Nonfiction is Amazing!

High school English teachers, and maybe teachers of literacy and reading across all ages, are guilty of over-emphasizing fiction over nonfiction.  Students seems to believe that nonfiction is boring and dry, something akin to reading a textbook for enjoyment.  However, as adults the kind of reading our students will do (especially those who define themselves as non-readers) is nonfiction -- nevermind the fact that nonfiction books can tell stories that often stranger and more fascinating than anything fiction can dream up.

I myself am an avid nonfiction reader.  I have learned what happens to dead bodies when they are donated to science (Stiff by Mary Roach), the history and impact of race policy and relations in the United States (The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander), the experiences of other women that I could connect to (Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly), national tragedies (Columbine by Dave Cullen, Dopesick by Beth Macy), what it's like to climb Mt. Everest (Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer), the struggle of living of poverty (Evicted by Matthew Desmond, Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich), how to write better (On Writing by Stephen King), the values and behaviors of religions (Troublemaker by Leah Remini, God: A Human History by Reza Aslan), and how national policies and attitudes affect the LGBT+ community (Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin, No Ashes in the Fire by Darnell L. Moore) and so, so very many more that I can't list here.  So much of what I know and believe about the world is thanks to the brilliant nonfiction writers who have enlightened me and taken me to places and ideas I did not know before I read their books.

I've also laughed a lot thanks to popular nonfiction authors like David Sedaris, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Tina Fey, and Samantha Irby.

Of course, students should also be encouraged to read "classic" nonfiction like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and others.

The benefit of nonfiction is very much like the benefit of fiction.  Nonfiction expands our student's world view.  It lets them get deeper into critical issues of the day, going beyond whatever they are reading in the headlines or hearing around the dinner table.  It can help students become more empathetic as they hear the true stories of people not like them.  It can take them to far-flung places they probably won't visit.  It helps them see how others have overcome seemingly impossible challenges. It can open doors to new interests and pathways they didn't even know existed.

If we help guide students towards the awesome nonfiction that exists, students will soon see that nonfiction is the exact opposite of boring.  Nonfiction shows a real world that is a wild place full of fascinating people doing unbelievable things.

Do yourself a favor and read anything you can get your hands on by these authors:
Mary Roach (Stiff, Bonk, Gulp, Packing for Mars, and Grunt)
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken, Seabiscuit)
Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed, Natural Causes, Bright-Sided, Living with a Wild God, and more)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, We Should All Be Feminists)
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years in Power)
Roxane Gay (Hunger, Bad Feminist, Not that Bad and essays)
Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, Missoula)

Nonfiction books about really whacky stuff:
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
The Secret Life of Lobsters How Fisherman And Scientists Are Unraveling the Science of Our Favorite Crustacean by Trevor Corson
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell
Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan
more here from goodreads

My up-next nonfiction reading
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
Feel Free by Zadie Smith (the English department book club book for October)
Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips
Gender Outlaws Katie Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman)
Some Assembly Required: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen by Arin Andrews

Some outstanding Nonfiction Books of 2018:

 

Time magazine best nonfiction of 2018

For additional information on the value of nonfiction, check out this ASCD article:  Nonfiction Reading Promotes Student Success

A Reading Funk

The dog days of summer are here, and I'm in a reading funk.

Before this, I'd had an amazing streak of great books, each text satisfying and insightful.  But the greatness has dried up.  I have been so disappointed in the most recent books I've read.

The characters in the highly recommended and lauded Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi were supposed to be original and unique, but they read more like Harry Potter characters living in a futuristic Nigeria.  The women with electric hands in The Power by Naomi Alderman were too flat (and static -- get it?) for me to care about.  And why, oh why, can't authors figure out how to tell a multi-perspective story without having different characters narrate different chapters?

The plot lines in The Memory Watcher by Minka Kent were convoluted to the point of being laughable instead of suspenseful.  I know a suspense novel is bad when I, a person who would lose Clue board games to my toddlers, figured out the "whodunit" before the end.


Even when I tried to get lost in something funny, the observations in Girl Logic:  The Genius and Its Absurdity by Iliza Schlesinger just seemed trite and obvious.  What?  Women have irrational insecurities?  Stop!  Really.  Stop.  I'm not laughing.

