Books I've Read This Summer

I admit that over the past four years, my personal reading has taken a backseat to, well, sleep.  

The first two years I had an excuse: I was in grad school! 

(Confession: I really didn't read a lot of my textbooks.)  

Now, having to teach books I haven't taught before forced me to read them first.  

So yay for me!  I finally caught up on reading the books everyone else was loving in 2009!  

(And also some books that aren't from 2009.)

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

 

Basic premise: The story of a girl and her foster family harboring a Jewish man during WWII,  

I loved this book.  It's a novel about the World War II and the Holocaust, without really being a novel about World War II and the Holocaust.  The writing is extremely poetic and symbolic, which I love.  It adds a whole extra layer to the story.  Recommend big time.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Basic premise: A teenage boy ends up trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger, lost at sea for over a year.  

I couldn't put this book down once the story got rolling, which took about a hundred pages.  It's suspenseful and really engaging. It also has a bit of a twist at the end.  This is the kind of book I finish and wish more people I knew had read it, so we could get into an argument over our interpretation of certain things.  Recommend big time.

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

Basic premise: Four sisters become revolutionaries in an attempt to overthrow the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic.

I liked this book quite a bit.  Sometimes, I had a difficult time keeping up with which sister was which, but soon enough, the author develops each one well enough that they each have a distinct voice.  While it was enjoyable, I feel like I would have gotten more out of it if I had researched Trujillo before reading it.  Recommend.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Basic premise: In the future, a young boy is taken from Earth and trained to become the Commander of Earth's fleet to fight an alien race.

My brother loves this book.  My husband loves this book.  When I bought the book from the used bookstore downtown, the surly college student who rang me up actually spoke to me to tell me how much she loved this book.  Everyone and their mom loves this book.  Except me. It was entertaining for sure, and it there's a lot to dissect and discuss, but at the same time, OSC's style is just so boring to me.  It's like reading a textbook, a little bit.  The character development is shallow.  Recommend but I'm not turning cartwheels over it.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Basic premise: An elderly Chinese American man relives the relationship he had with a Japanese American girl when they were young in the time of Japanese internment.

(This book wasn't a book I needed to read for school, but I'm playing with the idea of teaching it to my 10th graders anyway because it fits in with the curriculum.)  I didn't like this book much at first because the main character is kind of unlikable, but by the end of the book, I loved it.  It's interesting to see the family interactions between immigrant parents and American children.  I had never given it much thought before, but it made me sympathize with the difficulties immigrants face with balancing assimilation and maintaining a cultural identity, and the strain it can cause.  Highly recommend.

Well, I feel like I'm missing a book here... maybe I'll remember at some point.  Now I've moved on to The Catcher and the Rye, which I don't have to teach but was never forced to read in the past.  I'm reading it now so I can seem all knowledgeable and et cetera.

What good books have you read lately?