Bookblasters Read for the Holidays

Whether you spend winter break curled up in a comfortable chair, lounging at the beach, or hanging around the ski chalet after a day on the moguls, make sure you have a good book on hand to entertain, empower, enlighten and enervate.  Grab your kindle or head out to your local library or bookstore for a few good titles to get you through the short days and long nights of the winter season.

Bialik Bookblasters have recommendations which range from fantasy to mystery, from classics to the latest bestsellers.  Graphic novels and the supernatural are popular, but so are books about great debates and controversies such as the Books That Shook the World series.  Arthur Conan Doyle is right up there alongside John Grisham, and George Orwell’s 1984 ranks right next to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.  Gallop alongside King Arthur and his knights, fly through the air with a magical dragon; take a ringside seat while the heroes and gods do battle in modern cities.  Solve a mystery, conquer the universe, combat evil and wrongdoing.  Take your imagination for a holiday ride!

Novels and Memoirs

1984 by George Orwell

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

The Client by John Grisham

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Feed by M.T. Anderson

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Richard Adams

House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

The Sword in the Stone by T.H White

Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

Series

A Dream of Eagles by Jack Whyte (The Skystone )

Dune by Frank Herbert

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass )

Earth’s Children by Jean Auel (Clan of the Cave Bear)

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare (City of Bones)

Pendragon by D.J.MacHale

Percy Jackson & The Olympians by Rick Riordan(Lightning Thief)

Septimus Heap by Angie Sage

The Young James Bond

Books That Shook The World

Darwin’s Origin of Species by Janet Browne

Plato’s Republic by Simon Blackburn

Marx’s Das Kapital by Francis Wheen

Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens

Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey by Alberto Manguel

The Bible by Karen Armstrong

The Qur’an  by Bruce Lawrence

Adventures with Bookblasters

Our Bialik book club adventures continue this year with stories of war, genius, fellowship, mystery and of course, plenty of dystopia.  Our Junior Bookblasters began with The Hunger Games  which is among everyone's favorite new series.  These readers don't miss a detail, so when we played 'The Hunger Games Jeopardy Game' on the ipad, they scored high in every category.  The latest fat title in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance fantasy series came out last week, and our many diehard fans have ploughed through it already.  If you haven't already done so, true-blue dragon fans should read the wonderful Patricia Wrede series 'Dealing With Dragons', which is on the lighter, more ironic side. Junior Bookblasters agree their favorite fantasy series include  His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass) by Philip Pullman and of course the marvelous mythology fantasy Heroes of Olympus (The Lightning Thief) by Rick Riordan .  Senior Bookblasters began the year with Art Spiegelman's Maus, the classic graphic novel/memoir about his father's survival during the Holocaust.  Maus is celebrating its 25th year of publication with a new edition called 'MetaMaus' which includes includes a full transcript of Spiegelman’s taped interviews with his father and a DVD containing hours of original audio recordings, along with more family photos and early drafts of Maus. A completely different title, which we just finished reading is The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night Time by Mark Haddon, which introduces quirky Christopher who has Asperger's Syndrome and is one of the most unique characters our readers have ever met - part genius, part social misfit.  Christopher's story is an unforgettable, illustrated, coming-of-age adventure.  Readalikes include Jonathan Lethem's 'Motherless Brooklyn' and Gwyn Rubio's 'Icy Sparks', novels highlighting characters with Tourette's Syndrome, as well as Temple Grondin's memoir about autism 'Animals In Translation'. The seniors are also huge 'Hunger Games' fans and are eagerly awaiting the film version.  At the same time several recommended George Orwell's '1984' while I am supplying copies of that along with Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenhei 451' as our next read.

'Word Nerd' author Susin Nielsen @ Bialik

Secondary 1 Bialik students welcomed YA author and TV screenwriter (Degrassi Junior High) Susin Nielsen on September 15, 2011 for an an event which we shared with Sec.1 students from Hebrew Academy accompanied by HA librarian, Norma Newman.  Susin Nielsen is an award-winning author with Canadian Screenwriter and Gemini Awards to her credit, along with nominations for the prestitgious TD Canadian Children’s Book Award, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award and the Canadian Library Association’s YA Book Award, among others.  She is the author of numerous children’s and YA books, including ‘Word Nerd’ and ‘Dear George Cloony, Please Marry My Mom’(2010).  Susin spoke to our students about her career as an author using comical scenes from her life as a backdrop, and read to them from ‘Word Nerd’.  She also demonstrated the differences between writing for television and writing novels using student volunteers to act out a scene from one of her scripts.  Students were excited by Susin’s engaging presentation, and her books are flying off the Bialik Library shelves!   Watch Susin Nielsen reading from 'Word Nerd' to our students:

