Check out My Summer Reads!

Summer is my time to catch up on reading. 
No surprise, it's my favorite way to spend a relaxing day...

Here're the books that I read this summer.  

Ask me- I'd love to tell you about them.

Every summer I go out on the lake in my rowing scull. I love gliding across the surface-something mesmerizing about the ripples coming off the oars. 

I'm enjoying learning about the camaraderie and  thrill of racing in regattas and listening to this true account...

Daniel James Brown’s robust book tells the story of the University of Washington’s 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic games in Berlin, 1936.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Patchett's rich gripping adventure was a joy to read.  
Her lush descriptions of the Amazon Rainforest made me want to reach for my mosquito repellent.   

As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness. Stirring and luminous, State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest's jeweled canopy

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

Another enjoyable book:

Midwesterner Gary D. Schmidt won Newbery Honor awards for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boys and The Wednesday Wars, two coming-of-age novels about unlikely friends finding a bond. Okay For Now, his latest novel, explores another seemingly improbable alliance, this one between new outsider in town Doug Swieteck and Lil Spicer, the savvy spitfire daughter of his deli owner boss. With her challenging assistance, Doug discovers new sides of himself. Along the way, he also readjusts his relationship with his abusive father, his school peers, and his older brother, a newly returned war victim of Vietnam.

Blood Red, Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick

This is on my side table, waiting to be cracked open. 

I'll never get through my "to read" list, but I have fun trying! 

Russia wakes from a long sleep and marches to St. Petersburg to claim her birthright.  Her awakening will mark the end for the Romanovs, and the dawn of a new era that changed the world. Arthur Ransome, a journalist and writer, was part of it all.  He left his family in England and fell in love with Russia and a Russian woman.  This is his story. 

                                                      

This is the Story of You by Beth Kephart

Just started reading this-one of many on my list to read over winter break!

On Haven, a six-mile long, half-mile-wide stretch of barrier island, Mira Banul and her Year-Rounder friends have proudly risen to every challenge. But when a superstorm defies all predictions and devastates the island, when it strands Mira’s mother and brother on the mainland and upends all logic, nothing will ever be as it was. A stranger appears in the wreck of Mira’s home. A friend obsessed with vanishing is gone. As the mysteries deepen, Mira must find the strength to carry on—to somehow hold her memories in place while learning to trust a radically reinvented future.