It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 1/9/17

I went through a bunch of picture books this week as I’m trying to go through all the Nerdies winners – I’ve finished all the picture book and easy reader/chapter books. This week included:

• The Princess in Black Takes a Vacation by Shannon Hale
  I love this series – a great girl power book that includes princesses and superheroes and villains too. This is also a great introduction to chapter books and a great option for a read aloud for younger kids as well.
• Duck, Duck, Porcupine! by Salina Yoon
  I love Salina’s adorable illustrations and the little duck in this book cracks me up – all-knowing and just wishing someone would pay attention to them.
• I Am Jane Goodall by Brad Meltzer
  A biography of a fascinating woman who proved that she could do anything she wanted and in so doing taught the world about chimpanzees.
• Dear Dragon by Josh Funk
  I was lucky enough to meet Josh Funk, first on Twitter and then in real life at a book festival. He’s a great guy and an amazing picture book author with ideas like this one. Who doesn’t love to receive mail, especially from a pen pal? Until the pen pals meet and they realize they weren’t who they expected!
• Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty
  Ada doesn’t talk right away, but when she does she asks a lot of questions, thankfully her family embraces her desire to find answers by encouraging her  interest in science.
• Leave Me Alone! by Vera Brosgol
  A grandmother just wants to be left alone and sets out on an impossible journey to find some quiet to finish her knitting. She thought her house was too busy, until she meets bears, goats, and aliens!
• Shy by Deborah Freedman
  Shy is very… shy and until now he’s only ever read about birds, but oh, how he loves them. Finally a real bird comes along, will he be brave enough to meet the bird himself?
• Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis
  A made up language makes this a challenging read, until you get the beautiful rhythym, it also forces you to really examine the illustrations to fully understand the story. An amazing creation by Carson Ellis.

And finally, I’m working my way through The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog by Adam Gidwitz. I didn’t get to read as much of this as I wanted to this week, but I love the historical storyline and the magical realism that I’ve encountered so far. Plus, illustrations by Hatem Aly are not only really unique to this book, but also very entertaining.

My plan for the next week is to finish The Inquisitor’s Tale and hopefully work on a few other middle grade novels that I still need to read from 2016. I also still have The Reader by Traci Chee, which is my absolute next read as I keep seeing it EVERYWHERE! The ALA YMAs are coming up in a couple of weeks and I have a few more books I want to finish before the awards are announced.

Join Jen from Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers and share all of the reading you have done over the week from picture books to young adult novels. Follow the links to read about all of the amazing books the #IMWAYR community has read. It’s the best way to discover what to read next.