One Day in the ...

I just read One Day in the Desert and One Day in the Prairie by Jean Craighead George in less than an hour. These wildlife books always choke me up. The circle of life is something that has always tugged at my heartstrings, especially when it involves the suffering of large, majestic animals like lions and buffalo. I still can't think about the song from Born Free without weeping.

An injured and hungry lion is swept away in a flash flood in the desert. A herd of buffalo senses the danger of an approaching tornado in the prairie. I hope the kids like these beautifully written books that are full of great information about habitats and food chains.


Update: My fifth graders did like these books, and there's a whole series of them that the school has some copies of. Shockingly, some of my most reluctant readers loved these stories. Probably for their familiar, predictable format, but I don't care....they're learning about story structure and plot development, mixed in with a little science content.....it's all good!

The Girl On The Train

The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins was another quick and easy summer read that I waited f o r e v e r to download from CLAMS! I'm not sure what all the fuss is about because it was an OK mystery with some interesting characters and an unpredictable narration. Touted "the next Gone Girl" by The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and People magazine, it certainly is a page turner with several twists and turns and a gory, twisted ending.

“Hawkins’s taut story roars along at the pace of, well, a high-speed train. …Hawkins delivers a smart, searing thriller that offers readers a 360-degree view of lust, love, marriage and divorce.”—Good Housekeeping

What made this book interesting to me was the suburban London setting and the British nuances. All in all this is not my favorite genre, but I do appreciate an expertly paced, clever, well-crafted story with deeply flawed yet realistic characters.

Gone Girl

I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn in less than five days — a record for me, the snail-paced reader — and my eyes are bleary. Now I would like to blur my eyes some more and watch the movie…if I can find it anywhere.

I loved the first half of the book—the mystery and suspense—and then things got weird and a little too melodramatic for me. I would have preferred a more toned-down, civilized version of the ending, and while reading the last five chapters, I kept thinking, "It should end here!"

Still, the book held my attention and distracted me from the impending back-to-school frenzy, for less than five days!

Defending Jacob

Defending Jacob by William Landay was recommended by a friend and appealed to me because of the author's Boston connections. He graduated from Roxbury Latin School and Boston College Law School and worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Massachusetts for seven years before beginning his writing career. It was a quick summer read combining courtroom drama and family dysfunction with a quirky, noirish ending.

11/22/63

In my youth I was a huge Stephen King fan. Then I had babies and no longer enjoyed horror — imagining horrific things happening to my own children was more than I could bear. My all-time favorite King book is The Stand, which is more dystopian thriller than horror. I even liked the made-for-tv movie adaptation.

Here is a short timeline of some of the Stephen King books I have read, listed from favorite to least fav:

The Stand —  'Salem's Lot — The Shining — Pet Cemetery — Firestarter — The Running Man — Cujo   — Christine — It — Misery

That said, I was intrigued when 11/22/63 was published in 2011. I bought it on ibooks for $3.99 in 2012. I started reading it and stopped after about three chapters. Basically the plot involves a character's ability through time travel to return to 1963 to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy. I had a hard time getting into the story despite the descriptive writing and intricate character development, and I think I was a little intimidated by the length.

Recently I returned to the book and have been devouring it since school let out this summer. It is looooong and repetitive, but I like it. Sometimes the characters are too schmaltzy, but overall I can tolerate them. And, of course the historical context of JFK's death is compelling and thought-provoking. Right now, the end is in sight (2556 of 3332 pages on my phone), and I'm still curious about how Kennedy fares. If he lives, I'd like to read a sequel that explores the impact that would have had on the future / present.

What She Left Behind

Why am I obsessed with abandoned state mental hospitals? Probably because I spent a lot of time in them in my previous lives.

The setting in What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman is Willard Asylum in New York. The author was inspired to write the book after learning about the 2004 New York State Museum exhibition "Lost Cases, Recovered Lives: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic."

