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By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 3/6/2013
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I had the privilege of interviewing author/teacher Donalyn Miller last month for the Spellbinders Newsletter. I had so much to ask her, the interview became an unwieldy eighteen questions long. Donalyn answered every one. I've broken the interview into four parts that will first run at Spellbinders and then over here.
Many of you know I was a teacher before becoming an author. Of all the things I did in the classroom, the most satisfying (and, I believe, farthest reaching,) was getting kids excited about reading. If you are a teacher, parent, author, homeschooler, or book lover with young people in your life, I highly recommend this book.
I'd describe your beautiful book, THE BOOK WHISPERER, as a reading teacher's manifesto for free-choice reading. You state "students in free-reading programs perform better than or equal to students in any other type of reading program" and that students' "motivation and interest in reading is higher when they get the opportunity to read in school." Could you briefly walk us through the changes you experienced as a teacher that led you to embracing this mindset?
When I first began teaching, I followed the other teachers in my department. I passed
out reading logs, taught whole class novel units, and assigned book reports. I didn't know any other way. I knew that there was a disconnect between what readers do away from school and what I asked my students to do, but I wasn't sure what I could do about it. School reading and the reading I did on my own never overlapped when I was a kid. When I began questioning why this was still true for my students, I began to read and study reading workshop and look for ways to make school reading mirror what readers do "in the wild" as I call it.
I gut check everything we do against these questions:
Does this help my students become more independent readers?
Do readers actually do this (or something similar)?
If I can say, "No," then what's the point?
Students in your class are expected to read forty books from a variety of genres in their year with you. How do your students first respond when hearing this? How does this compare to what they feel about their reading at the end of the year?
I am known as the teacher who expects students to read a lot, so I think my reputation precedes me now. In the past, my students (and their parents) were shocked and worried about my reading expectations. I urge my students to try reading more at school and home. In turn, I promise them that I will do everything I can to teach them how to read and enjoy it more. We start with these mutual commitments. After a few months, students are amazed at how much they have read and feel more confident. By the end of the year, most of them have read substantially more than 40 books. For the past four years, our class average is 56.
My students also discover that I don't really care about the number of books they read. I just want them to find books that mean something to them. I want them to enjoy reading and find personal value in it. The children who read 20 books matter just as much to our class reading community as those who read 100.
One of the things I love about your classroom is the way you read alongside your students. In giving your students choice, you have shifted the power from the all-knowing teacher to a place where readers meet and learn together. While your young "apprentices hone a craft under the tutelage of a master, " you feel strongly that "meaning from a text should not flow from my perceptions... [but] from my students' own understandings, under my guidance."
This is a huge shift for children. How do you teach them to take the reins and trust their ideas?
It takes time to build a classroom community where everyone feels valued. The children don't trust me at first because they think I don't mean it when I say they can choose their own books, writing topics, and methods for responding. I work hard to encourage every student. I try to listen to them as a person before I respond as a teacher. When a student tells me he cried reading LOVE THAT DOG, he deserves to get an authentic reaction to his emotions before I ask him to evaluate how Sharon Creech crafted the story. I cannot tell you how many students tell me that they think adults don't really listen to them or see them.
Through feedback during conferences and one-on-one conversations, I encourage students to set their own learning goals and evaluate their work against standards and class-developed rubrics. Teaching students to critically look at their own work before turning it in for my evaluation is hard for many of them who seek my approval as indication that they are successful.
I love how you play book matchmaker for your kids throughout the year. Can you explain how you learn of their interests and pair books with readers?
I learn about my students because I talk to them constantly-about their life experiences as well as school assignments. I know who plays sports and who likes origami. I know who has a new baby brother and who is an only child. I also keep an endless database of books and authors in my head (and use Goodreads), and I read several books a week. If I see that a book is popular with my students and I haven't read it, I get a copy and read it immediately. When I can't find a book that matches to a student's specific interests, I fall back on titles that have wide appeal to most kids like HOLES or NUMBER THE STARS. I also ask students about the other books they have read and enjoyed.
I read a lot of book reviews, reading blogs, and book lists, too. Remaining current on the newer books helps me provide titles that are relevant to my students. I also talk to a lot of teachers and librarians on Twitter who recommend books to my students and me.
Knowing my students and knowing books-there's no shortcut. I often joke that I spend my life introducing my shelf children to my classroom children and facilitating friendships between them.
Learn more about Donalyn and her book at www.thebookwhisperer.com. Stay turned for the second part of the interview, coming soon.
