Finished HOLES

Love this book.  In retrospect, it is not really a distopia (which his teacher wants us to read), but the first part could pass for it.  There are story elements that can be taught with it, as well as irony, allegory, and, certainly, drawing conclusions, which Gabe is weak in.  So probably this book is more ideal for Gabe than for his teacher.  Ah well.  I am looking forward to reading it with him.  What is the point of tutoring one-on-one if you don't individualize?

I have now started another book I'll be reading with Gabe this simmer:  The Boy on the Wooden Box   How the impossible became possible on Schindler's list, a memoir by Leon Leyson who lived the story.  That pretty much tells what it is about.  In the forward it is twenty years after the war ended and he gets to meet again Oskar Schindler, with several other of his survivors, and fears Oskar will not remember him.  He needn't have worried...

Finished GREEN MILL MURDER

Again I am amazed by the number and complexity of plots Kerry Greenwood can fit into less than 200 pages, as well as his many quirky and often fun characters.  These books are always a delight to read.

The second book I will be reading with Gabe this summer will be Holes by Louis Sachar which I have read before and loved.  I never had a chance to read it with my students in the classroom and am very much looking forward to reading it with Gabe.  Holes has received every award available to YA books.  An innocent boy is sent to a delinquent boy's camp where the inmates must dig holes in the ground every day.  Gabe's teacher wanted him to read a distopian novel in preparation for reading Brave New World in school next year.---YLLLLK  She suggested 1984.  Double YLLLLK.  I thought about Animal Farm, but then decided I could make Holes fit the definition and it is a much more upbeat novel!

Finished OUT OF THE DUST

One of the reasons I enjoy teaching historical novels is that I get to teach history in a real and practical setting.  Here is a story told in blank verse and first person giving us immediate knowledge of what it must have been like to live in the dust bowl (Oklahoma panhandle) in 1934 and 1935.  By giving us a protagonist who loved the piano), music in general, as well as apples and cooking (even when the dust makes it next to impossible,  we see the human side of this historical era.  There is lots to teach in this book and I will enjoy doing just that.

I have now started The Green Mill Murder, by Kerry Greenwood.  This the fifth in the series, though I don't know that I am reading them in order.  A young man is murdered at the end of a dance marathon at Phryne's feet and, of course, she must solve the mystery.  Love these books.  I finished the last book before receiving the rest of Gabe's books for the summer, so I decided to fit this short mystery in...Skipping handed me two more of Gabe's books this morning, so I'll finish this up, then head back to those.

Finished Anne Rice's THE WOLVES OF MIDWINTER

It is always sad to finish an Anne Rice novel.  Suddenly I am ripped from that sensuous, intelligent world back to reality.  I spend the rest of the day trying to mentally find my way back there and hoping Anne has written another book since I ordered this one.  We spend this novel learning more about the Morphenkind and their incredible neighbors, expanding family and fending off attack.  A good read.

Again I am tutoring Gabe this summer.  He is going into 8th grade and has only one book as required reading, Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse.  Set during the depression and dust bowl in Oklahoma, Billie Jo is about 14 as the story starts in 1934.  The style is first person, blank verse.  I've not read this book before and I am now reading it to ready it to teach.

Finished EDGE OF ETERNITY

I found this to be the most readable of Ken Follett's epic length books, probably because I have lived through all of the events recounted.  Some things I had not known, or had not thought of from the point of view in which they had been told, certainly, but I was 18 when the events of the book started (1963), so as characters I enjoyed entered the time period of a specific event, I began to worry about them.

Basically, two main developments are followed in this narrative:  the Berlin wall and the Civil Rights Movement in the USA.  Sometimes I wondered why certain events were not included, but this is, of course, why.  They were irrelevant to the major themes of the book.  Also Follett's liberal bias (which I also have) was more evident in this than in the earlier books.



I have now started The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice.  Again I enjoy slipping into the fantasy of immortal love of the natural world that is also characteristic of Anne Rice's vampires.  However, the wolves can enjoy life in the daytime as well, thus are able to enjoy their human neighbors and their ever changing culture more fully.  I can almost feel my own awareness expanding with this author's descriptive style.