Librarian's
Corner

Summer is coming, despite the weather! If your students are looking for some good books with which to while away the relaxing hours, check out the Library’s extensive lists of recommended pleasure reading. Lists are divided by grade, and then further divided by subject (such as fantasy books, nonfiction history books, etc.). We put the lists together primarily from books receiving starred reviews in the past year or two, with a few old favorites added in. Happy reading!

The Library lists are not connected with required summer reading.

The 5th and 6th grades were lucky enough to enjoy an author visit this week: Catherynne Valente, an award-winning writer of adult speculative fiction has just published her first book for middle schoolers, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Originally published for free online, and now in print, it’s a delightful and thoughtful reinterpretation of old-fashioned Victorian fairytales, tales in the style of The Wizard of Oz, and traditional fairytales. However, it has many modern twists to update the tone of the story–for instance this heroine, unlike Dorothy, has no desire to go home! The book is fantastically creative, and the students really enjoyed hearing Valente talk about the book and her inspiration for it, and writing in general. They asked many well-considered questions, and were completely engaged in the presentation. Many thanks to Cat Valente for helping to inspire our kids to be avid readers and writers!

Each year, the Library and the PE Department run a Green/Gold Readathon. For the past two years, instead of counting pages, the students have been using a simple formula to count the approximate number of words in the books they read. This year it was a heated battle, with Green in the lead for three weeks, but Gold made a stunning push at the end and took the win.

Final score:
Gold: 13,093,016 (524 points)
Green: 12,355,006 (495 points)

Ten readers read over a million words each, and they will be receiving a $5 Borders or Starbucks gift card. The top reader read 2,280,094 words!

We measured each team’s progress on these test tubes, which were marked up to ten million words. When the teams went over, I started at the bottom again with the black sharpie.