I Read What I Want

Yay, I voted! Well, I dropped off my ballot in the voting bin, although it hasn't been recorded yet. 

I met up with my friend for a walk, and with my faithful family for our weekly zoom. I cooked one night, making sad comfort food because a dear friend seems to be in the final battle with cancer, and one that she doesn't have much hope of winning. And I can't visit her because of COVID.  So I made sausage pasta with tomato-cream sauce and spinach, and put on extra parmesan cheese. My stomach felt better for it.

Let me not discuss my exercise regime. The less said, the more it echos the amount of exercise itself. 

I had my second elementary school book club. Online, again. This one was for for the 4rth and 5th grades, and these kids have more to say so I'm still learning how to juggle Zooming protocols to encourage engagement but hear what everyone has to say. Turnout was fairly small which helped with that.

Saturday was the Dewey 24 Hour Readathon, which I used to polish off a few Cybils books and to clear out a few of the extra books on my currently reading pile. I set a goal of reading a bit during every hour, but letting myself nap when I wanted. It was very helpful in getting me to focus a bit on a single book for long enough to make progress.

 

I'm working on my Cybils reading, although sometimes I have more tolerance for poking around on the database and seeing what my library has, juggling my holds to see if I can get books at the right speed so I finish them before they have to go back but not so slowly that I run out of reading. My balance isn't very good yet, so that last thing doesn't have much chance of being a worry.

I pulled out reviews of the Cybils books to a separate blog, which I then forgot to post on Sunday. So I'm going to try to get that done, so anyone coming late to this page (which is itself going up late) will have links to that page.

My currently reading continues at normal for me 20, which is the size of my goodreads page so it makes me feel in control. I still have about six extra books than I'd prefer, but I hope to finish them up soon. I'm using soon in the geologic sense here.

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. Ditto for the children's lit version at either Teach Mentor Texts or Unleashing Readers. I will be eligible there for the next few months for sure!

Started

Youth To Power, Jamie Margolin. Cybils nominee

We Had To Be Brave, Deborah Hopkinson. Cybils nominee.

The Talk, ed. Wade Hudson. Cybils nominee.

Tracking Pythons, Kate Messner. Cybils nominee.

Return of the Thief, Megan Whalen Turner. FINALLY!

Kiss Number 8, Colleen A.F. Venerable. Cybils finalist.

How We Got To the Moon, John Rocco. Cybils nominee.

Her Naughty Holiday, Tiffany Reicz. From a library mystery bag.

Completed

Flunked, Jen Calonita. Talbot Hill 4th-5th grade book club pick. Small turnout but that meant we could let the kids talk in Zoom without raising their "hands". The kids approved of the book, and I asked them how it rated as a fairy tale retelling and as a boarding school book. I like to start with concrete questions and then move into more squishy ones. Eventually I revealed (the librarian pulled it out of me) that while I thought the book was locally good it had problems as a whole -- each chapter was exciting and interesting but it tended to forget everything that happened in other chapters. At the beginning Gilly was desperate because her family was literally starving -- she brought in almost all the food, and she was furious with her father because he was more concerned with her petty shoplifting (mostly of food) than with the family's economic state. At the end she is warmed by his praise of her "mature" decision to stay at the boarding school to protect the royal family instead of coming home. I mean, maybe the royals would remember their promise to throw him some business instead of stealing all his profits, but nothing makes me or Gilly expect that to last more than a day. I think the kids were amused when I told them I was rooting for a democratic revolution. I tried to control my rant and get the kids to find any differences between Gilly's motives at the start and the end and if that showed character growth or authorial carelessness. We also discussed plans for all hungry kids in the kingdom to misbehave so they'd be sent to the luxurious reform school, and how they would help the babies commit crimes safely but ensuring they'd be caught. 

Skylark and Wallcreeper, Anne O'Brien Carelli. 2018 Cybils middle grade fiction finalist. Like Flunked, I liked the pieces of this one better than the whole. In this case I didn't think the two strands worked well together. We follow Wallcreeper (not Wallpaper as I've apparently been typing, oops) as she and her friend sabotage Nazi plans in WWII France, which is exciting and dangerous and produces the scars that her granddaughter Lily can recognize as she uncovers the secret adventures her grandmother never shared with her family. But actually Lily's life is more interesting in itself than as a vehicle for detective work; the present strand is set during the evacuation of her grandmother's entire nursing home to a shelter during Hurricane Sandy's flooding of New York. There's a lot of fascinating stuff about how the nurses help keep their often confused elderly charges safe and fed while hoping their building can be made safe and habitable again; Lily gets to be a responsible and vital member of this team. We hear that Lily's mom is a bit overprotective, but she's apparently OK with Lily spending a week or so in the homeless shelter. Lily uses the utter lack of supervision (she's treated as a junior staff member and sent on errands to buy food, etc.) to sneak across boroughs in an attempt to replace her grandmother's favorite pen before having to admit she lost it. So I spent the entire triumphant uniting of the two strands (Lily finds Skylark!) marveling at how apparently she has been so overprotected by her paranoid mom that she doesn't differentiate between sneaking out past her understood boundaries to go to antique pen stores and using the nurses' food money to buy a train ticket out of the city to visit a complete stranger. I was not impressed with Lily's judgment or her mom's parenting skills. It's nice that Lily made some friends and took some cute selfies with girls on the train ride home, but as I read that I kept thinking that this valuable page space could have gone to the flashback story where Wallcreeper was blowing up Nazi transports. I know which made the more gripping story. I would have enjoyed either an all-WWII book or a book about the New York floods, but combining them made the latter seem less important and diminished Lily's character. I mean, it was nice to find her grandmother's long lost friends, but there was no reason for the urgency.

