Growing Bookworms Newsletter: October 22

Today I will be sending out a new issue of the Growing Bookworms email newsletter. (If you would like to subscribe, you can find a sign-up form here.) The Growing Bookworms newsletter contains content from my blog focused on children's and young adult books and raising readers. I currently send the newsletter out every two weeks.

Newsletter Update: In this issue I have eight book reviews (picture book through young adult), two posts with links that I shared on Twitter recently, and one post describing a recent literacy milestone by my daughter. Not included in the newsletter, I also shared one final post of the year about KidLitCon. 

Reading Update: In the last two weeks I only completed two books, both audiobooks, on middle grade and one young adult. I listened to:

• Rick Riordan: The Heroes of Olympus: Book 5: The Blood of Olympus. Disney-Hyperion. Middle Grade/Middle School. Completed October 20, 2014, on MP3. An enjoyable conclusion to this series, with satisfactory outcomes for characters whom readers have come to care about. (Though, after reading two series set in this universe, not highly suspenseful for adult readers.)
• Rick Yancey: The Fifth Wave. Putnam Juvenile. Young Adult. Completed October 12, 2014, on MP3. (Review from an earlier reading of The Fifth Wave here.) The dual narrator format of this audio book worked well. 

I'm still reading the third book of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle: Blue Lily, Lily Blue. I'm enjoying it, but my reading time has been very limited, and it is fairly slow-paced and I keep falling asleep when I read it before bed. I also started Rick Yancey's The Infinite Sea on my Kindle, but I'm trying to restict reading that to times when the Kindle is all that I have available. I'm listening to Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen. The narrator, Katherine Kellgren, is also the narrator for the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place books, which occasionally pulls me out of the story. Does that ever happen to you?

As always, you can see the list of books that we've been reading to Baby Bookworm here. She is starting to learn sight words at school, and enjoys sounding out or recognizing the occasional word when I read aloud to her. She's also chiming in more with memorized passages from books, even books that I didn't realize she knew all that well.

She continues to want, want, want more books all the time. Last night we read Here Comes the Easter Cat by Deborah Underwood and Claudia Rueda. At the end of the book there is a pretty clear hint to what the next book in this series is going to be. She immediately started begging me to buy that one. But I think what I'm enjoying most is watching her sense of humor develop, as she finds more and more things in books funny. 

What are you and your family reading these days? Thanks for reading the newsletter, and for growing bookworms. 

© 2014 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. You can also follow me @JensBookPage or at my Growing Bookworms page on Facebook.