I’ve been a movie lover my whole life so Oscar season is the most wonderful time of the year. When I was studying theatre in university, I dabbled in playwriting a bit and so my favourite categories are Best Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay. As Oscars 2016 predictions started being released this week, you should […]
Reading this book has changed my life.
Cinder by Marissa Meyer My rating: 3 of 5 stars As much as I wanted to get into this book about a Cyborg with way more problems than Cinderella (who the book loosely resembles), I had trouble with the world-building and the flow of unfolding the politics of this fantastic setting. I had trouble understanding […]
The Bear by Claire Cameron My rating: 4 of 5 stars The UGDSB has just chosen this book as our board-wide novel for secondary students and author Ms. Cameron will be visiting schools in May 2015. After reading this terrifying novel, I am nervous about the problematic areas in Cameron’s choices. As a parent, I […]
My White Pine book club is growing stale. The same few students join every year (which is awesome) but I’m not reaching as far as I’d like to in my secondary school of 1200 students. So I’m trying an additional book club this year in a different format. The book I’ve chosen is “This Dark […]
Jenkins and Kelley offer an optimistic alternative to Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains which is filled, as Jenkins claims, with “contemporary anxieties” (p. 10). The book offers instead this explanation: “As a society, we are still sorting through the long-term implications of these [media] changes. But one thing is […]
It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by Danah Boyd My rating: 4 of 5 stars Throughout danah boyd’s “It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens”, I’m very satisfied with the level of sophistication of boyd’s research and unbiased point of view in her writing. Her tone is academic, professional and at the […]
Literacy Is NOT Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age by Lee Crockett My rating: 3 of 5 stars Andrew Churches has been one of my professional development gurus ever since he developed the Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy https://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloo… . This is my first encounter with the other two authors and I think they’ve….watered down […]
The Taming by Teresa Toten My rating: 3 of 5 stars I expect high things from anything that Eric Walters puts his name on. After the Ontario Library Association nominated this as one of the best Canadian young adult fiction of the year, I expected even more. Until halfway through I thought I had found […]
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to hear Penny Kittle speak about reading and how complex it is for intermediate/senior teachers to teach. Kittle estimates that in 1st year college/university that the average pages a student reads is 500. She proposed that the #1 reason that students drop out after first year […]
Eragon by Christopher Paolini My rating: 3 of 5 stars It’s a solid first novel …. lots of world-building and the dragons are introduced well. Paolini’s writing style is juvenile …. self-indulgent in terms of cryptic vocabulary use, and the plot is predictable. The best part about this book is …the dragon. View all my […]
The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb My rating: 4 of 5 stars I rate Wally Lamb’s other two books as some of my all-time favourites. The Hour I First Believed has his usual depth into emotional hell (which I love!) but it was not something that I could read all in one sitting. […]
Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood by Naomi Wolf My rating: 5 of 5 stars After 10 years of struggling with fertility, 2 miscarriages, and a healthy boy born by emergency C-section, I still turn to Misconceptions. Whenever I feel abnormal for questioning the rights of women in our health […]
Triptych by J.M. Frey My rating: 5 of 5 stars Triptych’s exploration of heteronormativity touched me in places that I didn’t even know existed. The characters and their relationships make the sci fi problems Frey creates, very real and very relevant to the human reader. It is a very brave first novel, and I found […]
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak My rating: 5 of 5 stars The most unique aspects of this book are the narrator (the voice of Death) and the protagonist (Lisel). The interplay between the constant but playful voice of Death as he studies and admires Lisel, makes them an unlikely pair. Of course the historical […]
threadbare beauty 