And to top it all of, I discovered the "book" Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones is really just a novelization of a film script.  Thankfully the film was worth watching.

Argh!!

To be fair, in the midst of all the yuck, there have been several highlights.  Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. offered a historical perspective on how we as a society have ended up with such an enormous incarcerated Black population and suggested ways we as a society could fix that.  Ayiti by Roxane Gay was a beautiful collection of short stories highlighting the people and places of Haiti.  The fiction book Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalie Sylvester and  the nonfiction text The Border Becomes a River by Francisco Cantu put human faces on both the immigrant and the enforcement side of the immigration discussion.

I'm currently taking my version of a brain break and reading Lisey's Story by Stephen King, a book he claimed is his favorite of all of the books he's written.  I've also started listening to The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin where there seem to be characters that are well drawn and compelling.  Perhaps this means the funk is about over.  Huzzah!

I've got about 45 days until school kicks into high gear again and that is more than enough to conquer the few books I've got left on my summer reading list.  I'll be turning on the air conditioner, grabbing a fruity beverage, and getting through the dog days with these titles:
Legendary (Caraval #2) by Stephanie Garver
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
There There by Tommy Orange
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Summer Reading -- Had Me A Blast (and it's just begun!)

Summer is the greatest time to do just a ludicrous amount of reading.  I love nothing more than soaking up the sunshine or listening to the rain with a good book and a cup of coffee.  However, even on summer vacation, I cannot shut off the part of my brain that reads every book through a "how could I use this with my students" lens.  In addition to a pile of other books, I've read four books this summer that have potential to be useful with my students.

The first two books I read through the school lens were Dear Ijawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi.  Both texts and authors would provide thoughtful supplements to Things Fall Apart, an AP Prep English 10 anchor text.  Dear Ijawele was written after a friend asked Achichie how to raise her newborn daughter to be a feminist.  The book is brief and would be easy to excerpt, though the content isn't especially connected to the content of Things Fall Apart.  Adichie's more famous book, Americanah, probably would be a better choice; re-reading that book is also on my list this summer.   Freshwater also stars a Nigerian protagonist.  In Freshwater, the main character, called the Ada by the spirits (the ogbanje)  that inhabit her, is born in modern Nigeria but goes to university in Georgia.  In Nigeria, she is haunted by the harmful ogbanje; in America, those spirits and the ways they make Ada behave, are recognized as mental illness.  The story is beautifully written and shows the challenges of moving between different cultures as well as what it means to struggle with mental health issues.  Adichie and Emezi are authors that would absolutely wonderful complements to Achebe.

In English 9, To Kill a Mockingbird remains an anchor text. However, Mockingbird is often difficult for students to read and sometimes, when read with a more modern eye and modern sensitivities, it is imperfect.  Two books, Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes and Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, can introduce some of the same themes in a much more approachable way.  In Ghost Boys, a young black boy is shot and killed by police; the boy's ghost watches the fallout from the shooting and meets another ghost, the spirit of Emmett Till.  The book weaves modern day race issues with important historical context, making it an excellent supplement to Mockingbird.  Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir told in verse, a memoir of Woodson's own childhood growing up during the Civil Rights era. The poems touch on what it was like growing up during times of such racial tension.  Because the text is written in verse, it will again be easy to excerpt and hopefully find passages that students haven't read in an earlier grade.   Both books will add a fresh perspective to the important themes of Mockingbird.

I have spent A LOT of time in the last two weeks hanging out with books, so I've also read the following:

Skip these and do something else with your time:
The Outsiders by Stephen King:  Read It instead; it's the same story.
Girl Last Seen by Nina Laurin:  Pop fiction garbage.
People Like Us by Dana Mele: Young Adult fiction in the genre of prep school murder mystery.

Entertaining but not super insightful:
The Everafter by Amy Huntley: A different perspective on what happens after we die.
Finding Me; A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed by Michelle Knight: The awful, but poorly written, true story of what happened to Michelle Knight during her 11-year kidnapping.
The Atomic City Girls by Janet Beard: Fictionalized telling of the real Tennessee site where ingredients for the atomic bomb were created; I would suggest reading a real account instead.
Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Morris: A must-read only for true grammar nerds -- I'm talking to you Gretchen Egner!  Check out the whole chapter on apostrophes.