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 3/4/2013
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It is impossible to discourage the real writers -- they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.
- Sinclair Lewis
1/17/1895
I am so crazy about reading that I can’t let a book drop until I see its end, even if it is as dull as a cookery recipe.
7/10/1898
I have written a good deal since coming home and am slowly but I think surely, climbing up the ladder. I think my recent work is much better than any I have yet done. I study hard and struggle to improve.
12/31/1898
How I love my work. I seem to grow more and more wrapped up in it as the days pass and other hopes and interests fail me. Nearly everything I think or do or say is subordinated to a desire to improve my work. I study people and events for that, I think and speculate and read for that.
4/4/1899
I have no doubt that it is a wise ordinance of fate -- or Providence? -- that I cannot get all the books I want or I should certainly never accomplish much. I am simply a “book drunkard.” Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.
5/1/1899
Dear old world, you are very beautiful and I love you well.
5/1/1900
Oh, as long as we can work we can make life beautiful! And life is beautiful in spite of all its sorrow and care.
5/1/1900
I also re-read “King Solomon’s Mines” lately. I always liked it because it was so full of adventure and I do love that with a love that has outlived childhood. What care I if it be “wild and improbable” and “lacking in literary art”? I refuse to be any longer hampered in my likes and dislikes by such cannons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it any every other fault.
If you missed the first part of the discussion, be sure to click through here.
The Two Selves:
From early on, Maud wrote of feeling like an outsider at school and at home. She was raised by her grandparents, who having already raised their children, were not interested in indulging a spirited, curious, social child. At school, where she was often at the top of her class, she felt separate from her classmates intellectually. Though loved by her grandparents and extended family, they found her book love and imagination both strange and obsessive. As a result, Maud learned to keep her true nature largely to herself. There are certainly parallels between her life and her characters, Anne and Emily, to be sure.
I have grown years older in this past month. Grief and worry and heartbreak have done their work thoroughly. Sometimes I ask myself if the pale, sad-eyed woman I see in my glass can really be the merry girl of olden days or if she be some altogether new creature, born of sorrow and baptized of suffering, who is the sister and companion of regret and hopeless longing.
Before taking her third school (1897-1898), Maud became engaged to Edwin Simpson, a decision she immediately regretted that threw her into months of turmoil. At the same time she started a secret relationship with her landlord’s son, Herman Leard. This portion of her life was a turning point, where her two selves became -- and continued -- to be more separate than they ever had been before.
The pressure she felt, both real and (possibly) imagined, to keep a calm external life continued to dog her for the rest of her life. In the years she cared for her grandmother, she was often lonely, stifled by the old woman’s set habits (which included heating only the kitchen through terrible winters), and overwhelmed by depression that often abated in warmer months but could attack at any time without any warning.
It was difficult for me to read of her depression this time through, knowing things would only become darker. As she corresponded with her fiancee and future husband, Ewan MacDonald, she was distressed to read of his own mental and emotional anguish, something that played a huge role in their future marriage and his future calling as a minister.
The Journal:
Maud often described her journal as a place to record and make sense of things (a place to “write it out”) and a “grumble book” -- somewhere she could honestly, privately share her frustrations and woe. As an occasional journaler, I can relate to both of these and often wonder, as Maud sometimes expressed, of the skewed picture such a journal paints. How much of the true person can be known when a journal is used this way?
As readers will discover in future volumes, Maud made considerable effort to re-copy and organize older entries, transferring all volumes into the same standard blank books she was to keep for the rest of her life. While there is the possibility cuts were made in the process, she let the honest, the unflattering, the heartbreaking, the sometimes unkind entries stand. She allowed, I think, as much honestly into her records as a person can bring.
Things to consider as we continue reading volumes II-V:
- At what point did Maud decide she was writing for an audience and not just herself?
- Did she knowingly edit as she wrote, softening or omitting things?
- How much honesty and transparency is a person capable of in recording a life?
- In regard to her depression: do you think there were ways she could have asked for help with those she trusted or was the taboo of mental illness too strong?
- Would her books have changed if her life were different?
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 2/25/2013
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An Overview:
This first volume of Maud’s journals covers her life from ages fourteen through thirty-five. She starts as a school girl (not above school yard spats and secret indulgences in novels during lesson time); studies at Prince of Wales College and Dalhousie University; teaches three years in different communities in Prince Edward Island, works one year as a copyeditor at a Nova Scotia newspaper; experiences six* proposals, two engagements, and one secret love affair; and spends more than a decade as her grandmother’s companion and caretaker, all the while reading, writing, and dreaming of the literary life.
