It's Monday, What Are You Reading? - April 23

My goal is to participate in this challenge (hosted by Kellee and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts) on a regular basis.   I love the idea of being an active contributing member of this reading community. Thanks so much to all of you for sharing your reading lives with me.

This entire week, I read hardly anything, and then the weekend came, and I managed to get several books read, and really enjoyed all of them.

First off, I read Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: False Apology Poems by Gail Carson Levine.  I chuckled my way through the entire book and all the poems.  It was fun connecting poems with their original literary context, and it was also quite amusing that Levine played with the sequencing of the book as well.  As I read, it seemed to me that she must have had a blast writing these poems.  While I'm sure they were all hard work to get just the way she wanted them, Levine infused each poem with great humor.

Next came The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart.  I have enjoyed the Mysterious Benedict Society series, and this book was a prequel to that.  In it, the reader gets a behind the scenes look at the events that shaped Nicholas Benedict's life.  They are really quite telling of things to come.  I wrote in my GoodReads account that I originally picked this book up to have something that wouldn't take all my time and attention; I figured because of its length, it would take me awhile to finish.  Stewart does such a great job with the pacing of the story and the multiple plot lines, that I just couldn't put it down.

I've had the 2nd book in the Mal and Chad graphic novel series, Food Fight!, for a few weeks, but finally made time to read it.  It is very similar to the first book, and I know my students will love it.  On a personal note, I really wish the other kids in the book wouldn't be so unkind to Mal.  I noticed that it really bothered me this time.

My final book has a back story I'm embarrassed to admit: up until this weekend, I hadn't read any of the Swindle series by Gordon Korman.  My blog partner here, Bill, has read/reviewed each one of them, and for some reason, I was just not motivated to do so as well.  But I read Showoff (the 4th book in the series), and I enjoyed it immensely.  I am predicting that my students will get excited as I highlight these books now.  I am planning on rereading the three books that came before so I can get an understanding for the evolution of each character.  I enjoyed them all so much in this book.



I currently have no specific plans for reading this week, except I may be rereading Divergent to prepare for Insurgent's release next week on May 1.  Hope everyone has a great week of reading!