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I rock!  That’s just in case you didn’t already know.  I came home yesterday from a long day at work to find out that my hard work reading paid off this weekend and I earned a 2nd place prize with the 48 Hour Reading Challenge!

There were approximately 40 participants this weekend who read thousands upon thousands of pages.  One impressive participant read 6479 pages.  Can you imagine?  She rocks too!

Bibliophile, the reader of 6479 pages, who slept like 5 hours this whole weekend, spent her 48 hours reading series books, including  Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series. 

Jen Robinson and I both read 11 books, but I think I didn’t count my time as accurately so it might be less than 30 hours that I read, but we live and we learn.  Completing this challenge has revved Jen up to where she might do a 24 hour challenge once a month.

Becky of Becky’s Book Reviews announced on her site a YA Romance Reading Challenge that starts July 1 and ends February 28, 2009.  That’s way longer than 48 hours so sign up and fall in love with books again.  Becky also participated this weekend with the challenge and read a book by one of childhood faves, Lois Lowry. 

To check out all of the participants’ blogs, visit Mother Reader and hop away.  I’m sure once you’re done reading and skimming blogs, you’ll find new blogs and books to read.

Well, I came to the library, I saw tons of books on the shelves, I read many of the ones I checked out.

I started at 11:00AM on Friday and while it’s not quite 11:00 AM again, I know none of the books I have will be finished in an hour.

I guess it is fitting that I started at 11:00 as I read 11 books in 48 hours.  And I had fun.  Reading these books, I was able to travel to rural NC in the 70s during the Vietnam War and experience a mother teaching her daughter about pride and honoring her word to others.  I saw a homeless girl fight to get her family out of a car and into a house even if it meant doing wrong.  I journeyed with an 8th grade girl in Los Angeles as she battled lymphoma.  I even got to go to Iraq and be the silent passenger in a Humvee during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Thanks to 11 books, I learned, I laughed, I grew.  I saw the good side of life, the bad side of life, and everything in between.  I learned about other cultures and have a couple of authors to add to my favorites list.  Helen Exley once said, “Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’”

It was peaceful to tune out most of the world for 48 hours and just get my read on.

Funny thing about the number 11.  I still have 11 books on my table’s to be read pile.  I checked out 22 books over the course of the last week in preparation for this weekend, this challenge.

To Be Read Pile
Copper Sun by Sharon Draper
Life is Fine by Allison Whittenberg
Lucy the Giant by Sherri L. Smith
Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass
Girl Overboard by Justina Chen Headley
Game by Walter Dean Myers
Out of Patience by Brian Meehl
A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass
Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything In It by Sundee T. Frazier
Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen
Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall by Wendy Mass

As you can see, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy on the treadmill for the next few weeks.

I’ve enjoyed this experience and will definitely do it again next year — shut out the world and read.  Maybe next year, I will reach my goal of 16 books.  I just need to not go to sleep at night.  Silly me, lol.

I’ll never know what it is like to be biracial, but in Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, author Sherri L. Smith paints a portrait of a biracial family through the eyes of Ana Shen.  Living in Los Angeles, Ana is the salutatorian of her 8th grade class.  Graduation day is hectic enough when a water main breaks right as Ana begins her speech, but now that the graduation dance is cancelled, Ana will have to spend more time than expected with her African American and Chinese grandparents.

Previous events where both sides of the family gathered together were disastrous.  Ana is determined to make today perfect and have her grandparents, especially the grandmothers, make peace.

Primarily set in the Shen’s kitchen, Ana is in charge of making pot stickers, Grandma White will make gumbo, and Grandma Shen will make lion’s head.  Plus there’s a boy involved — Japanese student Jamie Tabata who is the class valedictorian.

The day is filled with tension and at the meal with Ana’s family, Jamie’s family, and two other families, things come to an explosive head.

The story is a winner because it offers an honest look at a family that combines two cultures who try to get along for the sake of the children.  The title describes the meal that the family is preparing to celebrate Ana’s graduation, but I think it describes her family as well.  No family is all good or all bad.  It takes a bit of the hot, the sour, the salty, and the sweet to really make a family.  Ana learns that lesson on graduation day.

