TACKLING MY TBR WITH A BOOK TASTING

                

I don't know about your, but my TBR (Too Be Read) pile is huge! How best to tackle this behemoth of books? Picture books are easy - I just sneak those in here and there but the chapter books are a bit more challenging. I decided to not reinvent the wheel but to borrow from the First Look Book Club. If you have not heard of this delightful email service - Suzanne Beecher provides a few pages each day from a just published book. There's an excerpt from a new book, waiting in my inbox, each Monday-Friday morning, a different book each week. As the website says, "Get a first look before you commit to a book!" I probably read a dozen books each year that Suzanne has promoted through her emails. 

So I have adapted the process by reading the first twenty-five or so pages of each book in a stack to see what captures my attention - sort of like wine tasting but with books. The books picture above are my current stack. Let's see how I did!

 

You may notice that all but one of these books are middle grade fiction. But the book that snagged me immediately was the one adult book - Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano. It's a delightful romp of a mystery! I loved it and can't wait for #2 which is being published in the spring. 

 

The next book I finished was How to Train Your Dad by the late, great Gary Paulsen. I love his books but my favorite is Harris and Me. This book is somewhat similar - crazy funny exploits of two twelve year old boys.  If you like Paulsen, I highly recommend reading this one. 

 

And then I read Kaleidoscope by Brian Selznick which was -- very different. Imagine a kaleidoscope. You turn it and the little pieces of glass inside shift to give you a pattern. Then you turn it again and the same pieces of glass give you a new pattern. Selznick took two characters - James and someone not named - and wrote a series of very short stories (two to five pages each) about them. Some are fantastical, some are realistic, some are mysterious. There are other recurring themes in the stories - butterflies and trees, for example. Some deal with grief, some with love. It was intriguing but I am not sure it's everyone's cup of tea - especially kids. 

I am about one-third of the way through Loteria which is a fantasy that delves into the question of free will vs. fate. Life and Death play a game of Loteria every year and whoever wins the game determines the fate of a person chosen before the game begins. This year, it's a twelve-year old girl named Clara. The chapters go back and forth between Clara and her life and the game being played by Life and Death. The game, of course, is impacting the events that are happening to Clara. Clara just followed her younger cousin, Esteban, into a magical world supposedly controlled by The Devil (that is one of the Loteria cards). It's all quite fascinating!

 

Two books went back to the library. I liked what Roger Sutton had to say in his November editorial in the HornBook -  "We have all read books 'for children' that were more like 'to children,' filled with firm ideas about just what the young need to know. I hate those books (whatever veneer of diplomacy I may have accrued over the years seems to be wearing off in anticipation of my semi-retirement) and hope you do, too." The two rejected books seemed to fall into that category. 

 

What are you reading? And how do you handle your TBR pile?