his move!
Book Lust, Nancy Pearl. Still in the B's. This is my emergency bag book, but I haven't had many reading emergencies.
One Good Dragon Deserves Another, Rachel Aaron. I like J's family.
The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang. Last month's Sword and Laser pick. I only read a little as I was trying REALLY hard to read this month's books.
Picture Books:
Draw the Line, Kathryn Otoshi. They had me at wordless book, because I'm a sucker for those, but I thought this was a fairly sophisticated emotional rollercoaster ride, with two children making friends, finding conflict, and then resolution, all shown in soft colors and finely detailed line drawings (and lines!). Lovely.
The Bell in the Bridge, Ted Kooser. The ending is frustrating, but in a narratively pleasing way. The boy doesn't completely solve his mystery, and doesn't even do some obvious things to work on it. But we see how the bridge tolls, and have hope that the kids will manage to get together someday.
The Adventures of Egg Box Dragon, Richard Adams. Fun and foolish.
Can Princess Become Astronauts, Carmela Coyle. This is a solid entry in the you-can-be-anything-you-want genre, aimed at girls but for everyone. It does what it says on the tin but didn't really make much impression on me.
One Word From Sophia, Jim Averbeck. I liked the illustrations (watercolor? I'm awful at art), and although the ending was predictable I still liked the journey. The diverse family was pleasant, as the adult's distinctive but unified responses.
Palate Cleansers
These books I'm barely reading; I use them as palate cleansers between books I'm actually reading.
A Traitor to Memory, Elizabeth George. Musician finds out bad things about his past. Pregnant woman makes bad decisions, but then she's got a bad baby daddy.
The Educated Child, William Bennett.
Cookie, Jacqueline Wilson.
Give All to Love, Patricia Veryan. The women meet and seem to be friends. I like that in a book.
Tell the Wolves I'm Home, Carol Rifka Brunt.
Reading and Learning to Read, Jo Anne Vaca. Reading for fun with kids!
Reading Challenges
- Cybils 2017. Almost done with nonfiction books. Ordered up some middle grade fiction.
- Cybils 2018. Finished poetry (picked the winner!), Read two and started one nonfiction junior high nonfiction. More are incoming.
- Reading My Library. Picked out the next one.
- KCLS Ten to Try. All done!
4 comments:
I hope round 1 judging goes smoothly, Beth! Do novels in verse normally fall under "poetry" for Cybils? I wasn't sure about that. Like you, I enjoyed The Poet X more as a novel than a poetry selection. So I wondered about how that category works. I had such high hopes for Miller's Fake News. For years I taught information literacy at our college. Many of my students are education majors and so I was hoping to find a possible textbook to demonstrate instruction in middle/high school. But it just didn't work for us as the examples chosen were too obviously partisan and spoon-fed. Our majors are clever and read between the lines, so it won't work for us. With so many available topics to explore that aren't quite so politically slanted, we'll find plenty of other useful examples to discuss from both sides. Oh, I can't wait to read Boots on the Ground: America's War in Vietnam!! My mom worked for years at a veteran program office and this one sounds important. Thanks for all these wonderful shares!!
I was looking for partisanship, and I didn't have the same issues as you. Yes, there were many more examples of Republican-leaning falsified news reports, or true stories that Republicans maligned as Fake News, but that makes sense because there were/are a lot more fictional news coming from those sources. There weren't teams in Macedonia pumping out stories for liberals to click on. Any book on Fake News is going to spend a lot of time talking about Trump, because Trump spends a lot of time lying or quoting wrong things. Or calling news he doesn't like false (the other definition of fake news -- real news that someone doesn't like and so denies)
I did raise my eyebrows when Miller had a paragraph or so wondering if this was because of the nature of conservatives and their different reactions to things, mainly because I found Jonathan Haidt's book on this very interesting but I didn't think Miller had the space to go into that in a meaningful way. I was glad when he backed away.
I think any book dealing with truth is going to have a problem with being seen as partisan, because Trump has a very unique relationship with it (he avoids it or thinks of it as opinion), and our current Republicans have chosen to embrace this. But that doesn't make reality different.
Oh, yes. Personally, I don't disagree with what you've said about Trump and the current shouts of "Fake News." Absolutely. But as I was looking specifically for a textbook on Information Literacy from a library science perspective, it was apparent that this was not the book's intended purpose. As the title suggests, this book was more narrowly focused on the catch phrase "fake news" and current hot topics from the political spectrum. Some of these topics would arise organically in our classroom discussion, but in this instructive format it might not be well received. Students will come to many of the same conclusions using critical info lit steps (and by stepping out of echo chambers) and then they'll own that conclusion. Anyway, I read this title months ago and no longer have the book on hand, but if memory serves it was the spotlight primarily on political polarization, coupled with some pointed comments (like the section you mentioned), that ruled this one out for an instructional textbook for OUR classroom use. That was the gist of my disappointment. Thanks for the discussion, Beth. :)
Wow! Cybils is a big time commitment. Thanks for doing the work.
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