RAE’S READS

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This year (2025) finds me with 53 years of teaching “under my belt.” I have taught all levels from pre-K “(library lady” or “book lady”–volunteer) to juniors, seniors, and graduate students enrolled in my Advanced Writing class at the university where I have just completed 34 years. My first paying teaching job was junior high, and I spent 13 years with ages 12-13, the “difficult years.” I had some of the “funnest” experiences with this age group. When I was no longer the “young, fun teacher,” I taught in an elementary school setting before sixth graders went on to junior high, teaching language arts blocs, an assignment that was a “dream-fit” for me. After completing graduate school in my 40s, I went on to community college, then university teaching. This past fall I accepted a part-time teaching job at Apogee Gulf Coast Schools in its first year at the Alvin campus. After my Better Half died n 2022, I achieved a lifelong dream: opening a bookstore of my own, Rae’s Reads. A year later, I sold the house we had lived in for 47 years and moved into the bookstore. My goal is to circulate and repurpose books. Just as teaching is “in my blood,” so is a passion for reading, writing, libraries, and everything bookish. This blog will be open to anyone who loves books, promotes literacy and wants to “come out and play.”

  • TUESDAY TEASER

    The idea of the Tuesday Teaser is to tease another reader into looking into your current read as a possibility for their TBR list. Mine today is from Jennifer A. Nielsen’s Words on Fire, categorized as a Middle-Grades Read.

    “My name is Audra. In my language, Lithuanian, it means storm. But my language had become illegal. If the soldiers we passed on the road heard us speaking it, we could be whipped on the spot and arrested. Or in some cases, we might disappear. That happened sometimes.”

    And so we enter the world of Russian Cossacks, underground book smugglers, and rigorous political control as we enter this outstanding YA historical novel. It promises to be an exciting, emotional read.

  • WWW Wednesday

    What have you finished reading? / What are you continuing to read? /What are you likely to read next?

    Because I read several books simultaneously, I finished up IMG_0593IMG_0600IMG_0602

    I am undertaking a Middle Grades reading project, where I will read many books before Christmas. My Better Half picked up 30 at the library today after I’d brought home 19 yesterday. So far I have read two books in one day.  I am continuing to read middle grade books and

    I also am continuing to read:

    IMG_0606

    I have a big week of reading ahead. How about you? What have you finished? What are you continuing to read? What will you read next?

  • TEASER TUESDAY

    Tuesday Teaser, hosted by The Purple Booker, asks readers to copy at random a sentence or so from a current read. This provides a sneak peek at a book one might want to add to their TBR list. My Tuesday Teaser for 11/5/19 is from a middle grades novel, Each Tiny Spark by Pablo Cartaya. The selection begins after an especially contentious school board meeting where the adults were fighting redrawing the lines for school distribution because they didn’t want “those people”/riff-raff attending school with their children. Often times, the children have the “best” perspective on things and here is what Emilia Rosa, the main character says,

    “I read at the library about how towns used to be divided by train tracks…Living on one side could mean a person was ‘on the wrong side of the tracks.’ Like they weren’t as good as the people living on the ‘right’ side…The only ‘wrong side’ is the side where people don’t care about each other.”

    Out of the mouths of babes–or sixth graders!

  • BOOK “Y” OF THE ALPHABET SOUP CHALLENGE: A Review

    A Year of Wednesdays by Sonis Bahl, a 2019 publication, is “…a story that will make you laugh, cry, and think again,” according to the jacket blurb. I found it warm, humorous at times, and full of contemporary cultural allusions. Two people, an arrogant businessman and a mother with a baby are thrown together as seatmates on a 15-hour flight.  Wednesdays is a “One time, one encounter that lasts a lifetime.” Even though they separate after the flight, the cool, Wall-Street guy escapes as quickly as he can from the “mom-with-the drool-stained-sweater” who is lugging an under-two year old, puzzled that the woman’s philosophy of life shared during the 15 hours is so different from his. Not only are they diametric opposites, but she has also refused to give him information for further contact, making it clear she has no interest in him or (to him) his successfully glamorous life.