This is a great premise for a book that brings together the lives of two characters: one a patient at the hospital in the 1930s and the other a modern day teenager grappling with her own past while assisting on a museum project similar to Lost Cases. Unfortunately I agree with many online reviewers who found the characters flat and the dialogue clichéd. Hardly "illuminating and provocative" as described on Amazon, and I can bearly remember the "unexpected, heartrending ending"mentioned by RT Book Review. The good news is that I was able to finish reading the book and enjoyed the historical elements embedded in the plot.

The Goldfinch

For some odd reason The Goldfinch is only available on CLAMS as an audiobook, soooo I downloaded and quickly devoured the sample on iTunes to see if I was up for reading this massive tome. I think I like it, but I'm not sure if I have the stamina to finish the whole darn thing. $12.99 is a steep price to pay when there is uncertainty : ) Sooooo, I downloaded the audiobook which I can't seem to acclimate myself to . . . mostly because the reader's voice is soooooo annoying it makes me want to rip my ears off! What to do?

That's my dilemma. I guess this qualifies as a first-world problem.

The Boston Girl

I am enjoying this book despite some of the negative reviews it got on Amazon. I guess I just like the way Anita Diamant writes, as The Red Tent is one of my favorites. The storyline is interesting to me too. It describes the life of an immigrant girl in early 1900's Boston as remembered and recounted to her granddaughter.

I wish I could've finished reading this book before my two-week, nonrenewable CLAMS expired!

So, I waited in line again at CLAMS (63 out of 21 copies) to finish reading the last 20% of this book. Despite the two week hiatus, my reentry into the story was easy and I quickly gobbled up the rest of the book. I still enjoyed reading about Addie's life even though I felt like the ending was a little rushed. The huge jump from 1931 to 1985 seemed awkward, and the details were not as satisfying as those in the earlier part of the book. All in all, an engaging read.

The Traitor's Wife

March 10, 2015—Downloaded The Traitor's Wife by Allison Pataki on iTunes because I couldn't get it on CLAMS. Paid $10.99 for it.

April 10, 2015—Was looking forward to reading this book for a while, since Maggie talked about it last year. I usually gobble up historical fiction, but I'm still plundering my way through this very tedious, heavy-handed book. The characters are predictable, tiresome, and very unlikable.

May 18, 2015—Finally finished cavorting with Peggy and Benedict Arnold, whose company I did not enjoy. Suffice it to say that I found the Epilogue and Notes on History and Sources more interesting than the story.

I wonder if Benedict Arnold ever wrote an autobiography. Or maybe I'll just stick to reading biographies of famous people rather than historically fictionalized accounts of their lives.

Orphan Train

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline was a quick read with great subject matter. I loved the historical aspects and the storyline that centered on the turn-of-the-century children sent from New York City to the midwest to find families. The contemporary storyline involving a teenager living in foster care in Maine seemed kind of trite to me and therefore not as compelling.

No Child Left Behind

This is not a book review. It is an open letter to politicians regarding Education Reform. This unabashed editorial has been percolating in my brain for months. Enjoy!

I am writing to share my views about the troubling trends currently impacting public education in our country.

Teaching is a second career for me. This is my third year as a grade five classroom teacher, but I have been working in the Barnstable Public Schools since 2001 as a teacher assistant, substitute, and tutor. While guiding my own three children from elementary school through college, I returned to graduate school myself, received a Masters degree in Elementary Education, and became certified to teach grades 1-6.

I love working with fifth graders and I love my job, but I am becoming increasingly discouraged by the disrespectful manner in which teachers are being portrayed by the media, government bureaucrats, and business people.

I work long hours each and every day and contribute my own money to provide superior, caring, differentiated assistance to all of my students. There are not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that I would like toward this end. I am at school from 7:30 to 4:30 and take work home at night and on weekends. Funding for public education is under fire and resources are dwindling, yet licensure demands, professional development requirements, and senseless mandates continue to multiply. These well-meaning but unrealistic intrusions make it increasingly difficult for teachers to perform the work we consider most important—planning lessons and instructing students.

“Not enough time” is a common lament in every business. The distinction in the teaching profession, however, is that every extra minute of work translates into services that contribute to the well-being of a living, breathing, human child, not simply to hours of productivity or an addition to the corporate bottom line. Contrary to the current mindset about teaching, the majority of teachers enter the field hoping to make a difference in the lives of their students and to provide a service to their community, not with the aspiration of becoming “rotten apples” in a declining system as has been suggested in Time magazine.

