Bookworm Moments: Begging for Access to a New Book
Links I Shared on Twitter this Week: September 20: Helicopter Parenting, Giftedness, and Read Alouds in the Classroom

Growing Bookworms Newsletter: September 18: Back to School Edition

JRBPlogo-smallToday, 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 three to four weeks.  

Newsletter Update: In this brief issue I have two posts about my daughter's latest literacy milestones (sneaking in Amazon pre-orders and declaring a favorite book) and one about her latest "Bookworm Moment". I have also published several posts with literacy and reading-related links that I shared on Twitter. Since there are so many, I've included only the most recent one in the newsletter. You can find the previous ones here: August 16, August 23, August 30, and September 6. I've been swamped between work and my daughter's back-to-school needs of late, and hope to get back to blogging more one of these days... 

Reading Update:  In the last few weeks I finished one seven adult titles (five fiction and two nonfiction). I read/listened to: 

  • Eric Bernt: The Sound of Echoes (Speed of Sound Thrillers, Book 2). Thomas & Mercer. Adult Mystery/Thriller. Completed August 21, 2019, on Kindle. This was a fun read about Eddie, an autistic savant who invents a machine that can play back any conversation that has ever taken place in a room. Powerful forces want to use the machine, but a doctor and a cop unite to protect both machine and Eddie. It's not the most plausible book I've ever read, but I enjoyed the characters, especially a new love interest  for Eddie. 
  • IntelligenceTrapDavid Robson: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes. W. W. Norton & Co. Adult Nonfiction. Completed August 24, 2019, on Kindle. This one had some interesting content, but still took me a while to get through... 
  • Denisa Mina: Conviction. Mulholland Books. Adult Thriller. Completed August 25, 2019, on Kindle. This, on the other hand, I read very quickly. I've not read many (any?) of Mina's books, and will have to remedy that. This one is a twisty standalone about a woman on the run trying to solve a real-life podcast murder mystery while facing demons from her own murky past. 
  • David Epstein: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Riverhead Books. Adult Nonfiction. Completed August 28, 2019, on MP3. This is book with an interesting thesis, but which I ended up wishing I had read instead of listened to, so that I could have skimmed some of the content. 
  • Laura Lippman: Lady in the Lake. William Morrow. Adult Mystery. Completed September 7, 2019, on Kindle. I like Lippman's Tess Monaghan series, but was a bit lukewarm about that standalone mystery. It is set in 1960's Baltimore and explores casual discrimination based on race and gender, as well as two different murder mysteries. There is a fun cameo in which readers see Tess Monaghan's parents meet. 
  • ADangerousManRobert Crais: A Dangerous Man (Elvis Cole and Joe Pike). G.P. Putman's Sons. Adult Mystery/Thriller. Completed September 13, 2019, on MP3. I love Joe Pike! That is all. Fans of the series will want to read this one, in which Pike protects a young woman who is the target of forces she doesn't understand. 
  • Louise Penny: A Better Man (Chief Inspector Gamache). Minotaur Books. Adult Mystery. Completed September 17, 2019, on Kindle. I love Armand Gamache, too, though he is very, very different from Joe Pike. In this installment of the Three Pines series, Gamache faces political and literal headwinds, while investigating the death of a young woman from a nearby village. This book has one of those plots that you can spend time puzzling over in spare moments, without the solution being obvious. 

I have just started listening to the latest Walt Longmire novel by Craig Johnson, Land of Wolves. I'm otherwise between books. I have a reading weekend coming up, though, and a bunch of prospects lined up. I'm waiting to see what really grabs me. 

HugItOutMy daughter is back in school and we are back to reading while she eats breakfast. Mostly we've been reading picture books. We've also dabbled in reading some of the Big Nate books. Currently we are reading the script for Aladdin Jr., her school play (for which has has a small part, but a high level of enthusiasm). You may picture me with a constant ear-worm of songs from the movie. 

My daughter has been enjoying Booki Vivat's Frazzled series, which I picked up from the library on the correct suspicion that they would be up her alley. She's also excited about books by Suzanne Nelson from the Scholastic Wish series, though they are a bit more challenging than her usual fare, and take her a while to get through. One day, after I had allowed her to choose several for purchase for a coming trip, I found her clutching one (I think it was Shake It Off) to her chest. She said:

"There's just something about the Wish books that makes me happy." 

ShakeItOffOf course a statement like that made ME happy. After I shared this remark online, Suzanne was kind enough to send her some signed bookmarks. She treasures them. They make her feel special. She is slowly working her way through some of the books, taking breaks for quicker reads like Big Nate, and endless Dork Diaries and Diary of a Wimpy Kid re-reads. 

She is struggling a bit with a requirement to take an AR test every week for school, where the books have to be above a certain level. But we are managing. I'll share more about that in a separate post. 

Thanks for reading, and for growing bookworms! 

© 2019 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. You can also follow me @JensBookPage

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