#IMWAYR February 19, 2023

Welcome! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next.


Happy Family Day to everyone! Here in British Columbia, it's a day off. I hope you all find time to spend with the ones dear to you.
 
Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.
Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.

FICTION PICTURE BOOKS


"Six people from different corners of the world celebrate the history, culture, and beauty behind their names."
This summary from my library's website tells nothing about how gorgeous and important this book is. I struggled with the pronunciation of many of the names. It's a good thing Joanna Ho shares how to say them so people like me can practice them before reading the book to a group of students. 



A young boy wakes up to discover snow outside. As he waits to go out and play in it, he imagines himself going through the steps to build a perfect snowman. At last he is dressed and heads off to start. Things don't go as planned, but in the end he realizes that his creation is good enough. 
As I read this book, especially the step by step snowman building process, I wished I was still teaching so I could use it as mentor text for procedural writing. 


This beautifully illustrated book taught me things I didn't know about the moon and how it influences different creatures on our planet. 

Henry likes routines. He likes things to stay the same. He likes to know what is going to happen when. So when their regular class schedule is disrupted and share time is switched to a different time to make space for a parade, he isn't happy. 
Thankfully, Henry finds a way to participate in the parade on his own terms. 
 
Henry's anxiety ratchets up as the week progresses and the day of change draws nearer. Bailey and Song show us how his dread affects him at a physical level. He has volcanoes in his stomach and not even his friend Katie can help him feel better. 
I appreciate the diversity of Henry's classroom. I can't recommend this book enough!

GRAPHIC NOVELS

This is is a graphic adaptation of the book by the same name. It's a brilliant retelling of real-life Auschwitz prisoner Dita Kraus, who kept books alive while living at Auschwitz. The artwork is just brilliant.
I haven't read the original book, so I can't compare the two versions of the story. I really appreciated this one. Even though I have read many other narratives about the camps, I had no idea that the Nazi's kept a separate compound of Jewish prisoners to trick the Red Cross into thinking that all were being treated fairly. 


Milo and his family have moved into a new house. He's busy exploring when his mother asks him to check the basement for his baby sister's missing pick sock that their grandmother knitted.
To be honest, I was terrified along with Milo when he first went down those dark stairs. Then he sees a rat and freaks out for a bit. Soon he discovers a key and a doorway into a new room. He spies the rat with the sock and takes off after it. In the process he discovers it is a "really big basement!" It has multiple levels full of all kinds of treasures as well as a few horrors. He meets and befriends some strange creatures in this underground world. Together they help him search for the sock. One of those horrors is a slimy green gobbler that devours whoever it comes across. When it eats his new friends, he has to come up with a way to rescue them.
This is a brilliant yarn. (pun intended) I couldn't stop flipping through the pages to see what Milo would discover next. The levels are full of stunning replicas of famous artwork. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous.

ADULT/YA FICTION


When Dr. Sophie de Greer, a member of a government think tank goes missing, Anthony Sparrow, a bureaucrat close to the Prime Minister, accuses MI5 of disappearing her. Dianna Taverner, first desk of the agency, is their prime suspect. Meanwhile, the denizens of Slough House may or may not know where she is. 
Confusion, mayhem, treachery, and the usual backstabbing shenanigans ensue. 
I am now almost caught up in Mick Herron's Slough House series. I'm waiting for number 7, and then will have to wait along with everyone else for the next book to be published.


To be completely honest, I did not read all of this book. I don't do thrillers well, and when I came to the part where Pippa (the teen protagonist) figured out who the murderer was, I was too terrified to listen any more. I skipped to the end of the book to see how it all turned out. I do have a reserve on a text version of it so I can skim through the harrowing pages. 
Aside from that, I was completely invested in this debut novel. 
Pippa, who plans to become an investigative journalist, decides to examine a five year old murder for her final high school project. As she digs into the case she discovers that Andie Bell, the murder victim, wasn't the innocent she was purported to be. She discovers that many people close to her are keeping dangerous secrets, and that lies, racism, and corruption flourish under the town's patina of wholesomeness. I adored Pippa, her family, her friends, and her budding romance with Ravi, brother to the alleged murderer. 


This was a delightful respite following the previous novel. It's a mostly cozy historical mystery set in Victorian England. Violet and her sixteen year old half sister, Sephora, live with their Aunt Adelia. When she heads off to the continent with a new beau, she leaves Violet responsible for answering the Dear Miss Hermoine letters for her published advice column. Luckily Bunty, their aunt's housekeeper is there to help her.
One of the letters troubles Violet so she heads off to the village of Willingdale to meet the author, Ivy Armstrong. She arrives in the village just in time to attend Ivy's funeral. Posing as a school friend, Violet determines that Ivy's death was neither accident nor suicide and sets out to uncover who murdered her. There are plenty of suspects.
Meanwhile, Sephora is having a clandestine relationship with a secret beau. When he disappears she sets off into dangerous part of London to find him.
The story is told from the perspectives of the two sisters. Whereas Violet is educated and studious, Sephora is a social butterfly. At first their two narratives seem unrelated, but eventually they weave together. 
Even though this has a number of hair raising episodes, it's also full of humour. I'm looking forward to reading the next in the series. 

