Saturday, June 7, 2014

"He's Coming Around the First Turn"

Hey, guys, I have a few minutes for a quick post. I was up this morning at 6:00 and got right down to reading. My first book was Black Diamond: The Story of the Negro Baseball Leagues by Patricia C. McKissack and Frederick McKissack, Jr. It was very interesting. Reaffirmed my belief that, in the early days of baseball, the players were larger than life. Especially when they had to deal with all the racism. After that, I started on Heart of a Samurai by Margi Preuss. It's based on a true story of a teenaged Japanese boy who was stranded on an island and rescued by American whalers. Was very absorbing. I'm a slow reader and didn't finish it when I had to stop at 11:00 am. The rest of the day was spent in taking care of obligations (and, as I said last year, REAL MEN take care of their obligations!) But now I'm back and should finish the book tonight. The good people who run the Challenge let us spend an hour looking at other blogs in the Challenge for every 5 hours that we read, so I'll do that and then crack the books. Don't have time to give full reviews right now--maybe I'll do that later in the week. In the meantime, if you want to see some good books with diversity that have appeared on this blog, take a look at Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry (the first book I ever reviewed here), the Alvin Ho books by Lenore Look, the Gabriel's Horses trilogy by Allison Hart, the Tiger's Apprentice trilogy by Laurence Yep, and Ice Drift by Theodore Taylor and The Basket Counts by Matt Christopher, both of which I read for last year's Challenge. Hey--I read two books on diversity last year. As always, the Iron Guy is ahead of his time! (You can click on the tabs under this post to see reviews of those books)
PS--I almost forgot one of my very favorites--The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill.

4 comments:

Beth said...

Those were some good books you listed.

My boys are with their dad this weekend, but they'd have passed your 3 hours challenge with their eyes closes. Well, actually, I guess that would make it hard (unless you allow audio books) but when they do participate I set their bar at 10 hours. But they've got a LIBRARY CHICKEN mama for inspiration.

Iron Guy Carl said...

Well, introduce them to this blog when they get home. Any boys who could read with their eyes closed are truly MANLY MEN!

Beth said...

I'll point them here for sure.

My library has a cool app that tracks your reading time, so if I need to take a break I just hit pause and then let it start up. Makes the math easier.

Iron Guy Carl said...

Great! I'll look forward to hearing from tem. And I've just rounded my time off. Sometimes I've grabbed 10 or 15 minutes to read and used that to "fill in" times when I took a break.