…and the Rest

• Viola in Reel Life is Adriana Trigiani’s first young adult novel. It’s fun and rich with great character-development and a good message. I plan to pass this on to my daughter when I’m done.
• Brava, Valentine by Adriana Trigiani. How is it I’ve never heard of this super-bestseller-maker before now? Love her.
• Super Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I loved the first book and look forward to what they have come up with in this follow-up book.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney.  My third grader devours these.  It was only when another parent said, “I’d never let my child read those!” that I thought, “Hmm…maybe I’d better read them all the way through (instead of just thumbing through the first one) to make sure.”  They are hilarious. Greg Heffley is a middle school everyman.  These are laugh-out-loud funny.  And I totally approve of letting elementary schoolers read them.  Reading should be fun.
• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Settenfield.  A young and naive biographer falls under the storyteller’s spell.  I am reading this for book club.
• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  This is (yet another)  book about someone choosing something to do for a year and documenting it on a blog.  As a bitter unpublished-in-novel-form blogger, I want to hate these, but so many of them (like The Year of Living Biblically and The Unlikely Disciple) are actually really, really good.