I first learned of Sheila P. Moses through my involvement with The Brown Bookshelf.  The author of The Legend of Buddy Bush, Moses was raised in Rich Square, North Carolina as the ninth of tenth children.

Set on Cumbo Road in rural North Carolina, Sheila P. Moses uses her own childhood as the inspiration of the story of Sallie Gal, her cousin Wild Cat, and their adventures as a sharecropping family.  While Papa’s off fighting in the Vietnam War, Sallie Gal and Momma pick cotton.  Sallie Gal yearns for pretty hair ribbons like her cousin Wild Cat with the pretty green eyes wears.

Momma instills in Sallie Gal a strong work ethic and sense of pride.  Refusing to accept charity from anyone including family, Sallie Gal and Wild Cat come up with ways to earn money to buy hair ribbons from the Wall-a-kee Man like selling lemonade on Cumbo Road and doing chores for Miss Dottie.

The story is an easy read, filled with wonderful illustrations from Niki Daly, and told in a way that teaches about life in the rural south where families have to work hard for the things they need all while maintaining a sense of pride and passing it on to their children.

I grew up reading Lurlene McDaniel books and I remember crying hard as the protagonists battled cancer, mainly leukemia if my memory serves correctly.

I recently read My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.  An amazing book by the way and it will be a movie in 2009 with Abigail Breslin.

I saw the movie Stepmom and any Lifetime movies that deal with cancer.

Last year, my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Daily I work with breast cancer patients.

So it is safe to say that I am familiar with cancer.

I discovered Side Effects by Amy Goldman Koss this morning at the library by happenstance.  I wanted some thinner books to read to balance out the 200 and 300 plus page books that I am reading this weekend for the readers challenge.

This is a great book.  Izzy is diagnosed with lymphoma in the opening chapter, but if you expect her to be weepy and philosophical and brave in the face of this disaster, forget about it.

Her form of therapy to stay sane in the face of nine rounds of chemo, her mother’s tears, her best friend’s mood swings, and people in general being sympathetic to her illness is to draw her way through it.

If you’ve seen the movie Juno, I can totally see Ellen Page being Izzy.  She’s snarky, honest, and outspoken, but at times she keeps those thoughts from her weepy mother and just shares them with us  the reader.

I won’t tell you the final outcome, but I will say that I didn’t cry.

It’s not easy being poor.  And it’s even harder when you’re a kid who has been evicted from her home and has to live in her car with her mother and brother.  Georgina Hayes washes up for school in the gas station bathrooms in the mornings before school as her mother works two jobs.  It’s hard to keep this all a secret in a small town in North Carolina especially from her best friend. 

Until one day Georgina comes up with a plan — steal a dog, get the reward for the missing dog, and move into a house.  She scouts around for the perfect dog to steal and finally founds lovable and smart Willy.

Stealing a dog is a bit more complicated than Georgina counts on even if she did create a step by step guide.  Author Barbara O’Connor tells a poignant story that has you rooting for Georgina even if she does something wrong to make things in her life right.   She doesn’t wrap up the story by making the family financial problems magically go away either.  Georgina grows up in the course of  this story and learns a good rule from an unexpected teacher:  Sometimes, the more you stir it, the worse it stinks.

I’m not an expert or anything, but I am willing to bet that there is no other school on Earth like Wayside School.  At the beginning of the book, we learn that Wayside was closed for 242 days.  Why?  I have no idea.  I might need to read Sideways Stories from Wayside School or Wayside School is Falling Down to get the backstory.

After reading Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, I know the following:

• the school has 30 floors
• there is no 19th floor
• there is only one classroom on each floor
• the principal Mr. Kidswatter is a little bit off
• the students love Mrs. Jewls and Louis, the playground teacher

Once Mrs. Jewls goes on maternity leave, the students get a series of weird substitute teachers who turn the classroom on the 30th floor upside down with funny voices, old grudges, and a teacher who can hear what others think and uses that against them. 

The author of Holes, Louis Sachar tells a fun story about a funny school.  We have Allison who has to write a poem about the color purple yet doesn’t know any words that rhyme with purple.  Her best friend Rondi knows tons of words that rhyme with blue but never quite gets that poem written.