Listen to these:
Calypso by David Sedaris:  Witty essays that sound even better when narrated by Sedaris himself.
God by Reza Aslan:  A brilliant exploration of how we came to the understanding we have today of god; Aslan narrates and makes the incomprehensible a little more understandable.

Adding to my classroom library for sure:
Beast by Brie Sprangler: One of the best books I've read with a transgender main character.  The focus was on a good story and not on educating the reader on what it means to be transgender, and that made all the difference.

Great memoirs:
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover:  Tells the story of Westover's childhood in the mountains of Idaho raised by survivalist parents and how she found her way to college
Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir by Amy Tan: Another brilliant Amy Tan book that explores how her life has been part of her writing muse.

The rest of summer is wide open, so you will find me camped out in the usual locations reading one of these:
Legendary (Caraval #2) by Stephanie Garver
Lisey's Story by Stephen King
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Daniel Tatum
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Ayiti by Roxane Gay
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
There There by Tommy Orange
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
The Memory Watcher by Minka Kent
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester

I love summer vacation!

Thirteen Reasons Not To

Another round of Thirteen Reasons Why has dropped and left in its wake another round of controversy.  The first round of the show invited some students into the original book where they could get to know the characters a bit more, relate to the ideas a bit better, see the back story a little more clearly.  Books invite questioning and conversation.  TV shows watched in private on iPads tucked into bedrooms at night do not.

This second set of episodes strays from the book and moves into its own territory.  The new set of episodes is rife with missteps, especially when considering the audience. I give you thirteen reasons I have issues with this season of the show:

