Growing Bookworms Newsletter: June 17

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 usually send the newsletter out every two weeks.

Newsletter Update: In this issue I have three book reviews (early chapter book to YA) and one posts with mini-reviews of several picture books. I also have two posts with literacy and reading links that I shared on Twitter recently, and one post about a new literacy milestone for my daughter (being inspired by a book).

Reading Update: I got a lot of reading done in the last two weeks (thanks in large part to my husband taking my daughter away for a Daddy/Daughter weekend). I completed two early chapter books, one middle grade title, four young adult titles, and four adult titles (three of them nonfiction). I read/listened to:

• Todd H. Doodler: Super FLy: The World's Smallest Superhero. Bloomsbury. Illustrated Early Chapter Book. Completed June 3, 2015. My review.
• Shannon Hale and Dean Hale (ill. LeUyen Pham): The Princess in Black. Candlewick Press. Illustrated Early Chapter Book. Completed June 7, 2015 (read aloud to my daughter). Review to come.
• Lauren DeStefano: A Curious Tale of the In-Between. Bloomsbury USA Children's Books. Middle Grade / Middle School. Completed June 12, 2015 (ARC). Review to come.
• Charlie Higson: The Hunted (an Enemy Novel) Disney-Hyperion. Young Adult Fiction. Completed June 6, 2015. Review to come. 
• Sophie Kinsella: Finding Audrey. Delacorte Press. Young Adult Fiction. Completed June 7, 2015. Review to come. 
• Gary D. Schmidt: Orbiting Jupiter. Clarion Books. Young Adult Fiction. Completed June 10, 2015. Review to come. 
• Matt de la Pena: The Hunted. Delacorte Press. Young Adult Fiction. Completed June 14, 2015.
• Daniel T. Willingham: Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom. Jossey-Bass. Adult Nonfiction. Completed June 3, 2015. I read this because I liked Willingham's Raising Kids Who Read so much. Though geared more towards teachers, I still found some interesting tidbits about how people learn in Why Don't Students Like School. 
• Carol Dweck: Mindset. Ballantine Books. Adult Nonfiction. Completed June 10, 2015. I can't believe I waited this long to read Mindset. I found it inspirational, both for my own life and for my parenting. I am now nagging other people to read it. I was inspired to read Mindset by this post at Everead. 
• Katherine Neville: The Fire. Ballantine Books. Adult Fiction. Completed June 11, 2015, on MP3. As I suspected, this was not as good (even on audio) as The Eight. But it still held my attention. 
• Julie Lythcott-Haims: How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. Henry Holt and Co. Adult Nonfiction. Completed June 15, 2015, on Kindle. This is another book that I will be nagging other people to read. Absolutely top-notch. Lythcott--Haims distills research for a wide variety of other sources (including several titles that I've read recently, such as Mindset), adds in her own personal experience as Freshman Dean at Stanford and as a parent of two teens, and comes up with solid recommendations for parents. Highly recommended. 

I'm listening to The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad series) by Tana French, and am utterly captivated. I dropped Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult and Samantha Van Leer, which I was reading on my Kindle, due to annoying formatting (a very light font for certain sections that I found hard to read). I'm reading And All Between (Green Sky Trilogy, Book 2) by Zilpha Keatley Snyder on my Kindle, and the second Joshua Dread book by Lee Bacon in print. 

The books my husband and I have been reading to our daughter can be found here. She quite liked The Princess in Black, which we read in a single sitting. She chose that book (with a few small paperbacks) to take with her on her weekend trip. We've been mixing in more early chapter books into our reading, but are still primarily reading picture books. When she returned from her weekend away, one of the first things she wanted to do was sit down with me and read half a dozen or so picture books. She's been more into variety, finding long-unread (or never read) titles from our shelves. 

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

© 2015 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.