Re-reading a book: why, why not, how do you feel about it?

• Mrs. Stevens is re-reading a couple of books (Fahrenehit 451 and The Circuit) to prepare for her class reads; she said she re-reads to remember, annotate and break it down for class activities.
• Ashley says she likes re-reading books, but she definitly reads them faster; she said she will remember a really good book and seek out its ebook version to enjoy again.
• Maddie chooses to re-read only the print books she already owns.
  • If she's reading for fun, she may skim a book on the second read.
  • If its for class, like F451, she will pay more attention.
• Hunter says re-reading a book is boring.

Books Told in Non-Linear Methods

• A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult
  • Summary: The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center--a women's reproductive health services clinic--its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage. After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. As his phone vibrates with incoming text messages he glances at it and, to his horror, finds out that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Wren, is inside the clinic.
  • Genre: realistic
  • Told in reverse chronological order
• Geniune Fraud by E. Lockhart
  • Summary: The story of a young woman whose diabolical smarts are her ticket into a charmed life. But how many times can someone reinvent themselves? You be the judge. Imogen is a runaway heiress, an orphan, a cook, and a cheat. Jule is a fighter, a social chameleon, and an athlete. An intense friendship. A disappearance. A murder, or maybe two. A bad romance, or maybe three. Blunt objects, disguises, blood, and chocolate. The American dream, superheroes, spies, and villains. A girl who refuses to give people what they want from her. A girl who refuses to be the person she once was.
  • Genre: action/thriller or horror (seeking Ashley's opinion once she's finished reading)
  • The first chapter is Chapter 18, then Chapter 17, etc.
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
  • Summary: In a future in which a pandemic has left few survivors, actress Kirsten Raymonde, having witnessed paparazzo-turned-EMT Jeevan Chaudhary try to save the life of actor Arthur Leander after he suffered a heart attack on stage, travels with a troupe performing Shakespeare and finds herself in a community in which a prophet will not let anyone leave alive. Includes subplots about Jeevan as he watches the world change from the pandemic and Arthur before his death.
  • Genre: science fiction
  • Related book: The Glass Hotel
• Replica by Lauren Oliver
  • Summary: Presents two novels which can be read separately or in alternating chapters. In "Lyra," two experimental subjects escape from the Haven Institute, where human replicas are created and observed; [and] in "Gemma," a lonely, often-ill teenager discovers her father's connection to the Haven Institute and travels there, meeting the escaped replicas
  • Genre: science fiction

Read or Currently Reading

• Americans in Space by Mary E. Mitchell
  • Summary: Life is a challenge for 36-year-old Kate Cavanaugh, high school guidance counselor to a motley group of at-risk students. Two years after finding her young husband dead in bed beside her, Kate's storybook life has vanished, and she and her two children are still reeling. Her daughter Charlotte, once a sweet girl, has morphed into an angry, tattooed, tongue-studded teen; and Hunter, Kate's four-year-old, keeps his feelings sealed tight inside and an empty ketchup bottle clasped to his heart.
  • Genre: realistic
• The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan
  • Summary: How do you punish an immortal? By making him human. After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disorientated, he lands in New York City as a regular teenage boy. Now, without his godly powers, the four-thousand-year-old deity must learn to survive in the modern world until he can somehow find a way to regain Zeus's favour.
  • Genre: fantasy
  • series The Trials of Apollo

TBR (To Be Read)

• "I have a little bit of a list," Hunter says.
• Love from A to Z by S. K. Ali
  • Summary: A marvel: something you find amazing. Even ordinary-amazing. Like potatoes—because they make French fries happen. Like the perfect fries Adam and his mom used to make together. An oddity: whatever gives you pause. Like the fact that there are hateful people in the world. Like Zayneb’s teacher, who won’t stop reminding the class how “bad” Muslims are. But Zayneb, the only Muslim in class, isn’t bad. She’s angry. Then, marvel and an oddity occurs… Marvel: Adam and Zayneb meeting. Oddity: Adam and Zayneb meeting.
  • Genre: relationships
• Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of a NASA Mathematician by Katherine Johnson
  • Summary: Throughout Katherine Johnson’s extraordinary career, there hasn’t been a boundary she hasn’t broken through or a ceiling she hasn’t shattered. In the early 1950s, she joined the organization that would one day become NASA, and which had only just begun to hire black mathematicians. Her job there was to analyze data and calculate the complex equations needed for successful space flights. As a black woman in an era of brutal racism and sexism, Katherine faced daily challenges and often wasn’t taken seriously by the scientists and engineers she worked with. But her colleagues couldn’t ignore her obvious gifts—or her persistence. Soon she was computing the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s first flight and working on the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon. Katherine’s life has been a succession of achievements, each one greater than the last.
  • Genre: non-fiction
  • Realted to Hidden Figures book and movie
• Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir by Nikki Grimes
  • Summary: In her own voice, author and poet Nikki Grimes explores the truth of a harrowing childhood in a memoir in verse. Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduing companions. In this memoir, Nikki shows how the power of those words helped her conquer the hazards - ordinary and extraordinary - of her life.
  • Genre: non-fiction
• Free Lunch by Rex Ogle
  • Summary: Rex Ogle recounts his first semester in sixth grade in which he and his younger brother often went hungry, wore secondhand clothes, and were short of school supplies and he was on his school's free lunch program. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day in the school lunch line, Rex's is a compelling story of a more profound hunger -- that of a child for his parents' love and care.
  • Genre: realistic
• We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter
  • Summary: It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe will become inescapable and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety.
  • Genre: historical fiction
  • Recommended by Sasha's grandmother
• Previously discussed:
  • How Dare the Sun Rise by Sandra Uwiringiyimana
    • Sasha recommends this "intense" read, which she likes because it is a real person's story
    • She also recommends the memoir Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
  • The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
    • Hunter is impressed at Kamkwamba's creatvity to teach himself physics by reading an English-language textbook, even after he was sent home from his school in Malawi because his parents couldn't pay the tuition.