Book Post: Too Many Books!

A tower of books and book bags!

It's been too long since I did a weekly book post, and now I have too many books to talk about.  Since I am on sabbatical from my church work, we've been dedicating a lot more time to our homeschooling and I also have more time to read whatever I want since I finished all the work up for religious educators credentialing ... and the result has been that we overwhelmed the limits on our three library cards.  I've also had to resort to always bringing the rolling cart to the library, because I pulled a muscle in my shoulder carrying all our books out one day.

Yes - I got a library related injury.  Reading can be dangerous!

Fortunately, a friend reminded me that I could get an institutional library card as a homeschooler, and that has been a huge help.  Now I can have 200 books out at a time, instead of only 150.

And we've had some good ones!

Picture Books

As my children get older, we could leave the picture books behind us, as I know many people do.  But what a loss that would be!  Picture books pack a dense punch, with the ability to fit content, lyrical poetry or prose, and amazing art all into one slim volume and one sit-down snuggle on the sofa.



We read two this week that have been getting a lot of attention and awards:

We Are Stardust and Locomotive.  They were both lovely, but Stardust was especially amazing with the best illustrations I've seen in a long time.

Reading Out Loud



We are currently reading A Dog Called Homeless as our family read aloud, and it is lovely.  Told from the perspective of a grieving and lonely child who is seeing her dead mother appear to her in the company of a real stray dog, this is a dose of magical realism and a reminder that friendship and love can transcend barriers.  The writing is deceptively simple, in a lovely reflective way.

Audio Books

We've just finished listening to The Book of Three in the car.  I had forgotten how funny that book is!  It is always good to revisit a book you read in your own childhood, now in the company of your children.

My Reading

Cloud Atlas has been occupying most of my reading time.  It is a really good book, but at times it was good in a "look at how clever/brilliant/skilled the author is" sort of way rather than in a "I'm so engrossed in this story" kind of way.  I was very impressed with it, but it took me a long time to read.  Post-modern fiction built like a stacking puzzle will do that to you!

As a brain-palatte-cleanser, I binge-read Insurgent (the 2nd book in the Divergent trilogy) in less than 12 hours.  A good and pretty straightforward action-packed young adult novel.

Meanwhile, there is a huge pile here for me to keep on reading!