It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #imwayr 8/21/17

My blog has been sadly neglected–as has my reading life–in favor of KITTENS. Read a book or play with kittens? Kittens win out. Write a blog post or pet kittens? Kittens definitely win out.

It’s hard to believe the four of them used to be feral and run from human touch. Now my days begin and end with what I call the four-kitten purr: I stretch out on the chaise, and they drape themselves on and around me and purr and purr and purr. I’ve never had more than two kittens at one time, and two were pretty awesome. But it turns out that four is actually the magic number. Two feel like pets. Four feel more like a lifestyle.

Even when I did read, I didn’t accurately track what I finished, and now I don’t remember. So today I will share just two books I recently finished and vow to do a better job going forward keeping track of what I’m reading.

Like so many of Gordon Korman’s middle-grade novels, Restart has a strong premise: Chase Ambrose, the worst bully in the school, falls off his roof and wakes up with amnesia. He doesn’t remember his own mother, much less all the terrible things he did to torment the non-jocks at his school. It’s essentially a fresh start, and this kinder, gentler Chase discovers new interests and makes new friends among the kids he used to bully. The narrative moves along quickly, and it’s an engaging enough story, though Korman never explores what made Chase a bully in the first place and doesn’t really do justice to the question of whether we can ever truly start over.

I’ve been in the worst reading slump for a couple of weeks now–ever since finishing Megan Whalen Turner’s Thick as Thieves. Nothing else is as compelling as a dangerous road trip with the Mede slave, Kamet, and the Attolian. But then, very few books are as engaging as Turner’s magnificent Queen’s Thief series. Thick as Thieves is the fifth book in the series, and if you haven’t read the first four, go ahead and get your hands on The Thief, which kicked things off and won a Newbery Honor.  There are several twists and turns and big reveals in Thick as Thieves (though ardent fans of the series will guess a couple of them and feel very clever when they turn out to be right), so it’s a difficult story to write about without spoilers. It will certainly be in my 2017 Top 10.