Biblio Reviews

My avoidance of Jenny Hubbard's Paper Covers Rock  (2011) stemmed from my negative associations with John Knowles' A Separate Peace  (1959) , a required read from my tenth grade honors English class in high school. I never read the book: I didn't have to because the teacher basically did all the work by summarizing it for us each day. What I do remember is that I couldn't relate and so didn't care. A few years ago I tried to re-read it and found myself as equally uninterested. Last year, while I looked for interesting titles to add to my classroom library, I came across Paper Covers Rock.  It piqued my interest but not enough to make it a must-read. And so, it sat in my classroom library for months until a student chose it for her independent reading and wrote a response that propelled me to download it immediately on my Kindle. Set in 1982 North Carolina (though I'm not fully sure why),  Paper Covers Rock  has similarities to  A Separate Peace:...

I achieved my reading goal for 2014, though I did not achieve my Cannonball Read 6 Challenge: a half cannonball to read and review 26 books. I read and reviewed only 18 titles because who knew writing 26 reviews would be such a challenge?! Despite not meeting my Cannonball Read 6 challenge goal, I am happy with the progress I made with reading in 2014. One that I am most happy with is that I read more than just romance novels, though as you'll see in the final list, romance made up quite a bit of my reading. Among my most enjoyable reads of 2014 were enlightening nonfiction titles  Secret Sex Lives: A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality  and  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men , along with a couple of engaging novels by British authors:  Me Before You  by Jojo Moyes and  The Rosie Project  by Graeme Simsion, both of which I didn't review. To keep the ball rolling, so t...