This was a great reading month for me! I read a large range and enjoy so much about everything. Many of these books were by repeat authors, which is fun to realize. This month I read:

• The Dream Builders by Oindrila Mukherjee – I can’t figure out where I heard about this book, but I’m guessing I have the Currently Reading podcast to thank for it. This was an incredible, beautiful book! Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective, and yet the story keeps moving forward in meaningful ways. We begin when Maneka returns to India from America, where she has been studying and working. She and her father are grieving the loss of her mother, while the town her parents moved to is awaiting the build of The Tr*mp Towers. People love and hate the towers, as they take up time, labor, and model the power money has in the class-driven society. We meet people of different castes, working and living different lifestyles, who are all connected in some way. This is hard to describe but well worth the time to read.
• Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan – I LOVED this professional book! I heard one of the authors, Shane, speak at the SDCOE Equity Conference last year and I loved her description of street data – beyond the standardized test scores and grades, looking more directly at individual student stories. So much of this book resonated with me and connected to the equity journey we have been on as a system. There is also a tug in my mind between the necessity/ requirements of some forms of testing and data from a systems perspective, and then the balance of time to get to the meat of what students need individually. I know that this book can help inform our team’s revision of report cards in the next year and I’m excited to see where that takes us.
• Thank you for Listening by Julia Whelan [audiobook]- Julia Whelan is a Grammy-nominated director of and performer of audiobooks. I heard her audiobooks are so impressive because of the number of unique voices she can do while narrating and listening to this romance proved that true. Sewanee (pronounced Swani) is still struggling with the loss of one eye after an accident that chased her away from acting and into audiobook narrating. She is talked into co-narrating a romance, a genre she quit years ago, with an unknown but famously hot man. As she and “Brock” get to know each other, we see all of the typical romance tropes, and yet it’s funny and entertaining and endearing. I loved listening to this!
• Lone Women by Victor LaValle – I chose this as a Book of the Month selection recently and I’m so glad I did! Adelaide Henry is a Black woman who has to leave CA and buys land to homestead in Montana, which is based on true history from the early 1900’s. The story, while part historical in nature is also part fantastical in nature, and has unique characters. I enjoyed following Adelaide’s journey and the people she meets along the way, as a young, single, Black woman attempting to make a life and earn her own land in a rough climate.
• No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister – I LOVED this book! I also loved The Scente Keeper by this author and now I really need to go back and read her backlist because I could live in her writing. In this story, each chapter is narrated by a different character and can almost be considered it’s own short story… except for the fact that each chapter has a connection to the same book, Theo. As we meet each new person, we learn how they connect to this best-selling book, Theo, and how it impacts their life. Over time, we also see connections amongst the characters. At the end of each chapter, I would sigh loudly and want to hug the book. I was sad to leave each character but happy to know their story. This was beautiful story-telling!
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King – This book originally came out in 2000 and I read it around 2001, when I was a teacher of middle school English. I remember loving it, and loving that I found Stephen Kind again, many years after I used to read his books as a teenager. I reread it this month for my Stephen Kind Summer book club; this is the third summer I have participated! I enjoyed this, but it was an odd feeling knowing I had read it before and yet not remembering ANYTHING! The first part of the book is memoir, a brief history of King’s childhood, told with a lot of humor. The second part is King’s advice on writing – he writes with no planning or plot, just letting the story come to life. He hates adverbs and passive voice! The third part of the book is a summary the horrible car accident that almost killed him in 1999, his painful recovery, and how he got back into writing. He concludes with some recommended books, which are all very old at this point; I was surprised by how few I have read. The bonus content, added much more recently to a newer edition, included an essay by one of King’s sons and a transcript of an interview between King and his other son, both of which were entertaining. Overall, the best piece of writing advice King shares is that good writers read a lot. I’m half way there! He did also say not to write what you know necessarily, but what you like to read, which makes me wonder if I should consider a mystery…
• Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling [audiobook]- What a sweet book! I saw the second book in this series on a student’s desk while visiting classrooms during the first week of school. I asked the student about the book and she told me it was good, not really about a cactus, part of a series, and that I should read it. The audiobook version was fun to listen to. Aven and her family move to Arizona and Aven struggles to make friends at first. She is the girl with no arms and some people find it odd to watch her do so much with her feet. But she befriends Connor, with Tourett’s Syndrome, and Zion, an overweight boy, and the three of them bond over their differences and how they are seen by others. Meanwhile, Aven is helping her parents get an old western theme park up and running again. This story has good lessons about how we treat others, what friendship is all about, and had a bit of a mystery as well.
• Shark Heart by Emily Habeck – What an interesting book! In this beautifully written debut novel, we follow the love story of Wren and Lewis. Then some fantasy/ magical realism enter the picture and things get wild! We also follow the lives of a few other characters and how Wren came to be the graceful woman she is. If you can suspend disbelief, this is a fun read!
• The First Ladies by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray – What a beautiful story! I loved The Personal Librarian by these incredible authors and this second novel did not disappoint. The chapters are narrated alternately between Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune. These two women form an unlikely friendship and as we learn about their lives we also learna bout the times and how they were both champion for civil rights, human rights, and more. This is based on a true, but very secretive, friendship and grounded in lots of history I knew nothing about. I loved this glimpse into the interesting lives of two powerful women who used their power to help lift others up. I admire them both and am sad that the work they did in the 1930’s is still needed today.
• Hummingbird by Natalie Lloyd [audiobook] – This is a sweet middle grades story about Olive, a young girl with brittle bone syndrone, who wants to go to middle school and be a kid with other kids. When her parents let her do that, her whole world opens up – from friendships, to chasing mysteries to trying out for the school play. Olive is sweet, strong, lovable and sassy. This was a fun read and the second book by this author I’ve enjoyed.

Favorite Books

Fiction: The Dream Builders, No Two Persons, AND The First Ladies were 5 STAR reads for me this month!

Nonfiction: Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation