This Week in Reading: March 19-25, 2023

This past week was a busy one in my day job as a school librarian. Tuesday was our annual Big Battle of the Books, which meant me taking 9 fantastic young readers on a field trip to another local middle school where they tested their trivia knowledge on a list of 16 books. The top 2 teams from each of the school's individual battles got the honor of representing their school in the Big Battle. I was proud of these readers before, but for my 8th grade team to actually win the championship was particularly sweet, not going to lie. But we still had to get through Wednesday and Thursday before Spring Break started on Friday. We made it...barely.

I FINALLY finished reading Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days by Salman Rushdie. I bought this book almost exactly one year ago from Bookhaven, a used bookstore in Philadelphia when I was there to visit a friend and run a half marathon. Boy howdy, this book was a challenge for me. I'm not going to write a review of it because Salman Rushdie hardly needs press from a middle school librarian like me, but because I barely feel like I survived it. Maybe I'm just out of practice with literary fiction, but at times this book felt too smart for me. And that's okay! Doesn't make it a bad book by any means. In fact, there were moments when something would click and I would be so excited that I wrote the quote down so I won't forget it in the future. I just wasn't the best reader for this book. Such is life sometimes.

Two other books I've been making my way through are Dream a Little Dream by Giovanna Fletcher (a reread that has been a fun choice now that spring has sprung) and an ARC of the upcoming new TJ Klune novel, In the Lives of Puppets. This is a retelling of the classic Pinnochio story (NOT the Disney version!) and while I don't know quite what I think of it yet, I do know that I keep thinking about it when I'm not reading it, which always take as a good sign.