There are countless directions I could take this post, but for the sake of true discussion, I wanted to comment on a few things that struck me and raise questions to those of you who have also read. You’ll see I’ve had so much to say I’ve decided to run a second discussion post on Wednesday and a more quotes I found interesting on Friday. I invite readers to take us anywhere you’d like in the comments below.
The Literary Life:
All my life is has been my aim to write a book -- a “real live” book... Well, I’ve written my book. The dream dreamed years ago in that old brown desk in school has come true at last after years of toil and struggle. And the realization is sweet -- almost as sweet as the dream!
Maud’s first novel, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, sold to L.C. Page and Co., the fifth publishing house she submitted to. While on the surface, this looks like an easy thing, she had been tirelessly writing, submitting, and selling short stories and poems for over fifteen years. Writing had become a daily part of her life, as had a faithful study of the magazine market.
Blessings be on the inventors of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.
As well as writing, Maud read broadly and deeply. She often re-read childhood favorites, studying to see if they held up as the years passed but also refusing to let popular opinion sway her preferences. She compared author’s newer works to their older titles, pursued the bestsellers and the classics, and collected phrases that spoke to her (reminding me of my commonplace book).
After selling ANNE in 1907, she quickly went on to sell the sequel, ANNE OF AVONLEA, KILMENY OF THE ORCHARD (a story re-worked story that had previously run as a magazine serial), and THE STORY GIRL (her personal favorite).
The road of literature is at first a very slow one...and I mean to work patiently on until I win -- as I believe I shall, sooner or later -- recognition and success.
Wednesday's discussion will focus on the two lives Maud often felt she lived and the process of recording a life through journaling.
*Have I forgotten someone or accidentally added someone else in? Mr. Mustard, Lem, Lou, Edwin, Ewan, Oliver.
I'm so excited to share my critique partner and dear friend's debut young adult novel, WORDS AND THEIR MEANINGS, has sold to Flux.
Congratulations, Kate!
Kate Bassett's WORDS AND THEIR MEANINGS, about a talented young writer who, one year after her beloved uncle's death, discovers the shocking truth about him, her family, and the importance of finding new words, a new love story, for her own life, to Brian Farrey-Latz at Flux, for publication in Summer 2014, by Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agency (NA). Foreign:
info@rightspeople.com
My former classmate, Beth Little, is now a spectacular fifth-grade teacher here in Albuquerque. She invited me to speak to her kids last May. Beth sent me a little package over the summer, a collection of thank you letters from her students. This one spoke so directly to me, it's now framed on my desk:
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 2/20/2013
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By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 2/18/2013
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The world was hers for the reading.
- Francie Nolan, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN by Betty Smith
As I've been reading Volume I of Lucy Maud Montgomery's journals, I've been underlining quotes that I've found especially interesting, insightful, and fun. I've been sharing them on Facebook and Twitter but realized readers here might like to read them, too. Here's a glimpse into Maud's thoughts from ages fourteen to twenty. Be sure to return Monday, 25 February to discuss Volume I!
12/2/1889
Miss Gordon looked rather blank. I think she had been expecting to hear that Nate and I broke all the ten commandments all at once every day.
3/4/1890
I thought Jack was killed but when he picked himself up with a real live “cuss word” I concluded he wasn’t. But his face was all spattered with soot and he did look so funny.
10/20/1890
(Very Anne-ish): Today I got a letter from home with some pressed flowers in it. It just seemed as if they spoke to me and whispered a lovely message of a far-off land where blue skies are bending over maple-crimsoned hills and spruce glens are still green and dim in their balsamic recesses.
6/6/1891
Mustard a minister!! Oh Lordy--how it will sound--Rev. Mr. Mustard.
10/4/1891
I must have some duck in my composition for I always love to be out in a rainstorm.
9/1/1892
Grandpa stayed home to look after us all. He told the boys that they could fight the whole evening, if they wanted to. ...Well and Dave were black and blue for a week but they had had the time of their lives. I’m sure they wished Grace Macneill could have got married nightly.
1/12/1983
Books are a delightful world in themselves. Their characters seem as real to me as my friends of actual life.
9/28/1983
Oh, I wonder if I shall ever be able to do anything worth while in the way of writing. It is my dearest ambition.
9/6/1984
I may be teaching my pupils something but they are teaching me more -- whole tomes of wisdom.
9/18/1894
It is a regular fall rain now -- a night wild enough to suit any novelist in search of suitable weather for a murder or elopement.
