I’ve been on a buying spree.
No, I haven’t been spending all of my hard-earned cash on lip gloss.
Wait.
I did buy one more tube.
Um. Yeah.
No, seriously though, I bought something of more worth.
BOOKS!
I’ve been buying a few here and there, but over the last few days, I managed to pick up six books!!
First, I found these when I visited Books a Million…
They were on a clearance cart outside of the store with a sign that said Buy 2 Get 1 Free.
These days, I’m too busy to hunt for coupons, so a deal right in front of my face makes me happy.
The first book on the left, The Long Shot, immediately drew my attention.
Yes, you could say it was the picture of the tattooed hands…
I was instantly drawn in when I read the back cover.
It’s a story about a martial arts fighter and his trainer who travel to Mexico for one last fight.
I am sure that my students will love it. I started reading it Sunday evening, and I just don’t want to put it down! I’m about halfway finished and will do a book spotlight when we return to school after Spring Break.
The middle book is part of the Elm Creek Quilters series. Yeah. I know. The third, which is why it was discounted. Who cares. A few years ago, I read a series of books that had quilting as its theme. I have no idea if it was the same author…can’t even remember the names of the books. I enjoyed those books, so I figured this would be good, clean reading for my students. Of course, I’ll have to preview it by reading it. 😉
The third book is 29, and it’s about an 80-something year old grandmother who longs to trade places with her 29 year old granddaughter. Through the magic of birthday wishes (think 13 going on 30 only in reverse), she gets her wish.
With my educator discount card, I got two of the books for $3.18 each, and the third was free! Yay!
On Monday, I received an Amazon order I’d placed for the following books…
At the beginning of the year, I had a student in one of my classes who was an avid reader. I quickly discovered that he did not belong in my class. He wasn’t a struggling reader and had only been placed there because he was a transfer student, and the school didn’t have his records. After he got placed in another class, he returned to me one day and said, “Mrs. AuburnChick, you have got to read this book. It’s fantastic!” He loaned me the middle book, The Dead and the Gone. Though, technically, it’s the second in the series, it can be read before the first one, Life As We Knew It, without missing anything. The third book needs to be read at the end.
The premise of this series is that an asteroid has hit the earth and caused catastrophic natural disasters that leave the main characters, teenagers, to take care of their families. The first two books focus on one major character each (a girl and a guy). In the third book, they meet up.
It’s a little like the movie The Day after Tomorrow, but I enjoyed reading about dealing with such a disaster from a teenager’s point of view.
Naturally, I’ll read the first and third books before putting them on my bookshelves, but I’ll introduce the second book to my kids.
One other book I just finished, which my friend Barb had purchased from the Reading Department’s money, was Split, by Swati Avasthi.
This was a good but tough read. The main character is a 16 year old boy who gets kicked out when he steps in between a scene of physical abuse that his father is inflicting on his mother. He fights back, hits his father, and leaves home. On his way out, his mother hands him his brother’s address and promises to go to him at Thanksgiving. His older brother, it should be noted, made a stealthy escape five years before and left no trace behind, save for a letter he sent his mother.
Jace, the teenager, finds his brother, moves in with him, and begins his life anew; however, he has secrets about what happened before he left his former home.
The story is told from Jace’s point of view, and it gives a very candid view of the lasting effects that abuse leaves on a child and how it affects that child afterward. Jace is split between loyalty to his mother and the desire to begin afresh. Split can also be taken to mean that Jace is split between not repeating the abusive behavior and becoming more like his brother, calm and controlled.
I read this book in two days and cannot wait to share it with my students!!
So, this is how I’ve been spending the first couple of days of Spring Break…reading books in preparation for getting my students excited about reading. Comments such as, “Mrs. AuburnChick, I’ve never read as many books as I have since coming into this class” really motivate me to keep on keeping on.
Filed under: Teaching | Tagged: books, Long Shot, reading, Split, teaching, The Dead and the Gone | 2 Comments »
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