A guide to creating a book club that doesn’t fall apart, feels more like a fun hobby than an obligation, and involves more than just drinking wine together.
Wondering how to improve analytical skills? Just pick up a book! Readingfictiono is not only an effective way to improve, but also an enjoyable one.
Hello Cozy Readers! Do you belong to a book club? If not, why not get your friends together and start one! To get the discussion going, we’ve put together a list of some great questions that …
Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen's new film Book Club: The Next Chapter is set to be released on Friday, May 12.
Many of you are familiar that we do a monthly book club here at Lars. Along with featuring a new book, we collaborate with a new artist to create a print and bookmarks inspired by the book. They always turn out so beautifully and appropriate for each title! We decided it was high time that we […]
You don’t have to start from scratch. We’ve distilled everything you need to know about meetings into ready-to-use templates.
10 generic book club questions for awesome book discussions! Works for any book & includes a free printable guide.
Book clubs in first grade?! It may seem like a stretch, but the Spring is such a great time to get your students ready and used to reading, thinking about, and discussing books with their peers instead of me, the teacher! When done right, it can be such a fun learning experience for both […]
Classroom book clubs engage students in meaningful conversations that grow reading comprehension strategies. Get tips and tools for running effective clubs!
Whether your little one is a new reader or into their own chapter books, starting your own book club for kids is easy with these tips and tricks!
What is the purpose of literature circles? How do you structure a literature circle? How long should Literature Circles last? What is the teacher's role in
@MaryEhrenworth Listen to conversation like its gold #TCRWP #bookclub
Fluency is such an important component of reading. Low fluency rate may not always be detected until late elementary or early middle school. Suddenly, a student is expected to read more curriculum in a short period of time, and is not able to keep up with his or her studies. This is one area of reading that I wanted to tweak so my students would be well prepared. I realize that in order to increase a student's fluency rate, he or she needs to practice reading. I reflected back to my personal experience of joining a book club. My book club read a different genre each month . . . i.e. we didn't read chick lit. each month. I thought this must be what it's like for my students. You know, reading a book that's not really your personal taste. Whenever the genre wasn't my taste, it took me all month to read it. Most months I would have a cram session a couple of days before my book club met to finish the book. UGH! This must be what my students feel like! I decided to do something a little different to help my students. On Wednesdays, students are encouraged to bring a book of their choice to school. It can be a book they checked out of the library or one of their personal books. If they don't have one, they may check a book from my class library. I give them 20 minutes of time to read in class. Then we meet in book club groups. Students are grouped differently each week. Sometimes we meet according to the genre of the book. Other time I will have students meet in groups of 3 and do a book talk, mini-commercial about their book. Each student has a Book Club folder. I attached the assignment sheets (below) in the 3 prongs in the folder. I made each student a Book Club booklet. I cut construction paper in half, put copier paper in it, and stapled it together. The assignments are numbered. Each week, students complete an assignment about the chapter they read at school. Some weeks I assign a specific assignment, other weeks I let students choose their assignment. I found these assignments from different websites, but I'm sorry I can't remember which one or I would give him or her credit for the great ideas. Please let me know if you know the source. Book club is making a difference! I'm sure the key factor is CHOICE! Choice of book and some weeks they have choice of assignment. Below are the forms I use:
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER THRUST IS: “Epic.” –The New York Times “A triumph.” —Elle “Stunningly beautiful.” —The Daily Beast “Both of the moment and utterly timeless.” —Chicago Review of Books “A book to take in wide-eyed.” —Rebecca Makkai NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST As rising waters—and an encroaching police state—endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a "carrier" travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins—vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisvė, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries: a French sculptor; a woman of the American underworld; a dictator's daughter; an accused murderer; and a squad of laborers at work on a national monument. Through intricately braided storylines, Laisvė must dodge enforcement raids and find her way to the present day, and then, finally, to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a connection that might save their lives—and their shared dream of freedom. A dazzling novel of body, spirit, and survival, Thrust will leave no reader unchanged. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780525534914 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Publication Date: 06-27-2023 Pages: 352 Product Dimensions: 5.12(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.84(d)About the Author Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase, the story collection Verge, and the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt Cruces 1 We dreamed we were hers. The body of us thought that, because we built her, we belonged to her. We built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She arrived by boat in pieces. When the ship Isre finally reached port, we wept. The sailors too. They had been convinced that the tempests they'd endured on board would drown them in the ocean, and the cargo with them. The deck of the ship was nearly a farmer's field in size. The hold had been covered with huge black tarps for the journey. When the sailors pulled the tarps back, the hold looked dark and foreboding. I was asked to jump into that dark. Like plunging into the ocean's deep. Down in the hold, my eyes began to adjust. Gigantic crates the size of houses filled with pieces of the colossus: a woman in slices, crated and shipped. One by one, we found her body parts. Hair. Nose. Crown. Eyes. Mouth. Fingers, hand. Foot. Torch. She had arrived, in pieces of herself. Later, while discussing her reassemblage, an engineer remarked that the "embryo lighthouse," as they called the interior skeleton of the statue, held clues to reconstructing her form. Yet many elements of her construction went unexplained, left us puzzled. We were left with our imaginations to create adaptations. During those months, we lived in the city and we labored on the island. We were woodworkers, ironworkers, roofers and plasterers and brick masons. We were pipe fitters and welders and carpenters. We mixed concrete, we pounded earth, we armed the saws and drills. We were sheet metal and copper specialists. She arrived in our hands as thirty-one tons of copper and one hundred and twenty-five tons of steel. Three hundred copper sheets had been pressed to create the outer skin of her. We were cooks and cleaners and nuns and night watchpeople. We were nurses and