#bookaday: My Summer’s Top 20 (Plus 100 More)

I began this summer with a plan to read 25 books with my junior high students, to post pictures and reviews on Instagram and Snapchat as a way of keeping up with reading and finding some new titles for next year. I wrote about my summer reading plan in  “Summer Book Club 2016: Let’s discover books together for the first time”.

Just before summer started, I saw a post by Donalyn Miller about the Book-a-Day Challenge, and my 25-book-plan turned into something more: reading over 100 books.

A few weeks into summer, I came down with this very “serious” ailment called FOMO, which I wrote about in “FOMO: So many books, so little time.” The process of recovery involved recognizing that books are patient. There will always be a book waiting for you when you need it.

I found my rhythm of reading, and I experienced a summer rich in experiences that could only come from a varied and rich summer reading life:  From living in a 1930s Kentucky mining town in Empty Spaces to being the last man on earth in Y:The Last Man, from being an orphan on the streets in Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London to being an orphan in a haunted house in The Night Gardener, from being the outcast robot among forest creatures in The Wild Robot to being the outsider on a roller derby team in Roller Girl,  from the escapades of a trio of teen boys in Ms. Bixby’s Last Day to a trio of teen girls in Raymie Nightingale — only with books could I have spent time with such an interesting group of people.

Here is a peak into the over 100 books I read this summer:

• You can see my  entire list with reviews on Goodreads here.
• Here is a Word document, which you can sort by title, author, ISBN, number of pages, and copyright: #bookaday 2016 list. I have since read another dozen, which are not in this list but are on my Goodreads page.

After making this video, I thought I might take a break and watch the Olympics, but I read a great post on Nerdy Book Club by Matt Renwick on books for principals to read aloud to their faculty and am working through that list. During the school year, I am looking to my students to create book lists for themselves and to give me recommendations. That said, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with #bookaday.

Recommendations

I read all these books to become a better reading teacher for my students. Yes, I love the escape, the beauty, the discovery, and the privilege of witnessing other lives that only books can offer, but I read these books so that I can match that just right book with that just right reader at that just right time, offering students a range of reading experiences (experiences I did not have when I was their age).

I am going to tell you which were my favorites, but I sort of feel like making a recommendation can be little presumptuous. Who am I to suggest you’d like this book just because I did? What if you don’t like it, don’t get it like I did, don’t need it like I did? In this Yarn podcast, Patrick Ness, author of A Monster Calls, says he hesitates to recommend books at all because reading is such a private, intimate experience:

I get asked a lot what do I hope the book does or what do I want the book to do.I have reservations about that…I don’t want to tell anyone what to feel about a book, and that comes from …being a reader. I am very quirky about reading in that I believe it is so private…I can say I’ve had this experience, but I have no idea what your experience might be…For me, a reader’s reaction to a book is that private, that valuable, that true — because it is yours.

So I am going to make some recommendations because “I’ve had this experience” that I want to share. I will make some recommendations because in offering you these books, I am offering you a bit of me, my private experience with these stories. I won’t summarize them because Goodreads and Amazon does that, but I will tell you why a few of these resonated with me. Still, “I have no idea what your experience might be,” so you read any of them, will you share your experience with me?