12/15/1894
Well, my goodness! -- or somebody else’s goodness if mine isn’t substantial enough!
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 2/13/2013
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As I mentioned in the previous post, sod walls were typically two-feet thick. If you compare the exterior window pictures to this one, you'll see a generous ledge on both sides. Also notice the plastered walls. In MAY B. I make mention of this nicety through a conversation with Mrs. Oblinger, the new bride from the city, and May, the frontier girl.
from poem 29:
"I hate this place," she whispers.
Before I think better, I say,
"He's left a shade tree out front,
he's plastered the walls,
and he's putting in a proper floor."
"What'd you say?"
Does she even remember I'm here?
"Mr. Oblinger's a good man," I try again.
"He wants to make this home for you."
She stands over me now.
"You think plaster makes a difference in this place?
Look at this."
She holds out her mud-caked skirt.
"It's filthy here!
The ceiling leaks.
Sometimes snakes get through!"
The cool sod's where they like to nest.
"They help with mice," I offer.
She glares.
Sod houses were one room with little to no privacy. Here you see a bed right up against the stove, a tree trunk meant to support the roof also used to hang clothing.
These benches are made from hewed logs and are a great example of the wood used for puncheon floors (the proper flooring May mentions above -- many lived with packed earth underfoot) : the smooth side of a log faced up, the curved side down.
One way families kept dirt from falling from the sod above was to cover the ceiling in muslin.
How would you fare living this way?
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 2/11/2013
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In the years I've been blogging, no topic has drawn more visitors here than sod houses. I hope this post, showing the exterior of a Kansas soddy, and the next, its interior, will satisfy the curious!
My mother took these pictures while on an Elderhostel tour in 2009, just as I was putting some finishing touches on MAY B.
This sod house is located outside Gaithersburg, Kansas. You can see the family had access to enough wood -- perhaps a sawmill nearby? -- to build a door, frame out several windows, and lay lumber for a roof (though they still chose to place sod on top).
A pitched roof would have made rainstorms more comfortable, as it was typical for water to seep through flat-roofed sod houses, where it would continue to "rain" inside well after a storm.
Sod bricks were typically 1' x 2' x 4". They weighed roughly fifty pounds and were stacked, grass-side down, so that walls were two-feet thick. These sturdy homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Structurally, they weren't especially neat and tidy. This poor wall looks like it's melting.
While researching for MAY B., I'd read about women who'd left comfortable lives determined to make this new world as familiar and lovely as possible. My mother included a note with this picture, the words of her tour guide:
Bird cages were kept to show some gentility or civility attesting to their previous lifestyle.
I included a stanza in MAY B.'s poem 80 that was inspired by this bird cage picture:
I button Ma's fine boots.
I wish I had insisted on keeping Hiram's old ones,
but I know Ma gave me hers
for herself as much as me,
a message to Mrs. Oblinger,
fresh from the city,
showing that women out here still have some grace.
My feet will hurt, I reckon,
before I make it far.
Come back Wednesday for views of the interior.
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 2/8/2013
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Create Your Writer Platform: The Key to Building an Audience, Selling More Books and finding Success as an Author -- Chuck Sambuchino
www.chucksambuchino.com
I’ve read several books on author platform but have to confess never fully grasping the term until reading Chuck Sambuchino’s CREATE YOUR WRITER PLATFORM. At its simplest level,
a platform is an author’s visibility and reach -- the framework an author has and continues to build that let’s others know of his or her work.
Sambuchino describes his book as
“a guide for all the hardworking writers out there who want a say in their own destinies.” Though there is no one-size-fits-all approach to establishing a platform, Sambuchino says the need for platform cannot be ignored, even for those of us who write fiction. The book is divided into three sections: The Principles of Platform, The Mechanics of Platform, and Author Case Studies. At the end of each chapter, literary agents weigh in on the chapter’s topic, giving readers perspectives outside of the author’s. One of the most helpful aspects of the book is the Case Study section, where twelve different authors from a variety of genres (memoir to self help, fiction to reference) reflect on the choices they made in building their platforms --
what worked, what they wish they’d done differently, what they believe makes them stand out from others in their field.
Sambuchino is also quick to say “this is a resource for those who realize that selling a book is not about blatant self-promotion.” It is more about relationships, the sharing of expertise, and supporting others along the way. Though written for the aspiring author, a lot of things resonated with me, a newly published author, such as the wisdom behind an author newsletter, establishing an “
events” page on my blog, and always, that kindness and generosity go a long way.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
- Fredrick Buechner
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 2/4/2013
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THE BALLAD OF JESSIE PEARL -
Shannon Hitchcock
setting: 1920's, North Carolina
age range: 12 and up
release date: February 1, 2013
study guide based on Common Core State Standards
Please tell us about your book.