Trash, Andy Mulligan. Three kids outwit adults, including the corrupt government of their country, and find happiness. I liked how the kids shared the story between them, and I accepted the occasional insertion of outside viewpoints although now I'm a bit vague on how this frame was supposedly put together. It's a fun story of adventure and resourcefulness and independence. 

Flowers In the Gutter, K.R. Gaddy. 2020 Cybils nominee.

Youth To Power, Jamie Margolin. 2020 Cybils nominee.

They Called Us Enemy, George Takei. 2019 Cybils graphic book finalist. I really liked this memoir. The illustrations of young George and his brother Henry were absolutely charming as they innocently explored the fun camps their parents moved them to, even as older George now understands the fear and suffering his parents felt as the US government forced them from camp to camp. I also liked the exploration of the principles behind his parents' decision to be "no/no" people -- to refuse the mockery of pledging loyalty to a government that was holding them captive. I'd only seen that in terms of the angry young men who didn't go on to become heroic soldiers, not as a calmer principled stance. And then the added government torture of choosing between renouncing American citizenship or being thrown to an angry mob was another bit of history I hadn't known about. And finally there's the fun of seeing where famous Star Trek people came from, which is a shallower pleasure but one that warms me nonetheless.

We Had To Be Brave, Deborah Hopkinson. Cybils nominee.

By Immortal Honor Bound, Danielle Ancona.  I am reviewing this for a friend of a friend, after receiving a free ecopy. Sadly, I am not the target audience. The language of this paranormal fantasy was awkwardly stilted, as if the author had made a bet she could use all the words in an "SAT power words" list, even the ones whose meanings she was a bit hazy about. So instead of giving an air of ancient mystery to her story of a timeless war between good and evil, dating back into antiquity and gathering up strands of arcane knowledge from many cultures (it's cool!), it had the feel of dressing up for Halloween or a party. The pacing was odd, with the love story that broke the universe open with its intensity showing up after our hero enjoyed sexytimes with a bunch of cute women. There were some good worldbuilding concepts but they needed to bake a bit more before production. And the initial death of the heroine showed her entirely passively going to her doom, without even attempting to use any of the powers she had learned in a tediously sesquipedalian early chapter. It felt like her death was mostly there to drive the plot and make the hero sad. Her tutor's affection seemed more creepy than devoted, and their battle for women's education poorly executed. But it's an entire story, and has a lot of cool details about the different historical periods it studies (and a bibliography so the reader has confidence in these details). It's definitely a beach read, but I can see enjoying it while overlooking ancient ruins that echo the battles in the text.

Tracking Pythons, Kate Messner. 2020 Cybils nominee.

The Talk, ed. Wade Hudson. 2020 Cybils nominee.

Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan. This was much grimmer than I expected when I started. A casual look at the cover made me expect happy fantasy animals, but a closer look would have warned me that nobody is happy. There's a lot of rape and assault, and the kindness of one man doesn't seem to balance it out. I couldn't muster up indignation for the lost years spent trapped in a construct world, bland but without the constant cruelty of the real one. It was well written, it's definitely the kind of fairy tale where the wolf eats the first two little pigs, not the kind where they escape to the safety of the brick house. And the third pig isn't going to scare away the wolf; there's wolf stew on the menu tonight! These aren't spoilers -- the book is based on Snow White and Rose Red, but it doesn't shy away from the innate brutality of humanity.

Don't Call Us Dead, Danez Smith. I read this book of poetry a little while ago with my Torches and Pitchforks book club and then requested the audio version from the library, and it just arrived. It was interesting to hear them as spoken word verse, read by the author. His passion comes through in the reading -- when I tell you I slowed down the listening speed to 1.0 I hope you understand what a complement I'm paying to the performance. An angry, valiant book.

Her Naughty Holiday, Tiffany Reicz. From a library mystery bag. When I couldn't talk the local librarians into accommodating my Library Quest to read a book from each shelf I contented myself with getting some mystery bags and reading one from that. This is from the Romance Bag that I got at the end of the summer. I picked it from the others because it takes place in Oregon, and then I was delighted. It's a modern romance that just has fun with the genre, and instead of forcing the characters to have dumb fights with each other it lets them have a hilarious fight at Thanksgiving Dinner with her mean relatives.  A perfect post-readathon pick that I gobbled up in an evening. Silly enough not to feel like it's supposed to be taken seriously, but real enough that I don't feel silly reading it.