I am a huge fan of fairy tales of any kind. I tell you this so you know I was predisposed to enjoy this, and I did. 
Emily Wilde is a adjunct professor at Cambridge who specializes in dryadology -  faerie folklore. She travels to the Scandinavian country of Ljosland to be the first person to document the local faeries and complete her Encyclopaedia of these creatures.
She doesn't get off to a good start with the local townspeople of Hrafnsvik. (Emily comes across as someone who might be on the autistic spectrum, since as brilliant as she is, she doesn't do social interaction well.) Then one of her colleagues, the handsome and charming Wendell Bambleby, shows up and offers to help. He is much more than he first seems. The two of them seem like opposites so you know romance is in the offing. 
What I like most about this book is the dark faerie lore and how it is integrated into the plot. It is full of changelings, enchantments, and all kinds of nasty faerie shenanigans.  
While Emily deals competently with many aspects of faerie folk, she also ends up over her head. As experienced as she is, she ends up caught in her own kind of fairy tale nightmare and has to be rescued by Bambleby and the rest of the townsfolk. 
I'm not happy with women needing rescue by men, but I'm still  planning on reading the sequel. 

CURRENTLY
 
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
Stazy and the Magic List by Nancy Hundal October 15, 2023  🍁
Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline  🍁

UP NEXT (MAYBE)

The Faint of Heart by Kerilynn Wilson June 13, 2023
Besties Work It Out by Kayla Miller

READING GOALS 

#MustRead2024 3/25 one on the go

NonFiction 4/24 one on the go

Canadian Authors 5/50 two on the go

Indigenous Authors 2/25 one on the go

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 29/200 
Posted by 11 comments:
Labels: , , , ,

#IMWAYR February 5th, 2024

Welcome! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next.

Last Monday my specialist put me on antibiotics to treat my sinus infection. I've got another week to go. If you've ever had one of these, you know how hard they are to treat. He is sending me off for a scan to see what is going on in there before he repairs the damage done when I broke my nose in 2020. 

I did manage to work for 1 1/2 days last week although I was completely done in afterwards. 

In my creative life, I'm continuing to work on a knitted sweater for my son. I've also  been trying to finish up an order I took for two mice. I've finished up the clothing she wanted, and even though she didn't ask for it, am attempting to make shoes for them. It is really finicky given that the mice feet are at most, one inch long. I will make sure to share a picture of them when I am done.
 
Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.
Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.


NON FICTION PICTURE BOOKS

4 stars

Crayfish by Lola M. Schaefer January 1, 2002

I was subbing for one of the local teacher librarians last week. She asked me to read a couple of books to the primary groups who would be coming in. 
When I came upon this book, I knew it would be one of them. When I was a girl growing up in this area, there were lots of crayfish (crawdads) in the river and other bodies of water. I haven't seen any in many years, but that might be just because I'm not looking for them. 
This is "a basic introduction to crayfish, focusing on their physical characteristics, habitat, diet, and activities." I wish there had been more about how their eggs are fertilized.
It is a wonderful nonfiction title for beginning readers from prek to grade 2. I appreciate that it has all kinds of important nonfiction text features: labeled photographs, a table of contents, a glossary, an index.

This is the other book I read to those groups of primary students. If I had read it before, I didn't remember it although I did recall that it is a great read. 
It's a take on children wanting to keep wild animals for pets. In this case, a bear finds a boy in the bushes and convinces his mother to let him keep it as a pet. Like all the other Peter Brown books I've read, the art is charming, it's loaded with humour, and reveals an important lesson. 


When I first finished this, I was left pondering VR (virtual reality). Part of me worried that spending time in VR is a way to avoid reality and thus, not trying to change negative aspects of it. However, as I reflected more on the book, I realized that in many ways spending time in VR is a lot like reading. Yes it has an escapist component, but sometimes, that's what you need. It's also a way to learn more about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps if we could spend time in an artificial world, we would be able to come back more aware of what is missing and be motivated to change our lives.
This is in essence, what this book is about.
Addie (named after a toirtoise) and her father travel across the country for his summer job, teaching university students working with VR. Her mother, for reasons that are not clear at first, is unable to come with them. After a rocky start, she ends up becoming friends with Mateo, a boy across the hall. The two of them come up with ways to use VR to help patients in the hospital where Mateo volunteers.
There is a lot going on in this book. At the same time as we learn about VR, we learn about space travel, the longest living tortoise, opiate addiction, death, grief, and forgiveness.
I really appreciated the diversity of the characters and the authenticity of the relationships between them.