It’s 1922 and Jessie has big plans for her future, but that’s before tuberculosis strikes. Though she has no talent for cooking, cleaning, or nursing, she puts her dreams on hold to help her family. She falls in love for the first time ever, and suddenly what she wants is not so simple any more.
What inspired you to write this story?
A snippet of a family story and my son’s 8th grade history project. His teacher had each student collect ten family stories. Each story had to take place during a different decade. I decided to write a novel loosely based on one of the stories Alex collected.
Could you share with readers how you conducted your research?
I read novels set in the 1920’s, North Carolina history books, memoirs written from sanatoriums, and doctors’ accounts of the disease. I also contacted a local historian in my hometown who helped me locate resources about life on a tobacco farm in the early 1900’s.
What are some special challenges associated with writing historical fiction?
Not to tell everything you know, but just enough to add flavor to the story.
What topics does your book touch upon that would make your book a perfect fit for the classroom?
THE BALLAD OF JESSIE PEARL could be used in a cross curricular unit by ELA and Social Studies teachers. Keely Hutton, who’s an eighth grade ELA teacher, reviewed my curriculum guide and gave this feedback:
With JESSIE you have the perfect opportunity to tie in [the following]:
non-fiction pieces about the time period
TB
women’s rights and roles in family/society
health care during epidemics
historically what was happening during those years in the US and the world
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
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Want to know more about the Read Along? Click through for the
introductory post and
reading schedule.
THE SELECTED JOURNALS OF LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY, VOLUME I (1889-1910)
It is will great excitement I welcome you to the LMM Journals Read Along! Picking up this first book has, in many ways, felt like coming home. If you are an Anne fan, you will be delighted to see phrases and circumstances that feel very Anne-ish. If you're an Emily fan, you'll see parallels between Maud's upbringing and Emily's.
Here you'll find school girl spats, small-town social events, a year with her beloved father (and ill-humored stepmother), a proposal from her former teacher (!), many, many heart-broken suitors, teaching, writing, an engagement, loneliness, the sale of ANNE.
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born November 30, 1874 in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, Canada. "Thirty-four years later, in 1908, her first novel, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, put Prince Edward Island on the literary map of the world. When she died in 1942 Montgomery had published over twenty books, hundreds of short stories and poems, and her name was known far beyond the English-speaking world."
Before her second birthday, Maud, as she liked to be called, lost her mother. Her father quickly left for the mainland, remarrying and leaving Maud to be raised by her mother's parents. She began journaling as "a tot of nine" but destroyed those early copies. "Surviving are ten handwritten volumes that were begun when she was fourteen and date from 1889 to 1942." This first volume includes the first two of those ten journals, covering her PEI years "from ages 14 to 36" (including a year with her father in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan).
Without siblings, raised by older relatives, and intellectually ahead of her class, Maud often felt isolated and different from those around her. She "viewed her journals as a 'personal confidant in whom I can repose absolute trust'."
"Because the journals are so full and frank and cover such a long period, and because they are the work of a successful professional writer, they provide a degree of information, anecdote, and personal history that makes them unique in Canadian letters. The interest attached to the autobiographical content is obvious. What may not appear so obvious in this first volume is that the complete journals of L. M. Montgomery provide a fund of engrossing social history covering more than half a century and draw the reader surprisingly far into the depths of one woman's life."*
As I read, I'll share favorite quotes on Twitter, using the hashtag #lmmjournals. Make notes as you read or just enjoy. And please consider returning
Monday, 25 February to join the discussion of Volume I.
Be sure to keep a second bookmark at the notes section at the back of the book. Extra details are given here.
Happy reading!
*All quotes taken from the introduction of the first volume
What an honor. Thank you, American Library Association and Association for Library Service to Children.
Want to see what other books are included?
Click through!
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
- Richard McKenna
Planning to join the LMM Journal Read Along? Here's what you need to do:
Find the books
Try your public library, or order through your local indie, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble. Now that they're available in paperback, they're more affordable and easier to track down.
