We listened to Nuts To You on audio this week. It’s a very cute and very short middle grade fiction book from the Cybils shortlist. We enjoyed it. It was cute. The squirrels are very adorable. It also made me want a peanut butter sandwich.
I didn’t feel like starting anything long last night, so I grabbed the three non-fiction art books on my library cart and that was the perfect choice for the last couple of hours before I turned out the light.
Rock Art: Painting and Crafting with the Humble Pebble was an impulse pick up from the new non-fiction shelf at the library. Rock painting isn’t all that intense and you don’t really need to know a lot of techniques to do it but it was really fun to flip through all of the painted rocks. And, I was reminded of an idea I had for a rock garden for JMP… I am definitely going to work on that once we move next year.
I love The Sketchbook Project so you shouldn’t be surprised that I loved the book The Sketchbook Project World Tour. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t find a way to get to the museum in Brooklyn last month to see the sketchbooks in person. Sigh.
Three Non-Fiction Books Read More »
I’m making a lot of progress on my Cybils shortlist and am feeling really happy about all of the really good books that made the list.
I didn’t expect to love Ice Dogs but I did. Victoria is a great character and I loved her strength and I loved her dogs.
I also didn’t expect to love Nickel Bay Nick, either. Totally loved the characters and the story. Even better, I didn’t see the end coming! (That almost never happens and really never happens with children’s books.)
Two Awesome Middle-Grade Fiction Books Read More »
All Four Stars was a super cute, super fast read. I chuckled all of the way through it. And, I can’t wait to find out how Gladys explains to her parents that she’s a new restaurant critic for the newspaper. They’re going to freak, lol.
There’s not much on the library cart that I really want to read right now, thankfully there were some graphic novels from the Cybils shortlist to tide me over until I can pick up something interesting at the library. All of them were pretty good so that made me happy.
Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History was super interesting and drawn beautifully. I was surprised to have never heard of any of the people featured in this volume. My only issue with this book is that the text was difficult to read in places. I’m old, probably could use some bifocals, and the white text on black at times was difficult. In some areas, there was brown text. And, it was tiny, too. This is a book for kids so I’m guessing this is my issue and not an issue the intended audience will have. lol
Harlem Hellfighters was excellent. The pages felt chaotic, which seemed right for the story but made it hard for me to read late at night. Again, this might be an old woman problem. Hah.
In Real Life was pretty darn good. Girl gamers FTW!
Three Graphic Novels Read More »
From the Cybils shortlist, a middle grade fiction… The Meaning of Maggi. I really liked Maggie and I especially liked her family. These were real people… dad worked at Hartsfield and worked his way up from a baggage handler to ticketing. Mom got a job at a fancy Atlanta hotel, cleaning rooms and doing laundry. They ate some junk food.
What I didn’t like was the way they kept Maggie in the dark about her father’s health. I get it but… I didn’t like that aspect of the story. I also cannot picture any of my kids as 6th graders grokking this at all. Maggie was so young, in so many ways — for someone especially bright. Infantile, even. This… was troubling, particularly when Maggie had the breakdown at the end. She was completely unprepared and that was messed up.
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I couldn’t resist the cover of Mama Does Time and I was happy to hear TW chuckle through it. I chuckled through it, too. It was a lot of fun and I’d definitely read more Mace Bauer mysteries, (this was the first book in the series.)
Next, I read Karen White’s The Sound of Glass. Hoo boy. There’s no such thing as coincidence. Having said that, I could have hated this book because really???? These people were all tied together this way? Really???? But I didn’t. Every single character was likeable and I cared about them way more than I expected.
What’s extra interesting about me reading these two books, back to back, over a 2 1/2 day period is… I didn’t really feel enticed to move to the Okeechobee. I did, however, feel really drawn to moving to Beaufort. Which is interesting since I’ve spent more time thinking about moving back to Florida than I have thinking about moving back to SC. So here I am, looking at houses in Beaufort again. I think I need to lay off the southern literature until after we buy a house. This flip-flopping around is nuts. We need to just pick a spot and stick with it. Or something lol.
2 (Southern) Fiction Read More »
All things considered (KonMari and BlogHer15) this wasn’t a bad reading month. It totally could have been worse and I’m surprised it wasn’t. Yay, July!
I read 15 books.
1 was an audiobook.
6 were non-fiction.
3 were YA and those were all Cybil books.
Which is nice, I’m making a lot of progress on Cybils and am hopeful that I won’t be floundering with the list at the end of December, like I did last year.
The Boy Who Killed Demons is a creepy book. I found Henry to be maybe even creepier than the demons. But maybe you have to be kind of creepy in order to survive seeing demons… and then killing demons.
What I don’t understand is why the demons didn’t take this kid out when they realized he could see them. I don’t get that. It seemed… odd. And, the whole way through the book, I puzzled over this and found it difficult to really believe in the story, lol.
I liked the book, stayed up late to finish it, but I didn’t love it because that part just didn’t fly for me.
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I did it. I read Go Set a Watchman. I figured what the hell, TKAM is not one of my favorite books and I always found Atticus Finch to be a bit… too much and I certainly wasn’t going to be upset to find out he wasn’t who we were led to believe he was. That seemed obvious to me the first time around.
So… yea, I read it. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. The writing was not always great. The story was clunky in places. There were some chapters that I loved. There were some that I hated. In the end… we just traded Atticus Finch for Scout… a color-blind southern woman surrounded by small town Alabama citizens struggling with race.
No shock here for me. No revelations, either.