How We Got To the Moon, John Rocco. 2020 Cybils nominee.

Bookmarks Moved (Or Languished) In:

Uncompromising Honor 36/??, David Weber. Baen Free Radio Hour's serial. It's cool that they are doing this both as a podcast and a video, but they were in different subscriptions because my phone keeps downloading the video as well and then I get confused on which week I'm on.

Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling. I'm listening to celebrities read this to me. 

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James. Sword and Laser pick. Team building.

A Long Time Until Now, Michael Z Williamson. I'm rolling along and enjoying them learning to live in the new old time, and then the guys will say something that reminds me that apparently men soldiers don't think women are their peers. Or really people. If the women bristle at this it shows how dumb and feminist they are.

Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Humans and spiders may meet again.

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein, Farah Mendelson. Hugo finalist. Examining the short story types.

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton. The mystery of the whore who almost died is getting linked up with the mystery of the guy who did, but many miles away.

Someplace To Be Flying, Charles de Lint. Katy and Kerry may manage to meet again someday!

The Bone Witch, Rin Chupeco. I'm enjoying her education. 

The Bourne Supremacy, Robert Ludlum. Grim men being grim at each other. 

Picture Books / Short Stories:

 

Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, Brian Flocco. 2009 Cybils nonfiction picture book finalist. I'm always here for a space book, and this one is a great combination of narrative excitement and factual basis, which a flavor of we're-all-scientists-together-here curiosity.  

14 Cows For America, Carmen Agra Deedy & Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah. 2009 Cybils nonfiction picture book finalist. True story of Naiyomah going home from college to his Kenyan village with the story of the 9/11 attack, and his community responding with a gift to America to help. But I was left confused as to what happened to the cows -- are they still in the village but with ribbons on? I'm glad that all humanity has compassion for each other but I'm interested in the details.

Mermaid Queen: The Spectacular True Story of Annette Kellerman, Who Swam Her Way to Fame, Fortune & Swimsuit History!,  Shana Corey. 2009 Cybils nonfiction picture book finalist. The title says it all, but the book does it with bright and cheerful illustrations and a good balance of text to page art.

Faith, Maya Ajmera, Cynthia Pon, Magda Nakassis. 2009 Cybils nonfiction picture book finalist. I fell in love with the photographs of children from all over the living, celebrating, and sharing their religion. The text was sparse and I barely noticed it because the clear photos of the children riveted my attention. I guess I did register the lack of specificity of some of the Indigenous practices, which were sometimes just labeled as such instead of noting the nation or group of the individuals. 

Little Lost Bat, Sandra Markle. 2006 Cybils nonfiction picture book finalist. The books tells a story that could explain a known but confusing fact: about 10% of mom/baby bat pairs in southwestern caves are not genetically related. In admirably matter of fact but compassionate pages Markle shows how bats care for the young, how some babies are lost, and how some moms don't return to the cave, and what might be a way for an orphan and a bereaved mom to come together. The back matter explains the hypothesis. 

The Day-Glo Brothers, Chris Barton. 2009 Cybils nonfiction picture book finalist. Biography of two brothers who invented both a method for making glow-in-the-dark neon colors but also founded the company that provided these both to fashionistas and to military and emergency responders who found them live-saving. It then steps back to look at how childhood dreams can morph in ways that seem completely different yet hold true to the passions behind the specific ambition.

Palate Cleansers

These books I'm barely reading; I use them as palate cleansers between books I'm actually reading.

The Educated Child, William Bennett. 

Give All to Love, Patricia Veryan. 

Wool, Hugh Howey. Shenanigans in the new dome and the old.

Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho. 

Reading and Learning to Read, Jo Anne Vaca. Other kind of diversity and teacher responses to it.

Reading Challenges

1. Cybils 2017. None. I just need 3 YA books to be done. But YA is hard. 
2. Cybils 2018. Finished Skylark and Wallcreeper.
3. Cybils 2019. Finished They Called Us Enemy. Started Kiss Number 8.
4. Early Cybils: More picture books, and a few poetry ones arrived from the library and went on the queue.
5. Reading My Library. Read the romance. Now the action adventure is up. 
6. Ten to Try. At 9/10. I'm working on the last one. 
7. Where Am I Reading: 27/51 states. 26 Countries. Added Germany.
8. Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge.  I'm done.
   

Plans

I'm putting this at the end because I suspect it's complete fiction, but I feel I should attempt some structure.

I am reading: 

• Book I own: Return of the Thief. Next: No idea.
• Library Book: Wolf Rebel. Next: Sister book.
• Ebook I own: None. Up Next: One Man
• Library Ebook: I need to finish either Bourne Supremacy or Luminaries.
• Book Club Book: None. Up Next: Maybe Finder?
• Tuesday Book Club Book: Somewhere to Be Flying. Next: The Wine Dark Sea.
• Review Book: Up Next: Picture books.
• Hugo Book: The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein. Next: Joanna Russ.