every book in the world - book talk

I've done a pretty sad job of writing about the books I've read since the beginning of fall. I wrote about Eat, Pray, Love and I kind of emoted all over the place about The Hunger Games trilogy. But I never got into all of the middle grade award books I felt compelled to read at the beginning of the school year. The Mark Twain Award nominees weren't very special this year. I don't know, maybe I'm too hard on these little books, but there just wasn't a Paint the Wind among them. However, I do want to mention some here now just to clear the air on the unspoken 12 books.

The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy: This was the weirdest damn book ever. It's about these kids that go to an elite academy where the school serves mind controlling drug brownies which causes the students to become amazing students and palatable human beings. And this is bad, so our main character kids vow to shut the operation down.

I thought this book was strangely subversive and made me a little nervous. I feel like singing "Another Brick In The Wall" every time a kid checks this one out.

Stolen Children: What children are ok with is amazing to me. This book is about two children who are kidnapped and taken to a remote cabin in the woods, where they execute an escape plan. As a parent, this book scared the hell out of me, but when I would talk about how frightening this book was the kids acted like I was mental. Stolen Children isn't scary, Mrs. Bradfield, Coraline is scary. (They are right about Coraline though, totally scary.)

I also read this cult favorite among my most favorite library girls, Warrior Cats. If any of your kids like this series, I feel for you. Yuck.

I'm a librarian, so I read. I read and I read. I have just put in a large book order and I'm truly excited to read some of my selections. But before I do that, I have to finish my holiday reading.

What is holiday reading, you ask? Well, it's when I read all the books I'm planning to give as gifts. I've got two really neat gifts in the works right now.

One is the crazy huge Mark Twain text book that is the Autobiography. I'm getting it for my dad, but it's such a huge piece of work I'm starting to chew through it, adding tabs in hopes of making his reading more enjoyable.

The other is The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Talks of a 14th-Century Chinese Hermit. I won't say who's getting it, because it's a secret. This came as a recommendation from Karen Maezen Miller. These poems were written in the early 1300, yet somehow they feel exactly as new as you have noticed the world to be, just now. Notice, notice, notice. These poems are about noticing. They reveal to me that noticing is my birthright. Merry Christmas, indeed.

Before I started on my holiday books, I was and am still reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, which I'm not going to lie, is messing me up. Hello, my name is Nova/Patty, nice to meet you. This is my husband Brian/Walter, we are trying to hold it together. Is marriage for real? I expect nothing less from Franzen.

As I continue to read, I will do a better job of blogging about the books, so that we don't get posts like this in the future. Clearly, this one was a real mess.