With this five I have now read twenty-seven of the
thirty-five WBN choices; the final eight will have to wait for me a while as
Victoria and I began our re-read of the Harry
Potter series yesterday, and I’ll be in a state of Potter mania for the
bulk of the summer!
Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories has left me
with a hunger for short works. The stories in this collection are wonderful.
With such a small amount of space Lee was about to fully draw me in to each
story and make me care about the lives of her characters. All the while I was
lingering over various lines and phrases simply admiring the prose. I’m
definitely looking forward to reading more by Lee and I thank the WBN committee
for introducing me to these stories!
Can something be both idyllic and jaded? If so,
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin is a wonderful mingling of the two. This
novel of an almost-but-not-quite magical apartment building in San Francisco in
the 1970s was such an entertaining read. This book is full of wit, heart, and
sass – it’s just a good time.
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is one of
those books you have to talk about. I have probably mentioned some element of
this book in conversation every day since I started reading it. The idea of
“little things” making a “big difference” and just what makes things tip is
compelling and so interesting to talk about. Definitely a good choice for book
clubs (of which it has been a staple for a while now) as it is sure to get
conversations going.
Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon have created a perfect
middle grade mystery in Zora and Me. Using facts from Zora Neale Hurston’s
early life they imbued this novel with a pitch perfect sense of time and place.
The imagination at the center of this story fully realizes the spirit of Zora
and her tall tales – child readers will enjoy the fun and fear of the mystery
while adult readers see a portrait of the child Zora who will continue to
challenge established ideas, create great stories, and teach us much about race
and history through her collections of folklore. And adult readers get to enjoy
the fun too.
Reading Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers
was a jarring experience. Myers lulls readers with the monotony and boredom of
everyday life for soldiers in Iraq; then just as you settle into that idea of life
catastrophe strikes. The sheer psychic rift of inaction shifting dangerously
fast into violent action was the greatest thing I took from this novel. While
it is still difficult for me to imagine the life of a solider I feel that this
novel helped put me into their frame of mind.