Summer Reading

Summer vacation provides me with some uninterrupted reading time to work through that pile of books and magazines on the night-stand that I have been hoarding all winter and spring.  I also have many titles saved up on my Kindle, which  seems to sprout books as quickly as weeds pop up in my garden.  The joy of having a book download almost instantly prompts me to add more and more to my ebook library, which means I have lots more available to read at any one time.  And the popularity of ebook reading is growing so much that I have spent some time doing research this summer into the pros and cons of using ebooks in school libraries like Bialik High School.  More about this later.
Meanwhile, I hope all of you are happily ploughing your way through the summer reading on your shelves and ebook readers.  Our English department added a few new titles to the list for incoming and Sec.2 student reading this year, including a wonderful new favorite of mine, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jaqueline Kelly. From the book cover:  In central Texas in 1899, eleven-year-old Callie Vee Tate is instructed to be a lady by her mother, learns about love from the older three of her six brothers, and studies the natural world with her grandfather, the latter of which leads to an important discovery. This is the story of a strong-willed, smart, and original character whose expeditions into the natural world with her grandfather lead her away from the traditional women's roles of her time, toward research and scientific discovery.  It is a chance to experience another world, to hear the sights and sounds, and feel the heat, of a Texas summer when fans were a new invention and they were powered by big gas motors.  In order to continue to encourage an interest in literature and to help develop reading and comprehension skills further, the following titles are also recommended for those students entering Sec.2 this fall:  Speak by Laure Halse Anderson;  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; What I Saw And How I Lied by Judy Blundell and Big Mouth, Ugly Girl by Joyce Carol Oates.  All of these are available @Bialik Library for your reading pleasure.  Summer is a time to give yourself an opportunity to play, to relax, to dream and to read, read, read away into the long days and nights.  What is on your Kindle?

Not Your Grandmother's Library!

Computers and smartphones have changed the way we work.  I have been using the internet since its inception as a text-based system, and used to do online searches of remote databases using a 'dumb' terminal. In addition, the skills I learned searching for information for students in print indexes way back when have served me well into the new century.  I have adapted to the new technologies without becoming a slave to them; that is I use digital devices as tools rather than as my social or intellectual world.  I love to talk to far-away friends and family members on Skype while I am looking something up, but too much multi-tasking is a distraction from the work at hand.  In a recent article by Lisa Perez(Learning & Leading with Technology, March/April 2011) I am encouraged to become a more savvy school librarian, who can 'leverage technology to prepare students for a successful future'.  I definitely agree with her assessment that students consume a wide variety of electronic formats and need a 'digital age library' and 'savvy' information professionals to teach them 'to effectively navigate and use vast amounts of information'.  No question that she is correct there, and I do work collaboratively with many teachers in my school to teach information literacy skills.  Yet I am troubled because, although I appear to have been working for many years on realizing the long list of recommendations which uber-librarian Joyce Valenza outlines in her 'Manifesto for 21st Century School Librarians' (automation, website, wikis, pathfinders, pathfinders as wikis, collaboration, Facebook and LibraryThing presence, etc.), I still feel that the major contribution I am making to my school community is to provide great books for everyone to read.  Librarians have many skills which make them an essential piece of the successful school equation, but we are champions at providing the best reading to the most people, as Perez points out "School libraries...provide an equitable, fiscally responsible strategy for sharing resources across grade levels and the curriculum while addressing core reading, information, and technology literacies."
So, while I will continue to blog away in hopes that it catches the attention of a few book and library lovers, the daily act of pushing books, and helping students navigate the internet remain a one-on-one, human interaction in my rather industrial 20th century library. 

Bialik Bookblasters Select Best Reads of 2011

Our Bialik Bookblasters members have recommended their favorite titles for this year's Bialik Reads! contests. Junior Bookblasters have made their selections with the incoming Sec.1 class for 2011-12 in mind as well as the Summer Reading list for the incoming Sec.2 group.  Senior Bookblasters have created their own list to be posted on the library website as recommended reading for all students in the Senior School (Sec.3-5).  Here is the list of books they read and loved and want to promote in the next Bialik Reads! contest.  In an upcoming blog I will announce the winning titles for each grade.

Sec.1:  Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer by John Grisham; The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman; Half-Brother by Kenneth Oppel; The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan; Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank; The Giver by Lois Lowry; Holes by Louis Sachar; Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan; Eragon by Christopher Paolini; Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis; The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan; The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; The 30 Clues by various authors including Rick Riordan, Gordon Korman, etc.

Sec.2: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan; Courage Tree by Diane Chamberlain; In Your Room by Jordanna Fraiberg; The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky; Just Listen by Sarah Dessen; It's Kind of a Funny Story by Nick Vizinni; Last Song by Nicholas Sparks; The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd; Little Brother by Cory Doctorow; Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld; Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card; We All Fall Down by Eric Walters.

Sec. 3-5: Least Difficult Reading:  I Am The Messenger; The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak; The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury; The Tenth Circle; The Pact by Jodi Picoult; The Princess Bride by William Goldman; Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane; Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks; When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Lawrence Kushner; The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; Looking for Alaska by John Green.   
More Difficult Reading: I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti; The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks; The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill; The Client by John Grisham; A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray; The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger; Lost In Place by Mark Salzman; Little Brother by Cory Doctorow;
Most Difficult Reading: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut; Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer; Faultlines by Nancy Huston; The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien; Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster; Kafka On The Shore; Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami; Time's Arrow by Martin Amis