ADULT/YA FICTION


This is a sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow. In the first book we learn that something has destroyed the electrical grid, the world has gone dark, and is experiencing an apocalypse. A small Anishinaabe community in the north, after dealing with destructive outsiders and the deaths of many of it's members during the first winter, has survived.
The remaining people decide that in order to survive they will need to move to where there are better food sources. A group of six set off south to find out if they will be able to return to their original territory on one of the great lakes. Their journey is fraught with all kinds of dangers. Some come from the land itself and others from the humans they run into on their journey. Not all of them make it. 
A couple of times I became so terrified for these characters that I had to skip forward in sections of my audiobook. 

ADULT/YA NONFICTION

It's a paradigm shift that takes a deep look into the evolution of our species from the perspective of women's biological needs and the role they play in society. It examines the intersection of biology, sex, gender, culture, and evolution.
The writing is brilliant - full of scientific information, but also cosy and intimate, like when she refers to a Morganucodon, a rodent that lived 200m years ago in the Jurassic period, as Morgie.
She's going to piss a lot of people off with some of her thinking, like the fact that trans women are really women, but who really cares.
Everyone should be paying close attention to the chapters on love, especially with regards to the nutritional needs of girls and women.

I'm really looking forward to talking to my book club about this book. Charlotte Gill writes about her life as the child of an English mother and Sikh father.
The book is both personal, and global. It addresses the reality of racism at both micro and macro levels. On the one hand it's an exploration of a family trying to navigate their way through the remnants of two worlds, and fit into a third. It's a tale of family and relationship dissolution. In the end it's about forgiveness.
It's also examines the impact of systemic racism in our cultural institutions and what that is like at a personal level. She writes about her experience of being half brown, of being a member of the diaspora and not really fitting in anywhere and of dealing with racist experiences associated with her skin colour.

CURRENTLY

Bad Actors by Mick Herron May 2022
The Librarian of Auschwitz (Graphic Novel Version) by Antonio Iturbe, Salva Rubio (Adaptation), Lilit Zekulin Thwaites (translator) & Loreto Aroco (Illustrator) January 2023
Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke August 29, 2023

UP NEXT (MAYBE)

Of Manners and Murder by Anastasia Hastings February 7, 2023
The Faint of Heart by Kerilynn Wilson June 13, 2023
Stazy and the Magic List by Nancy Hundal October 15, 2023  🍁

January Reading Update: 

I read 16 books (3569 pages)

graphic novels 3
picture books 2
nonfiction picture books 2
middle grade novels 4
YA/adult novels 3
YA/adult nonfiction 2
BIPOC authors 7

READING GOALS 

#MustRead2024 3/25 one on the go

NonFiction 4 

Canadian Authors 5/50

Indigenous Authors 2/25 

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 19/200 
Posted by 12 comments:
Labels: , , ,

FIRST FRIDAY POETRY FEBRUARY 2024

Last year, I joined Beverly A Baird & Linda Schueler in a "year long poetry practice – on the first Friday of each Month," when they, and anyone else who joined, wrote a poem based on the theme of the month and a photo taken relating to that theme.

I've decided to join them again this year, even though there is no theme. 

I was given a Mary Oliver collection for Christmas. Reading her work has reminded me to make time to appreciate the world around me and rejoice in the pleasures of nature and ordinary things. Perhaps as I age, I was already on my way to this, but her work certainly reinforces it.

So while there is no theme for this year, I'm thinking I'm going to write about the magic of ordinary life. Today it's about coffee. I didn't expect either of my photographers to have an image of this, so i tried to capture the process myself. I should probably have whittled the poem down more, but I ran out of time.



alchemy

have you ever,
i mean ever,
really paid attention to brewing coffee?

i concede
there are many methods
for making delicious
brews of this black elixir

but none of them compare
to the intimate ritual of
a pourover pot of coffee

i grind beans the night before,
some people think it’s a travesty, but
who wants that racket first thing?

on occasion,
when i have to get up early,
i set everything up before going to bed
(purists insist that grind and water should be fresh)

the truly important bit begins
once the kettle whistles,

now,

pay 
close 
attention

as you pour the boiling water
to barely wet the grounds
observe how it blooms 
into foam and large bubbles
as the carbon dioxide escapes

pour more water,
watch as it steeps
over,
around,
and into the ground beans

note the creation of caverns and crevices
see how they
crash and collapse
as the celestial liquid flows,
now transformed,
into the pot

it’s not over yet
it’s barely begun

peer closely
at the multitude of
tiny bubbles
glistening,
shimmering,
dancing brown jewels
refracting rainbows
of light

pour more water
watch it all again

as you conjure up 
ordinary morning magic









Posted by 5 comments:
Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)