Po(sey) Sessions

“ Now that I have found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night ?” Matched , first line The book fair is over and I feel like I have a few moments to myself. For more than a week I have been dreaming about reading Matched by Ally Condie, but I haven't been able to find the time. I have set this weekend aside as a way to recover from the hours of work I put into the book fair. I am at a cabin on the lake to relax for a day or two. It is nice to feel apart from the world, to feel like I am getting away.  Especially since my dystopian reading has fallen to the wayside for a few moments while the rest of life frantically demands my attention.   It is interesting to be at a place like this and think about concepts like utopia and dystopia. When there are just a few people set apart from the world like we are here, it is easy to believe that utopia is attainable. Both utopia and dystopia play with the idea of hope, they both try an conceptualize...

Well, I had a set budget for the book fair and I kind of splurged a little. All I can say for myself is that it IS a fundraiser so I it is going to a good cause. The hardest part about working at the book fair is that all the book lovers congregate around the cases and start reading the backs of books. You hear, “This sounds good!” “Did you see this one?” No, no, no! My budget doesn’t want to hear that!   My co-chair pointed out two books to me that I would have definitely looked over otherwise. We both love to read, especially YA and MG books, but we mostly focus on different genres. Which is nice, because we tend to fill in each other’s gaps. She like fantasy, ghost stories, and other Halloween/horror type books. I, on the other hand, focus on science fiction and more general fiction than she does. Overall, we generally end up looking at most of the books and know what they are about.  The two books in particular that she pointed out to me caught my eye as well, but look...

I am sitting here at the book fair before another long day of work. We are having a very successful book fair so far this time and it is really exciting to see people buying books for their children.  I just wanted to write a quick post talking about some of our best sellers.  One of the best thing about book fairs is being exposed to new books and having conversations with other book lovers.   One of our teachers loves the Missing series and we have been able to use her endorsement to sell quite a few of the books in the series. The Scholastic book fair has the first three books in this series all in hardback. People seem to be     excited about buying them, but also about sharing the experience of reading with others. I haven’t gotten to read Found yet, I have been wanting to and this book fair has made me even more eager to do so.  Haddix is a really popular author around here and we spend a lot of time recommending books that aren’t even avai...

It is being another lazy Sunday here for me. I have so much going on right now I am having a really hard time relaxing.  Even when things are lazy it doesn’t mean they are relaxed. I finally reached a true state of relaxation last night while catching up on some episodes from the last season of Bones. As nice as that was it also ate up a huge chunk of reading and cleaning time. Now Sunday is here and the weekend is headed out the door. I have so much left to do!   I am also trying to plan for the rest of my reading year and look at what I have already read.  This year I joined more challenges than I ever have before. I am taking today to check in on my progress with them and think about what I need to read before the end of the year to accomplish them.   The first challenge is the Support Your Local Library .  I will definitely not meet my goal of reading 50 library books this year because I have barely read 50 books TOTAL in 2010 so far, but also, I h...

There are some people who are struggling to understand exactly what steampunk is. To understand it is pretty straightforward but to try and explain it gets a little more convoluted. The basic concept of alternate history is relatively easy to explain, but once you start getting past that people tend to get lost.  Wikipedia let me to the word anachronism to aid in the understanding of steampunk. I think it perfectly encapsulates what makes steakpunk fiction unique.   a·nach·ro·nism [ uh - nak - ruh -niz- uh m]   –noun something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, esp. a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time. an error in chronology in which a person, object, event, etc., is assigned a date or period other than the correct one.     You want to read steampunk, share your opinion and reviews with like minded people? You want to get recommendations from others because you have ...

    What, you ask, is the most wonderful time of the year? Is it Christmas? Nope! Is it Thanksgiving? NOPE! My favorite time of year is better than any holiday because it comes TWICE every year.  Do you know what it is? It’s our book fair!!!   I am thrilled to be doing another Scholastic book fair at my daughter’s school. We managed to get more books than we ever have before and I am very excited.  In case you were wondering, here’s a picture that basically give you the whole idea of how our book fair is set up this year.   You can kind of see the other book fair lady in this picture and all that really does is make me happy that I was the one taking the picture.  There are so many reasons to love the book fair.  There are the books. And the….books. And more important than that is getting these kids excited about books and reading. At our school we work really hard to find the right book matches for people, especially ourselves! N...

It is no secret that I like dystopian fiction. You know, like isn't even a good word. I adore it! I am researching dystopia  from two sides, fictionally and academically. Each informs the other in my quest to better understand what dystopia means and how to classify it. My interest in dystopia started later than most. I don’t ever remember being exposed to dystopian young adult or middle grade fiction in middle school. The closest example would probably be The Wave which I read in middle school.  The scariest thing about The Wave was that it was based on true events.  One of the interesting distinctions in some dystopian definitions is that the story must be imagined and not be based on actual events. Do you think this is always the case? (To find out more about The Wave please check out this review .)   The first dystopian book I read was in high school when I was 15. We read 1984 and I remember it forever changing the way I read and the way I saw the world....