In the immortal words of Brittany Spears, “Oops, I did it again….”
Yesterday was another day for the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl. My husband and I completed the crawl by visiting another 7 bookstores in the area. This time a friend tagged along, and I think enjoyed the day as much as we did. All in all, I came away with 28 books (29 if you count the copy of 150 Bookstores You Need to Visit Before You Die that my husband bought me as a Mother’s Day gift but I found as the books fell out of bags in the trunk). And I still have some books from last year’s crawl that I never read. But with a yearly Goodreads goal of 80 books, this should not be a problem to finish the books. That is, if I can remain focused on the books I own — and none of my favorite authors distract me by publishing new books this year.
This week I have been enjoying The Bee Sing by Paul Murray. When I say I’m enjoying it, I really mean it. I have found myself wanting to scream at one character (PJ, I’m thinking of you), “NO! Don’t do that!”, and feeling regret with another character (Cass) for poor choices with unintended consequences. But I have questions – the biggest is, why no punctuation in the third chapter? (Although is it really called a chapter if it is more than 75 pages long?) This book is definitely keeping my interest and making me want to keep reading to find out if PJ really follows through with that really bad choice.
I am also reading a middle grades novel. I found The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass through Instagram, and I’m so glad I found it. The library was lost due to a fire of mysterious origin. Two boys are determined to discover the cause and solve personal mysteries as they do. Other characters include a cat, and old librarian, and a few ghosts. It is an enchanting story.
One quote caught my eye this morning and I can’t let it go. In a flashback chapter, the librarian character Al is remembering a young boy who used to come to the library, reading everything he could get his hands on. “One of those books was a story about a mouse. It changed him. After he read that book, he could no longer see mice as the enemy. He saw them as fellow creatures….” (page 95). And that is why we need diverse books. Not just so that we can see mice as fellow creatures, but so that we can get to know and understand people around us who are different, and who experience life differently than we do. We need diverse books because we need to be able to see those people as fellow creatures and not enemies.
I hope my middle grade readers will be able to understand the connection between a boy understanding a mouse and no longer seeing it as an enemy, and people learning to understand other people and refusing to see them as enemies.
Happy reading — and happy understanding!
Mrs. Hudson Reads 