A Sleepy Tuesday Night Book Post

I've found a way to calm my brain down a bit - reading fiction (especially young adult, nothing too hard!)  and biographies.  I had a years long non-fiction binge going and I think it didn't do me no good. :)  My library just hooked up with the 3M Cloud Reader system, and I'm finding it fits my personality even better than the Kindle - I can download right into my iPod and have it with me wherever I go. With all the waiting rooms I've been in lately I've gotten some good reading done.

Some books I've read over the past month...




Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys.  The story of a teenage Lithuanian girl and her family, who have been arrested by the invading Soviets and shipped to a forced-labor camp in Siberia. It is fiction but based on accounts of actual survivors of the work camps.




Who I Am by Pete Townshend.  While I found the facts fascinating, it read like a series of short news articles strung together.  I didn't get a sense of "who he is" so much as "what he did and who he met."   I don't want to be critical of someone who put himself out there. He seems to be very much a sensitive/loner/introvert, struggling in the world to get appreciated. I can relate. :)




Shakespeare Saved My Life by Laura Bates. This is the true story of a  professor who brought Shakespeare classes into the prison system, and focuses on one particular student inmate, a lifer who spent many years in solitary confinement, and how it changed his life ... and that of other inmates. I really enjoyed this one. (my English teachers are all cringing at my reviews here... "They were good books!"  :-P ) I have a place in my heart for books about education changing lives. :)




The Birchbark House, The Porcupine Year, The Game of Silence, and Chickadee, a series by Louise Erdrich.  Along the lines of a Native American Little House on the Prairie series, these books follow Omakayas, a young girl growing up in a tribe in the Northern U.S. during the late 1800s.  The fourth book, Chickadee, jumps in time a bit and focuses on her son.  I really loved the first three and couldn't wait to start the next one after finishing the previous.  The jump in time and switch of main character in the fourth book was jarring, as I was really becoming attached to Omakayas,  but it was still an interesting book. Just not one I related to as well, being about a young boy. The themes of living in tune with nature, developing one's gifts, and family bonds were ones I needed to explore in my own life.

Sooo...what have you been reading lately?