1. Roller Girl by Svetlana Chmakova (graphic realistic): My colleague on Instagram messaged me that her daughter read this book three times. I can see why. I play volleyball and fell into my memories of being on a team and desperately wanting to belong and be needed.
2. Tesla’s Attic by Neal Shusterman (sci-fi): I remembered Goonies where the boy finds a map in the attic. Here, Nick finds a whole lot of inventions in his attic that do what we’ve always imagined — a recording device that records what we meant to say without filters, a camera that can see the future. I loved the adventure and science set in a real place.
3. The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd (fantasy): I listened to this one. There is music and history and baking and a hidden treasure in this theme-park/graveyard/community center. Just a creative story.
4. Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes (realistic, historical): With fifteen year anniversary of 9-11 here, several middle school books have been recently published. This one resonated with me because the girl lived in New York her whole life and did not know much about what happened and its impact; she feels left out and ignorant as I do with history and as some of our students must. I am often haunted by my not knowing and could relate to her curiosity and resistance.
5. All the Broken Pieces by Anne E. Burg (verse, historical): I listened to this one while I was running and stayed on the treadmill way beyond my regular mileage to hear the story unfold. This is a verse novel, which I love, and it’s short, which I love, because I can fall deeply into a story and stay until it is told. The narrator stole my heart.
6. The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner (realistic): I heard about this from Donalyn Miller. This book took me to the south to meet the son of a now-imprisoned preacher. It is a story of three friends — differences that belong together. The story is really about permission to dream, to imagine a life for yourself, within and beyond the shadows of your parents.
7. The Seventh Wish by Kate Messner (realistic): This book had some controversy this summer because Messner dares to include a character with a heroin addiction. It is about that, but it is not. I discovered ice fishing and Irish dance. I knew about drug addiction, and Messner tells the truth.
8. Save Me a Seat by Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan (realistic): I listened to this one. Two boys took me through just one week of school. The book was organized by what was served at lunch, and the food helped tell one story of an immigrant experience and one story of what it means to have an IEP — both stories connected by their families, needing to belong, what it means to be a bully and to be bullied, and how important it is to have just one friend at school.
9. A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts by Ying Chang Compestine (short stories, horror, historical): These are just great stories that blend the past and present and are all connected with food. There are recipes in the book, too.
10. Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson (verse, realistic): This is one of the older books I read this summer recommended by a friend. Told in verse, it is about a boy who writes to make sense of what has happened to him; it is about grief and guilt; and it is about forgiveness. I needed to hear this story about siblings separated but trying to stay connected. I needed to hear this story about a teacher who knows writing can help kids make sense of their lives.
11. Boy 21  by Matthew Quick (realistic): Such an interesting story about friendship. (I am realizing now how many of my favorites are about boys and friendship.) When someone in the book is poor, the story resonates with me and my childhood. And when a story is about a kid wanting to get out of his hometown for something better, well that resonates, too. And when a story is about the loss of a parent and the empty spaces left behind, well, I want to read to help me makes sense of my ever-absent parents.
12. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz (realistic): These two boys. What an amazing story of how a friendship begins and changes as two boys become men. This book was really a window for me, and I found myself uncomfortable at times with how intimate some of the scenes are. What a gift it was to bear witness.
13. Death Coming Up the Hill by Chris Crowe (verse, historical): A verse novel set in 1968 when America was deep into Vietnam. I was reminded of when we first went to war in Iraq and how I was sitting in the classroom trying to figure out what that meant for me and my classmates.
14. Dust of Eden by Mariko Nagai (verse, historical): This story is just not told: the United States built isolated internment camps and moved American citizens of Japanese decent into these camps. This is one story from 1942 told by a thirteen year old girl. Her grandfather kept trying to grow flowers, and her brother deciding to fight for the America who interned him.
15. Empty Places by Kathy Cannon Wiechman (historical): Set in mining town in the 1930s, it is and is not about the Great Depression. Adabel is thirteen and wants to know why her mom left her and her siblings. I read carefully the parts with her older sister — charged with being the mom of the house as my oldest sister often was (when my mom brought home ten more babies). I listened to Adabel’s brother who after a heated argument with their dad vowed never to return. I felt like Adabel was my child self in many ways.
16. Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamilo (realistic, sort of historical): Finally, a story about three girls and their friendship. Such a sweet story. I think every reader will find herself in Raymie, Louisiana, or Beverly who come to each other’s rescue at just the right time.
17. Princeless: Book 1 by Jeremy Whitley (graphic, fairytale): I am always looking for comic books that resonate with my inner/outer feminist (just loved Wonder Woman as a child). I so appreciate how this book talks back to fairy tales that try to domesticate dragons and clothe women warriors in sexy outfits.
18. Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London by Andrea Warren (nonfiction): I wrote a really long paper about the orphans of Charles Dickens’ novels in grad school, and I was so happy to find this book to revisit some of my research in a really accessible form. Warren tells the dark side of development — the impact progress always has on a city’s most vulnerable population: children. Heartbreaking. And it will make you want to read Dickens’ works again.
19. Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary by Kenshni Kashyap (graphic, realistic): This was just such a fun and smart graphic novel with cool illustrations. This resonate with me because I was a counselor before I was a teacher, and I studied existentialism. I read Sartre, but I was most drawn to Viktor Frankl’s work in Man’s Search for Meaning. The book is organized as a high school writing/philosophy project. Tina writes letters to Sartre. I am not so sure that a lot of enlightenment is going on, but I enjoyed the path from Tina’s perspective.
20. Ms. Bixby’s Last Day by John David Anderson (realistic): I read this on a drive to the Silver Beach, Michigan  at the end of the summer with the windows down and my husband singing to the radio. I shifted the book toward and away from the sun for two hours as I read the story of three boys — friendship, again — hatching and revising a plan to see their dying, beloved teacher. It was sad, yes, but funny. The writing was maybe the best I read this summer — but it could have been my husband’s singing in the background.

A note of thanks to all of you who recommended books to me this summer, who liked my Instagram or Facebook posts, and who shared your own reading experiences.