It's Monday! What are you reading? 7-27-2020

It's Monday! What are you reading? Is a wonderful community of readers, teachers, and librarians. Hosted by Jen over at Teach Mentor Texts along with Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers, participants share their reading adventures from the past week along with their reading plans for the week ahead.

My Monday posts are generally just a highlight of what I've been reading during the week so if you'd like to see all that I've been reading, follow my Goodreads page.



My anxiety has been sky high this past week. The thought of returning to school in a few weeks just makes me completely despondent. So, if you're feeling like me, I thought I would share with you a couple things I watched that are book-related that made me feel less anxious





Both The Baby-Sitters Club and Timmy Failure were exactly what I needed this past week. The character-driven stories and low-conflict plots were easy to watch and made me feel like I was wearing a comfortable pair of pajamas. I highly recommend both, but especially The Baby-Sitters Club. It has a lovely 90s aesthetic and nostalgia and yet it is updated for 2020 by including poignant feminist, identity, and social justice themes. I'm really hoping another season is in the works. 


Last week I finished reading:

Dear Justyce by Nic Stone 
I loved that the sequel to Dear Martin is told from Quan's perspective, a character we were introduced to in the first book, but made a lot of assumptions about. Dear Justyce gives him his own voice and his own story.


I also read and loved:

I Yoga You by Genevieve Santos
This is a beautiful rhyming board book that uses yoga poses to talk about the ways parents love their children.


Currently Reading:

Beauty Mark: A Verse Novel of Marilyn Monroe by Carole Boston Weatherford 


Currently Reading with My Ears:

Democracy in One Book or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn't, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think by David Litt

It's Monday! What are you reading? 7-6-2020

It's Monday! What are you reading? Is a wonderful community of readers, teachers, and librarians. Hosted by Jen over at Teach Mentor Texts along with Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers, participants share their reading adventures from the past week along with their reading plans for the week ahead.

My Monday posts are generally just a highlight of what I've been reading during the week so if you'd like to see all that I've been reading, follow my Goodreads page.


Last week I posted:

500 Episodes of Nuance and Hard Conversations


Last week I read and loved:

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
A beautiful novel about family and grief. The audiobook reads like an extended spoken word poetry performance.

Woke: A Young Poet's Call to Justice by Mahogany L. Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Olivia Gatwood, illustrated by Theodore Taylor III
Not just a poetry collection but a call to action


Currently Reading:

Dear Justyce by Nic Stone

500 Episodes of Nuance and Hard Conversations

Recently I reviewed the book I Think You're Wrong (But I'm listening) by the amazing women of the Pantsuit Politics podcast. Today is their 500th episode. It is by far my favorite podcast. It is the one that I listen to on the exact day that it drops in my feed without fail, and that is because podcast that has given me so much hope, peace, and calm in the midst of the contentious storm of American Politics. I have so often called them my Political Prozac that I'm thinking of trademarking the term. ;)

I talk about this podcast a lot both on social media and with the people I know and love. And that's because I cannot stress enough how they have changed me and made me a better citizen.

 And as much as I talk about my love for Beth Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland, I've never told anyone this story about what kind, gracious, and generous women they are. Back in 2018, serendipity caused Sara Kajder and me to get to present with Beth and Sarah at NCTE in Houston. When I mentioned in an offhanded comment on a Pantsuit Politics Instagram post in late 2017 that I was part of a presentation at NCTE that year in St. Louis with Sara and she had mentioned how she uses the podcast in her classroom to show her students how to disagree respectfully, Beth replied by saying that her mom, a former English teacher, was an NCTE member and actually sat next to Sara on a flight home from NCTE once. That led to Beth agreeing to have her and Sarah present with us the next year about ways to disagree respectfully in the classroom.

I've told the story of presenting with them at NCTE to many people. What I often leave out of the story is that even though Beth and Sarah had a brand new book coming out a few months after NCTE and I had assumed that their publisher would pay for their trip to Houston, Beth and Sarah actually paid their own way just to present with us. All because Beth knew what a valuable organization NCTE was for teachers and how much her mom loved and respected my dear colleague Sara Kajder. 

And so. What I'd like to attest is that Beth and Sarah don't just SEEM like the wonderful women they present themselves to be every week, they ARE those women. When you meet them in person, they are the exact same Beth & Sarah that you hear twice a week on their podcast (or maybe three times a week if you listen to their Nuanced Life podcast too).

So congrats on 500 episodes, Sarah and Beth! Here's to 5,000 more!

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Follow Pantsuit Politics on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram (their daily newsbrief on Instagram is top notch!). You can also support them on Patreon.

And also: subscribe to their podcast!