Kids will enjoy the wackiness found within the classroom and the playground at Wayside School.

After finishing Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers, I had to follow it up with a frivolous, light read so I grabbed Jen Calonita’s Secrets of My Hollywood Life:  Family Affairs.  The third title in the Secret series, Calonita gives us an inside peek at Hollywood life from the eyes of a teenage actress.

I first discovered Calonita in 2006 and remember reading the first book on a Saturday afternoon rooting for Kaitlin Burke as she sought to have a normal teenage life in the midst of Hollywood with best friend Liz at her side and battling her antagonistic co-star Sky.

In this third title, Kaitlin’s back and so is Liz, Sky, boyfriend Austin, younger brother Matty, and the rest of Team Burke.  But trouble is brewing on the set of Family Affairs, the television show that Kaitlin has been a member of the cast since she was four years old.  New cast member Alexis is making trouble with her back stabbing ways and is so evil she makes Sky look like a saint.  Kind of.

Kaitlin is trying hard to be Zen thanks to a book she read, but it’s hard when she keeps hearing rumors about the future of Family Affairs which impacts her future as an actress.  Plus she’s feeling that she’s missing out on some of the typical teen milestones — driver’s ed, SATs, looking forward to college — but she’s not sure if she wants to go to college at the risk of jeopardizing her career.

Things come to a head on the set and sparks fly.  I won’t spoil it for you, but trust me when I say that Secrets of My Hollywood Life keeps the reader hooked throughout the 300+ page story.

Emotionally, this was a difficult read for me.  Walter Dean Myers put the initial days and months of Operation Iraqi Freedom into words through they eyes of Robin “Birdy” Perry.

I’ve never been in the military so I am very removed from war and what it is like.  My father served in the Navy and I have a cousin and her husband who have been a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  She’s told me stories and shared with me brief details of what it’s like over there.  She’s shared with me what it’s like once you leave and have to readjust to this life in America.

We’ve seen reports on the news, read articles about the war and those who lose their lives, but today for several hours I read a detailed account of it.  As I read it, I hoped that this character and that character, those who were connected with the protagonist, would survive and get to come back home to live out their dreams, raise their kids, and just simply live their lives with their friends and family.

282 pages is more than enough to share what can happen in a war, but at the same time, it isn’t enough.  Reading about the different places that the soldiers went to and the maneuvers they did as well as the need to be on alert as they moved throughout Iraq was well captured by Myers.   I can only imagine the number of soldiers that he interviewed as well as articles and news clips that he watched in order to write this story.  The details and imagery are very vivid and it encaptured me to the point where I felt that I was riding in the Humvee with Birdie, Ahmed, Marla, Captain Coles, and Jonesy.  I could hear Jonesy sing his beloved blues songs while Birdie tried to figure out Marla. 

Sunrise Over Fallujah is a wonderfully told story by an author who has told so many stories in the course of my lifetime.  It’s a mature YA read that gives a very detailed account of war through the eyes of American soldiers who don’t understand the real purpose of the war nor what exactly is the prize that will go to the victor.

It’s a coming of age story that shows even after you are officially grown, high school diploma in hand, there is still more growing up to be done.

One book read in one hour.  I rock!

Diary of a Wimpy Kid:  Rodrick Rules by Jeff Kinney picks up where the first diary left off.  The protagonist Greg chronicles more about his love/hate relationship with older brother Rodrick as well as moments of his relationship with younger brother Manny and his somewhat obtuse friend Rowley.

Reading this book puts me in the mind of a season of Everybody Hates Chris.  Every episode of Everybody Hates Chris involves Chris coming up with what seems to be a good plan, but for it all go awry and what should have been the perfect plan falling apart.

Notable moments in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules include Greg’s swim team escapades, the party Rodrick throws while his parents are not home, spending the weekend with Grandpa, and the sleepover with Rowley that is interrupted by a prank.

There are definitely laugh out loud scenes which are due to the cute drawings that show just what Greg is telling the reader.  Young or old will enjoy this kid’s diary of his middle school years and being the middle kid in his family.