artists and janitors, runners and messengers and thieves. Mothers and fathers and grandparents, sisters and brothers and children. During the day you could always hear the insistent hammering, the files grating, the chains clanking, the copper singing as it was being shaped over wooden scaffolds, the cacophonous orchestra of our labor. You could always see arms swinging, hands at work, shoulders and biceps and the jaws of the workers flexing and grinding. Those sounds were our bodies. Her body coming to life from all of our hands. We the body took pride in our labor-as if we expected that someone would know our names, carry our stories. When the winds in the harbor grew too strong, we had to abandon scaffolding. We used pulleys and ropes. We took care to be gentle against the softer metal. We dangled ourselves around her body, swung around the pieces of her, like the swoop and lift of acrobats, or birds, or window washers-though all of us were tethered to her body. Sometimes, for just a moment, a body can feel real inside a story that way. As if each of us existed. At night, when it was no body's shift, some of us would stand around her head and stare at her giant rounded eyes. We thought she looked sad. Or angry and sad. Her eyes each much larger than a human head. Her face neither male nor female, or perhaps just both. We felt she had the stare of our labor but also our loss, our love, our lives. Sometimes, holding near to her, we thought or felt mother, but we meant it in some new way no one has imagined before. We were the impossible possible voice of bodies. Some of us were born here and some of us were the sons and daughters of mothers and fathers not from here. They came from famine they came from poverty they came from occupations and brutalities and war. They came from something to leave, which is why they crossed land and water. They spoke of persecutions or poverty, but they also spoke of rolling hills or sunsets over the desert or flowers with names that made our hearts reach out. The leaving of a place carried sorrow as well as relief, and the coming here carried both as well. We spoke of both brutality and beauty-or remembered beauty-in our homelands, or in the hands of infants born here. We let go the hand of prior homes to reach this place. We were Jews and Italians and Lithuanians and Poles. We were Irish and Native American and Chinese. We were Lebanese and African and Mexican. We were Germans and Trinidadians and Scots. There were hundreds of us over time and across distances; it is impossible to say how many. We were an ocean of laborers. We spoke Russian and French and Italian and English and Chinese and Irish and Yiddish, Swahili and Lakota and Spanish and a swirl of dialects. Our languages a kind of anthem. We understood that labor crossed oceans. Some of us unloaded the statue pieces after her oceanic journey and some of us reassembled the pieces. Those of us who had unloaded pieces, and then reassembled them, felt a strange connection. Toward one another and toward her. Or we might have. The sum of us-the we that might have been-could have understood from the passing around of stories that our French colaborers meant for her to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The French sculptor's early model had held a broken chain in her left hand. Our eyes saw the drawings. The model. We knew what the chain meant. Some of us might have rubbed our wrists or ankles or necks at the thought or memory of it. But then the chain moved. On her body, and on our bodies. Down near her foot. We might have known then, in our bodies, that our states were stitched imperfectly-that war had ripped open a forever wound. That some of us would not be fully counted, our rights still pounded down on a daily basis. That children were being ground into dust everywhere, in the factories. That laws were excluding us even as we the body built the means of transportation across the land. Stories were traveling between us that could have led anywhere, turned in any direction, in spite of our backbreaking work. That we could have been born from her, but small cracks began to appear in the story, just as in the materials of her body and our labor. Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there-our labor had put them there-and we had thoughts about it. We wondered what story would emerge in place of emancipation, now that the chains were hidden. We wondered what story would be drawn from the tablet, from the newly prominent rule of law. We wondered what the figure herself thought about these changes to her body, these shifts in the story. No one asked what we thought, or what she thought, for that matter. Statues don't speak. A fear slid through some of our necks-that maybe she was not ours, or we were not hers-but no one wanted to say it out loud because we needed to make our livings. Once, when we were working on the head and the face at ground level, I saw a suffragist from a protest march spit on the face of her as we worked. Why should a female face represent freedom when women cannot yet vote, she asked. She shook as she yelled, as her question streaked down the hard copper cheek. I thought about that streak for a very long time. After everyone was gone for the night, I took a rag to the copper there, crying briefly as I wiped it away. The suffragist was right. I saw her meaning. But I had been among those who'd worked to make that statue's face, worked so that it could hold both the gravitas and the tenderness of an idea that I believed could be beautiful. In some future-not ours, but some day to come. A face that might become something we were not yet. A freedom obscured in the shackles hidden beneath her feet, r
*BELLETRIST JUNE BOOK CLUB PICK* Named a Best Book of May by TIME Magazine & Glamour One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year This darkly funny and provocative novel reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. And Raina's love story will shock them all. Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed . . . What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other? Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780316450850 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Publication Date: 07-25-2023 Pages: 336 Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)About the Author Maria Adelmann is the author of the short story collection Girls of a Certain Age, which explores the many impossible choices of modern girl and womanhood. Her work has been published by Tin House, n+1, Electric Literature, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Threepenny Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, AQR, MQR, and many others, and has been selected by The Best American Short Stories as a distinguished story. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram @ink176. How to Be Eaten is her first novel.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what to read next, especially if you’re in a bit of a book slump. A reading challenge is a great way to help you start turning those pages with purpose again!
It’s no secret that I love reading. I’ve always got a few books on the go and at any given moment am a part of two to four different book clubs. I don’t just enjoy reading though, I also enjoy making book lists, talking about books, writing about books, shopping for books, scoring a cheap…
Your success depends on your self-development. Here's a list of my top favorites and best personal development books everyone should read.
If you want the best of the best, these five star books won't disappoint. Here are 50 of the all-time favorite books to read.