1.   The pretense that it's made for high school kids, when in reality it's appealing to a much younger audience that is intrigued by what it means to be a teenager.  According to this show, being a high school student means lots and lots of nonconsensual (and consensual) sex, lying, betrayal, gun play, and thoughts of killing others.  Young teens crave a map to what is coming as they grow, and a show like this does not provide an accurate nor healthy one.
2. The focus on and fascination with teenage sex permeates the entire series and is so problematic.  I understand that the main conflict is the rape that goes unreported and unpunished in the first series, but in this second series, the focus on teen sex feels gratuitous.  The sexual relationships between the young people -- both consensual and nonconsensual -- is described in constant verbal detail, is shown in close-up shots, is preserved in the Polaroid pictures that are the linchpin of these episodes, and is the focus of many of the episodes.  Knowing that it's adults who wrote, acted in, and filmed each scene gives this constant focus a creepy, voyeuristic feel.
3.  The ever-present violence is also troubling.  Of course, the rape is the first kind of violence.  Nearly all of the female characters are assaulted as is at least one of the male characters.  Clay is constantly getting beaten up and spends the entire season bruised.  Another character is in anger management classes (even though his rage seems absolutely out of character for him).  Another character releases his stress by shooting guns (and he gets his best shots when he envisions his enemy's faces on the glass bottles); it suggested throughout the season that he will perhaps do something catastrophic with his collection of guns.  Teenagers threaten one another with death by gun. This leads to . . .
4.  The connection into the recent epidemic of school shootings.  We all know it's on the news weekly, and that we need places to talk about all of this.  Is an ostensibly entertainment show the place to do it?  Is the way this show presents it the way to do it?
5.  Liberty High School is filled with absolutely cliched high school students:  the emo punks with too much black make-up and hair dye, the rich kids with everything except parental love and attention, and the flamboyant gay characters.  Add to that the cliched adults:  earnest teachers who insist students overshare as part of class, the ex-hippie parents who cover and protect their kids at all cost, poor, drug-addicted parents who abuse their children.  No one in this show is a unique individual; they are all cut-outs of what adults think high school and the people who populate high schools are.
6. The show venerates athletes and their coaches in an unhealthy way.  Monty, a peripheral character until the end, expresses that sports is all he's got and the potential of losing his status as an athlete is what drives him to do horrible things.  Coaches allow the male athletes to use performance enhancing drugs.  Athletes get away with poor behaviors simply because they are athletes.  This portrayal of athletes also perpetuates harmful stereotypes.
7.  The show is not subtle in suggesting that all women are victims of sexual misconduct.  In the final episode, a parade of girls and women come forward to talk about their own sexual assaults.  These anecdotes are real and do leave indelible marks on the victims, but it is also true that not every single woman has been victimized.  It is also true that casting high school girls and adult women as constant victims does not help anyone get justice or equality.
8.   The women in the story are portrayed as being fairly weak.  In fact, only when the girls are encouraged and supported by the boys and men in their lives are they willing to stand up .  It is the men that are going to "stand up for" and "stand with" the girls who have been assaulted.  The women need rescuing and protecting.  Not a good message for young girls -- and probably not for the boys either.
9.  Hannah is a selfish character.  The audience is made to understand and empathize with the desperateness which led to her suicide; that is where her story should have stopped.  Continuing her involvement is where the selfishness comes into the story.  All I wanted throughout the second season was for Hannah Baker to just go away so that the people left behind could begin to move on with their lives.
10.  Related, the constant focus on Hannah and the orbit she created when she died furthers the idea one way to get attention is to do something drastic like suicide or a school shooting.  The idea that someone gets to continue to participate in life events (or get justice or control events) after death is already a common fantasy, not just for teenagers, but for humanity.  Perpetuating this myth does not help students know that the only way to deal with issues is right now, not in some make-believe after life.
11. There is an unfair insinuation that the school is to blame for what happened not just to Hannah Baker but to all of the victims of the assaults.  With limited resources (especially counselors or social workers), a school cannot possibly identify, rectify, and "fix" every single issue students bring with them to school.
12.  It wasn't enough that the show dealt with rape, suicide, and the aftermath of both.  In the second season, it adds heroin addiction, child abuse, a connection to the #MeToo movement, and an exploration of god/religion/the afterlife.  It's emotionally exhausting to watch as an adult; I can't even imagine what a middle or young high school student thinks as they try to process all of this.
13.  Just the acting and dialogue throughout is wooden and so earnestly "message" driven.  An adult viewer can sense the IMPORTANCE the producers/writers/actors wanted to impact to every moment of the show.  But there's also the overlay of a plot driven story that is making enough money to generate yet another season.  Towards the end, new characters, new (and even more horrific) assaults are committed, and new "oh-my-god-what-now?!" plot lines are introduced.  Because this show has gotten such wide viewership, the producers have full permission to continue to make more of them.

I do understand that high school and growing up is filled with hardship and struggle.  I know that high school students are not kind to one another.  I know that sexual assault is real and happens to far too many people.  I'm just not sure that a show presented under the guise of tackling these difficult subjects head-on but which ultimately panders to our culture's voyeuristic tendencies is the way to open dialogue about these critical issues and face challenging truths.

Maybe try reading and discussing any one of these books, all of which deal with some of the same issues presented in the show, instead:
Not That Bad:  Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson
Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabela Quintero
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

YA books are great COMMA BUT . . .

I am a fan of young adult books.  I appreciate the gritty story lines and relatable content and the way the books are intended to speak to teenagers in a way that books written for adults supposedly cannot (a dispute I'll argue another day).  I am also so excited that more and more diverse authors are getting published.

COMMA BUT.

I am beginning to wonder if the young adult books are getting just a bit too earnest, a bit too obvious in their desire to write an "important" book that deals with "real issues."  

Nearly all of the African-American focused YA books I've read lately involve an abused girl, a pregnant girl, or a boy that is involved with gun violence or police brutality.  

Salvage the Bones is a recent critically acclaimed book by Jesmyn Ward.  The book's protagonist is young, sexually and otherwise abused, poor, and pregnant.  A colleague recently read Push by Sapphire and that girl was raped, abused, pregnant and HIV positive.

Another book, Gabi: A Girl in Pieces, a book intended for a Latinx audience, included all of the following: a narrator who described herself as "fat" and struggled with body image issues, an abusive, meth-addicted and eventually (SPOILERS) dead father, a teenage pregnancy that resulted from a date rape, a middle-age woman unexpectedly pregnant by said meth-addicted father, a teenager -- different from the date rape pregnancy -- who has an abortion, first-time sex, and college admission stress.  