Save the dates
Volume I:
introductory post - Friday, February 1
discussion - Monday, February 25
Volume II:
introductory post - Monday, April 1
discussion - Monday, April 29
Volume III:
introductory post - Monday, June 3
discussion - Friday, June 28
Volume IV:
introductory post - Friday, August 2
discussion - Friday, August 30
Volume V:
introductory post - Wednesday, 2 September
discussion - Wednesday, 30 September
Read to share
Jot down anything that sparks your interest and join the discussion! And please spread the word. Twitter hashtag #lmmjournals
Dear Friends:
I'm planning ahead for April, National Poetry Month, and am hoping for a variety of guest posts from all sorts of people: teachers, authors, librarians, poets, readers -- in other words, you!
Interested in writing a guest post?
There are all sorts of directions you can take: share a memory, a lesson, a favorite poem, a collection of verse novels you love, ways you wish you’d been taught about poetry -- really, there is no wrong way to go about this. I’m hoping the collection of posts produced for April will be informative, celebratory, resourceful, and an opportunity for conversations to naturally develop.
Here are some guidelines:
- I have no minimum length requirement, though I ask you keep things under 500 words. Readers sometimes lose interest after that point (confession: I don’t always hold to this myself!).
- If you are able, it would be great if you could include pictures that might enhance your post. All that I ask is you have permission to use the image (think collective commons jpegs or pictures you take -- and have permission to use! -- on your own).
- Please include links back to your blog, Twitter acct., FB page, -- anything that might put readers in touch with you and/or might promote your sites and work.
- Send your post to me by March 15, so I might put it on the schedule.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. If you know of somebody who might be interested in writing a guest post, feel free to pass this information on!
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 1/21/2013
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The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
- Elias Canetti
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 1/18/2013
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So often we find books through recommendations, reviews, and general book buzz. But there are plenty of other ways to discover books to love.
A few months ago, I shared a quote from Lauren Destefano that sparked a conversation in the comments about ways we've come to certain titles unconventionally: at garage sales, from a friend's shelf, and the like. In celebration of Found Books, I'm sharing three with you today:
THE RAGING QUIET - Sherryl Jordan
where I found it: The library shelf. The cover intrigued me. Karen Cushman's gorgeous endorsement (below) sold me.
I found The Raging Quiet enchanting, a celebration of the power of love, hope, and courage to overcome prejudice and ignorance, with characters I cannot forget: the independent Marnie, the kind priest, and Raven, who is no one I know or am ever likely to know but who was so real and true that I loved and feared for him. The book is a wonderful achievement, full of truth and compassion, and a delight to read.
THE UNNAMEABLES - Ellen Booraem
where I found it: a free book table at a recent writing retreat. I couldn't resist this description.
Medford lives on a neat, orderly island called—simply—Island.
Islanders like names that say exactly what a thing (or a person) is or does. Nothing less.
Islanders like things (and people) to do what their names say they will. Nothing more.
In fact, everything on Island is named for its purpose, even the people who inhabit it. But Medford Runyuin is different. A foundling, he has a meaningless last name that is just one of many reminders that he's an outsider. And, to make matters worse, Medford's been keeping a big secret, one that could get him banished from Island forever.
When the smelliest, strangest, unruliest creature Island has ever seen comes barreling right into his rigid world, Medford can’t help but start to question the rules he’s been trying to follow his entire life.
MY INDIAN FAMILY: A STORY OF EAST AND WEST WITHIN A MUSLIM HOME - Hilde Wernher
where I found it: Goodwill
I love cross-cultural stories and old books, so this one was a winner (my copy is a lovely green hardback). Ended up sharing this one with my mom and have spoken of it to a number of friends.
Share some of your Found Books below!
Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.
When Facebook rolled out its new promote button a few months back, it also quietly changed a part of the Pages features. In the past, every Page you "liked" was guaranteed to show up in your Newsfeed.
Not any more.
According to Facebook, if you'd like to receive all new posts in your Newsfeed, you'll need to alter your settings in each Page you like.
Here's what you need to do:
- Open a Page (May B.'s Facebook page is a great place to start!).
- Hover over the like button until the pull-down menu appears.
- Click Get Notifications.
- Voila! You'll never miss another post from your favorite Pages.
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Great interview - thank you! I want to shadow Donalyn for a week. Can you arrange that? Ha.
Me, too! Tell me what you come up with, Holly. I'm leaving it all to you!
Enjoyed your interview with Donalyn! I just finished rereading The Book Whisperer last week for a class I'm taking so it was great to hear her current thoughts on the topics raised in the book. Choice and making reading relevant is more important than ever! Looking forward to Part 2 ...
I love that teachers are reading this book individually and in classrooms. For me, it was deeply satisfying to interact with Donalyn after reading. It was like getting an expanded version of the book.