Growing Bookworms Newsletter: March 15: Reading Harry Potter and Squish

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 growing joyful learners, mainly bookworms, but also mathematicians and learners of all types. The newsletter is sent out every two to three weeks.

Newsletter Update:  In this issue I have four book reviews (picture book and middle grade) and two literacy milestone posts (reading in the car and getting lost in a book). I also have two posts with links that I shared recently on Twitter, and one with more detailed quotes and responses to some joy of learning-related articles. 

Reading Update: I've been able to find more time to read than usual, for some reason. In the past two weeks I read one middle grade, two young adult and five adult novels, as well as one adult memoir. I read/listened to: 

• Lauren DeStefano: The Girl with the Ghost Machine. Bloomsbury. Middle Grade. Completed March 4, 2017, print ARC. Review to come. 
• Scott Westerfeld: Horizon. Scholastic. YA Science Fiction. Completed March 11, 2017. Review to come. 
• Tara Altebrando: The Possible. Blooomsbury USA Children's Books. YA Fiction. Completed March 12, 2017, print ARC. Review to come. 
• D.E. Stevenson: Amberwell. Endeavor Press. Adult Fiction. Completed March 1, 2017, on Kindle. This was a comfort read from one of my favorite authors, which popped up as a Kindle deal right before a vacation. 
• D.E. Stevenson: Summerhills. Adult Fiction. Completed March 4, 2017. This I had to read because it's the sequel to Amberwell, and I could hardly leave the characters hanging. 
• Sue Grafton: X (Kinsey Millhone). G. P. Putnam's Sons. Adult Mystery. Completed March 5, 2017, on MP3. There was a bit more detail than I needed about water conservation for a mystery here, but otherwise I found it interesting. Hard to believe that this series will be coming to an end soon.
• Charlaine Harris: A Fool and His Honey (Aurora Teagarden, No. 6). Berkley. Adult Mystery. Completed March 10, 2017, on MP3. I quite like this series. The books are light, and not strictly plausible, perhaps, but entertaining. I like the librarian main character. 
• J.D. Vance: Hillbilly Elegy. Harper. Adult Nonfiction. Completed March 12, 2017, on Kindle. I thought that Hillbilly Elegy (memoir by a man who grew up in a dysfunctional Appalachian working class family and ended up with a Yale law degree) was fascinating and insightful. 
• Charlaine Harris: Last Scene Alive (Aurora Teagarden, No. 7). Berkley. Adult Mystery. Completed March 15, 2017, on MP3.

I'm currently listening to In this Grave Hour (Maisie Dobbs series) by Jacqueline Winspear  and reading The Danger Gang and the Pirates of Borneo by Stephen Bramucci and Arree Chung. I'm also working my way through a slew of Kindle samples downloaded during a recent read of Mystery Scene magazine, selecting which ones I feel are worth reading. 

I'm reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling to my daughter. She commented this morning that it's harder to picture the book in her head because this is our first non-illustrated edition, but I told her that it's going to be better in the long run because she can picture things as she likes. She insisted, for example, that Professor Trelawney should be fat based on the description of her clothing. I said "picture her as you like, and then when we watch the movie you can see how the director pictured her, and see if you agree." We are having a lot of fun with this particular read-aloud so far. 

My daughter is reading more and more books on her own, entering the realm of early chapter books vs. easy readers. She's been borrowing books from a friend who is at an ever so slightly more advanced reading level, and the social aspect of this is, I think, contributing to her interest level. She has also been devouring the Squish books by Jenni Holm and Matt Holm, though we only have a few of those. She still laments that there are not going to be any more Lunch Lady books. You can find her 2017 reading list here. 

Thanks for reading, and for growing bookworms. 

© 2016 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.