The Hate U Give, police shooting an African-American teenager. Dark, African-American teenage boy shoots someone and then runs. Long Way Down, African-American boy considering avenging his friend's death by shooting the perpetrator. Dear Martin, Ivy-league-bound African-American boy unfairly arrested by police.

The Smell of Other People's Houses included yet another pregnant teenager (this time an Alaskan girl) and more abused teenagers (a set of brothers abused enough to flee Alaska as stowaways on a ferry and another girl terrified of her father).

Finally, None of the Above, a book written by a surgeon, tells the story of a student who discovers she is intersex. However, this book is trying so hard to educate its audience -- defining terms, forced medical conversations -- that the protagonist feels more like a cardboard cut-out of a medical patient than she does a real person.

I recognize that there are young adult books with lighter story lines.  I also recognize that the gritty awfulness provided in the above-mentioned stories is real life for some students.  And, lord knows, I certainly recognize that I am a long way from being a teenage reader.  

I just start to wonder if authors are pandering a bit to what adults perceive a good YA novel to be.  Many of the above-mentioned books have received critical acclaim, but those accolades often come from the adults trying to read them through teen eyes rather than from the actual teenage readers.  

Perhaps as the YA market opens up more for diverse perspectives, the storylines will also broaden.  New books on my must-read list include Odd One Out by Nic Stone, Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram, Love, Hate, and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed, and Pride by Ibi Zoboi.  These are books about LGBT+ youth, first love, and mental health issues, but hopefully they also about real characters who feel like people rather than conduits for "important" messages. 

This One's Not About Books

It's about students.  And violence.  And fear.  And guns.  And shootings.  And how I personally am fed up with it and want it stop.  I don't want one more child or colleague to die because someone with a gun has come into a school building and opened fire. 

Remember these events:  Parkland, 17 people dead; Virginia Tech, 32 people dead; Sandy Hook, 20 people dead -- most of whom were 6 and 7 years old; and Columbine, 13 people dead.  This list of school shootings is just the beginning.  Dozens of children and adults have died in school violence over the last 20 years.  I can't shake out of my head and heart the images of bloody teenagers crawling out of windows in search of safety, of elementary babies walking out of school hands on shoulders while a helicopter hovers overhead, of still photographs of teachers who are heroes because they were gunned down trying to protect students, of parents brought down by the unimaginable grief of losing a child to a kid who had a gun and used it to kill their babies.

It's just so, so, so, so wrong.  And it is time for it to STOP. 

Let me also say at this point:  While I have strong political beliefs and in my private life I advocate for issues I care about, I try hard as a teacher to stay politically neutral in my classroom.  In fact, students have guessed at various times that I'm a Republican and a Democrat because I absolutely do not use my classroom as a platform for my beliefs.  However, to me, school shootings and gun violence transcend politics; I feel compelled to be an advocate for change on this issue because it is about my students -- my kids.  The very lives of my students is at stake if we as a nation don't get a grip on our national gun violence problem and the way it enters our school buildings.

I'm tired of the empty "thoughts and prayers" and the temporary dismay and hand-wringing about what to do about guns and school violence.  I cannot fathom why as a nation we allow children to die again and again and again because we refuse to handle the plague of gun violence.

In my personal life, I am finding avenues to push for change including donating to groups who are dedicated to making our schools so much safer than they are now.  I am hopeful to see that the Parkland High students are turning their grief into action.  They have begun a national movement to create change; their rallying cry is "We are the students, we are the victims, we are the change."  I wholeheartedly support the teenagers who will get behind the Parkland movement to make some noise and to create discomfort for the adults who are not doing anything to make schools safer. 

Since this blog is really about books and reading, please consider reading some of these texts to better understand school violence -- where it comes from, the effects it has on everyone involved, and how we as a nation need to be handling our children and our guns differently:

How to Reduce Schootings (The New York Times 2/15/2018)
Why Can't the U.S. Treat Gun Violence as a Public Health Problem (The Atlantic, 2/15/2018)
The U.S. Fights Terrorism -- But Not School Shootings (The Atlantic, 2/15/2018)
School Violence Data and Statistics (CDC, 8/22/2017)
Columbine by Dave Cullen (2009)
A Mother's Reckoning:  Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold (2016)
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult (2007)
Hate List by Jennifer Brown (2009)
This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp (2016)

School work gotta wait . . . I'm binge reading!