Even in a lovely area such as Cape Cod Massachusetts there is a great diversity among my students, and many significant social issues affect their daily lives. My students come from a variety of cultures, family backgrounds, socioeconomic groups, and ability levels. Their individual needs are as varied and unique as each of them. What they have in common is the fact that they are ten and eleven year olds who all deserve equal opportunities to work toward and reach their potential by receiving a quality education.

But, public education is much more than just academics. Nurturing a love of learning, developing a culture of respect and cooperation, and recognizing and accepting diversity and adversity are the cornerstones of an effective educational environment. In order to be successful academically, children require other supports including social, physical, and developmental. I believe the bureaucrats and executives responsible for the “Common Core” standards have lost sight of this crucial factor. 

The most fulfilling part of my job is helping individual students recognize and embrace their own strengths and challenges—encouraging them to work hard, persevere and take pride in their performance. Cheering them on through their triumphs and their struggles and supporting their development into productive, competent citizens, I stress that education equals empowerment. Knowledge strengthens character, builds confidence, promotes opportunity, and broadens horizons. It is unrealistic and damaging to perpetuate the fallacy that all students should achieve proficiency in multiple academic subjects in order to be successful, especially when success is measured on a developmentally inappropriate standardized test.

Massachusetts has always displayed a strong commitment to providing its students with a quality education and has a reputation as a progressive, pro-education state. The Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks were crafted a decade ago to create structure and consistency around a field that is difficult to quantify. They are not perfect, but they are more realistic than the current Common Core which fails to recognize the developmental and circumstantial conditions that impact children’s learning.

Please think carefully about the underlying objectives of your efforts to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) or No Child Left Behind (NCLB). America’s public schools deserve support and cooperation from lawmakers, not to be penalized for the effects of societal issues beyond our control.

Private schools will always prosper and provide for the education of the wealthy and well-connected. Our public schools are one of the last vestiges of hope for the disenfranchised and hard-working middle class whose children comprise the vast majority of our country’s future citizens. Please make sure your decisions regarding ESEA and NCLB will shift the focus back to student learning and opportunity, and away from testing, labeling, and punishing schools.

—Bonnie Schulman

PS: No joke, this is the original NCLB logo . . . . . bloody fingernails dragging across a chalkboard!?!

The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam

Why do people even write trilogies? They should just quit after the first; it's always the best. The second is always mildly disappointing, and the third is downright annoying and repetitive. Usually by the time I get to the third, I just don't care anymore!

It happened with The Hunger Games and with Fifty Shades and now with Margaret Atwood's trilogy. Oryx and Crake amused me, and although I didn't like The Year of the Flood as much, it held my attention until the end. I didn't like the preachy, end-of-the-world rhetoric with prayers interspersed throughout, but I wanted to know how the characters connected.

I just finished Book 3, MaddAddam, which I almost dropped after the first few chapters. I hate giving up on books, and along came February vacation so I decided to give it more time. (I had to download it again from the library; no renewing ebooks!) I did get drawn back in, mostly because I was curious about one particular character's history, and I was happy to be reading for pleasure during my vacation rather than doing the schoolwork I brought home with me!

Oryx and Crake

I have read other books by Margaret Atwood—The Blind Assassin and The Handmaiden's Tale—and liked them, so when this book was recommended in a Facebook discussion, I decided to give it a try. Turns out there is a trilogy, and now I'm reading Book 2.  I downloaded the ebook version of Oryx and Crake from CLAMS and only had 14 days to read it . . . but I did it ! It is a manageable 2000-ish ebook pages on my iPhone, not intimidatingly long like the Outlander series.

I like the way Atwood writes. Her vocabulary is rich so reading on my phone with the instant dictionary function was great. The dystopian theme of this book is very familiar yet different enough to make it compelling, and the character development kept this reader routing for their survival.

Got to get reading The Year of the Flood now . . . before my 14 days expire!