Summer Reading

I'm pulling together all the lists of what everyone read over the summer so I can organize who will be assigned to which rooms. Teachers will receive lists shortly of what books their students are signed up for, and students should check those lists carefully to be sure they're accurate. If you read Tiger you won't want to be sent to a room of kids discussing Define "Normal"!

Of course, I'm hoping that most of you (students, teachers and parents) read something other than the "required" reading. I love having time to read the newspaper - I admit to being a news junkie. I still love getting the morning paper and spreading it out while I drink my coffee. But now that I've acquired a laptop, I'm also hopping online in the morning and reading other papers and news outlets online - and hoping the papers don't go under with all of us reading them for free online :-) Some good books I enjoyed are:

• Girl Overboard - YA book, about the daughter of a billionaire whose passion is snowboarding, but now that she's been injured she has to figure out a bunch of things in her life, including issues with family, friends, boys, and whether she'll ever be able to snowboard again.
• Finding Oz - a biography of L. Frank Baum, the author of the iconic Wizard of Oz books. His life held a series of failures up until his early 40s, when the first Oz book was published. The book reveals some fascinating and surprising inspirations for many of the elements and characters in Oz.
• When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - written by a journalist who grew up in Zimbabwe in the 1960s, where his British (or so he thought) parents settled after WWII. His parents are now aging and the country is becoming increasingly dangerous during the early 2000s, when this memoir is set. Family secrets are revealed, and the author grapples with his own mixed feelings about his home country, now that he no longer lives there himself.

What have you been reading?