I'm sure every teacher can relate:  I should be doing school work of some sort, but instead I find everything else under the sun to do -- clean the house, laundry, concoct some elaborate recipe that will fail, watch really bad reality TV, or, my personal favorite, go online, buy WAY too many books, and then park on the couch to start reading those books as soon as they arrive.

Let's just say I've spent a lot of time on the couch lately, and I've read some great books.

The first one I ate up was Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich.  I love Erdrich's Native American stories (LaRose, The Round House).  Her writing voice is absolutely beautiful and poetic.  This book didn't disappoint in the beauty of the voice, but the story was underwhelming.  Essentially it's Handmaid's Tale revisited, a dystopian future where pregnant women are valued and in jeopardy at the same time, and where a new Christian-based government reigns supreme.  There's hints of a commentary on the world today and flashes of the Native American culture which usually permeates Erdrich stories, but it all feels superficial and, ultimately, disappointing.

I read Rebecca Wait's The Followers in a day.  The story moves between the past where single mother Stephanie and her 12-year-old daughter, Judith, are drawn into a religion cult and the present where Stephanie is in prison.  While the story is predictable, it still horrifies.  I am fascinated by how people who are strong minded and independent, which Stephanie is, get drawn into a cult where all individuality is squelched.  Watching Stephanie meet, fall in love with, get wooed and manipulated by the man who brings her into the cult shows just how slowly and painstakingly the process could happen.  I loved that Judith remained the independent, rebellious voice throughout her mother's descent.  This book felt especially relevant as one of the most notorious cult leaders, Charles Manson, just died; the crime in this book has a Manson-esque quality to it.

I listened to Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen.  I knew virtually nothing about Magellan and his excursion prior to reading this book.  I even had to look up where the Straits of Magellan were on a map -- and I learned that I live only 6,700 miles away from it (and, according to google maps, I can't get there from here).  Listening to the political intrigue, high seas adventures, bold mutinies followed by swift and severe punishment, interactions with island cultures, the right and wrong turns to discover the straits, the sea battles, the rediscovery of the Spice Islands, and the perilous journey home was breathtaking.  I learned so much from this book, and all the while I was swept away by the smooth narrative and the unbelievable courage of explorers who literally thought they were going to go over the edge of the world.

On the quest for books that represent all of my students, I discovered Queer, There, and Everywhere by Sarah Prager.  This book covers 23 historical figures from ancient Rome to today who are queer, a term the author uses to cover all variations of gender and sexual identity.  This book is very much a young adult text; the tone is light and the information brief, but the information is so important for our queer students to see.  This is a population which is too often invisible, and their contributions to history has been as extraordinary as all other groups.  I knew I HAD to have this book in my classroom when a student picked it up yesterday and started to make fun of it.  I shut that down, and it reminded me of what many students have to deal with every day -- the dismissal of their identities or, worse, constant ridicule and mocking.  A book like this is critical to educate those who don't know about the contributions of queer people to world history and to validate students who are queer.

Then I picked up Prairie Fires:  The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser as my next audiobook.  I loved, LOVED the Little House books when I was a kid, and, of course, it never occurred to me that those books might not be the most accurate portrayal of life on the prairie.  Turns out (which, as an adult I think to myself -- no kidding!) Laura Ingalls essentially was a myth maker almost more than a history writer.  Like the Magellan story, I know so little about westward expansion, being a pioneer farmer, or what happened to the Native Americans, and this book opened my eyes.  Then, because I hadn't read any of the Little House books since I was about eight years old, I also picked up Little House on the Prairie to read again.  It's a great contrast to read the myth and listen to the reality at the same time. 

One of these days I need to refocus and get back to that school work which is still hanging there waiting for some love and attention.  Until then, I have a stack of books that will keep me well distracted for the foreseeable future!  Happy reading ya'll!