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Monday, June 6, 2022

It's Monday! What are you reading? 6-6-22

 

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.

Join me next week, June 15 at 7 PM ET for NCTE's Build Your Stack virtual event: The Best Books of the 2021-2022 School Year. Thanks Jen Vincent for inviting me to participate! You don't have to be an NCTE member to attend, but you do have to register in order to attend. 

I recently read and enjoyed: 
A wonderful middle grade novel that delves into the world of the wrongly convicted in both a gentle way but also in a way that pulls no punches. Highly recommend for classroom and school library collections.


Moonflower by Kacen Callender
An incredibly innovative book by Kacen Callender that turns the experience of living with depression into a fantastical world of going into a spirit realm. For some readers this will be the exact book they need. For others it will be triggering. I found it to be both, which is why, despite the short page length, it took me over a month to complete. As teachers and librarians, we need to be aware that just because students might identify with the main character's struggles, it might be too tender a subject for them to read at a given time. I recently had a student tell me that she really enjoys reading books about other kids' mental health struggles because it makes her feel less alone. But for another student who is in the throes of their own depression, this might not be the right book at the right time. 


The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises and Other Lies from a Sinking Ship by Chaney Kwak
This book describes the author's harrowing experience on the ill-fated Viking Sky cruise that almost met disaster in March of 2019. What was supposed to be an easy free-lance travel writing gig turned into the most difficult 27 hours of Chaney Kwak's life. The book reads like the plot of a disaster movie. The Passenger is a quick, easy, and satisfying read.

Currently reading:

Hummingbird by Natalie Lloyd

Currently reading with my ears:

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain


Purchasing books from any of the above Bookshop affiliate links support independent bookstores and gives me a small percentage of the sale. 

2 comments:

  1. Hummingbird is in my stack. I checked Bittersweet out of the library, but only read a few pages before I had to return it. Looking forward to hearing what you think.

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  2. First off, it's wonderful that you'll be presenting at such a cool event! And these books sound amazing as well. I need to get to From the Desk of Zoe Washington, and I made note of Moonflower as well—I don't expect it will be triggering for me, but you make such an important book that representation can sometimes be way more complicated for tricky subjects like mental health. (I know as someone with OCD, I tend to be careful about reading books that might give me more "ideas" of obsessions/compulsions.) Also, I hope you're enjoying Hummingbird—I'm glad it's not out yet, because otherwise I would feel so behind!

    Also, I wanted to mention that I recommended Gibberish by Young Vo at your suggestion today, and I absolutely agree—it is so good!! I really appreciate the recommendation. Thanks so much for the wonderful post, Beth!

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