    The rest of the book, alternates from chapter to chapter consists of internal conversations he has with her and she has with him. They can’t get each other out of their respective minds. As the jacket blurb says, “…somehow they continue to travel together” if only in their thoughts. This strange relationship goes on for a year of Wednesdays, the day he had suggested they meet at a tiny coffee shop. Somehow, these two are “unexpectedly connected” as ludicrous as that may sound.

    My favorite quote from the book is about my favorite beverage–coffee. “Coffee should be as black as hell, as strong as death, and as sweet as love.” This story is about two people as different as night and day, who share a connection as strong as life, and as sweet as confusing “non-traditional” love.

  • ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT BOOKS: A Review

    Recently I read another “book about books,” Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine, book two of “The Great Library Series.” Originally written for young adults and in the “steampunk” tradition, the book appeals to young and older readers alike. It is an Alternate History, where the great library of Alexandria survived, instead of burning, and by the time of this novel, it is all-powerful and in complete control of all knowledge. Personal ownership of books is forbidden although people have access through tablet-like devices to the words and world of books. This situation makes black-market books, especially old ones, very big business.

    The story opens as Jess, a young bookrunner, is being chased by Library Gardas and automatons across the busy marketplace. With the help of his twin brother, Brendan, who is described as “a schemer,” Jess escapes. Shortly afterward, the boys’ father sends Jess into “Library Service” to spy on its activities and to determine the location of ancient books, so Brendan can steal them to further the family’s illegal business. Jess’s training is rigorous, and he ends up making friends with other candidates who compete against him. Exciting book-related and library-related adventures ensue, and one turns the pages with anxiety and even dread at times. Action-fueled scenes bring the fatal “Greek Fire” of the alchemists, an encounter with an inklicker, and many encounters with bookburners The Library is seeking to prosecute.

    Jess and his friends are well-drawn, and the author makes the reader care about what happens to each of them, even the ones who at the beginning are arrogant or worse. Characterization, a skill I seek in every book I read, is second only to the fast-paced, breath-holding pace of the action and plot. This is a fun read and promises much in the next book of “The Great Library Series.”

  • SATURDAY MORNINGS FOR KIDS ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON

    Cynthia Kadohata’s YA novel, A Place to Belong (published 2019), is set at the end of WWII and tells the story of a young Japanese girl, whose family had been interned recently at a camp in the U.S.,and has decided to take advantage of the “deal” the government gives them to return to Japan after Hiroshima. Having spent her whole life trying to appear more American and less Japanese, the teenager must now act less like the “spoiled, American teen” and learn her family’s Japanese ways. Japan, the family finds, is not the Japan her parents longed for, but the poverty-stricken, occupied shell of their home country.

    This Newberry Award-winning author of Kira-Kira, a hit with both middle school students and early high-schoolers, once again deals with YA angst, relationships, and trying to “fit in.” Kadohata explores the Japanese concept of kintsukuori, “fixing broken objects with gold lacquer, making them stronger and more beautiful than ever.” This young woman’s broken spirit is mended, and her character is molded into something strong and beautiful as she deals with the situations and circumstances which occur in the page-turner.

    I give this one 5 stars out of 5 stars!

  • NOVEMBER LITERACY DATES COMING UP

    Rae Longest's avatarLiteracy and Me

    November brings many opportunities to celebrate literacy and all things “bookish.” This month Americans celebrate National Family Literacy Month, National Novel Writing Month, National Memoir Writing Month, and Picture Book Month. Sometime during November, Literacy and Me will feature a post for each of these occasions.

    Today, November first, is National Family Literacy Day. Plan some activity with your family that promotes reading and writing within the family. Because it is the beginning of the weekend, it is the perfect time to start reading aloud before bedtime if you don’t already do so. -OR- Have a read-aloud time after supper where each family member reads aloud at the table something he or she read today they considered interesting, funny, beautiful, or inspiring. If your family has five or six people, including mother and dad, it will not even take even a full hour. If your family does not eat together…

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  • THE HAUNTED BOOKSTORE, A CLASSIC by Christopher Morely: Review

    In attempting to read about books, bookstores, libraries, and all things “bookish” between January 2019 and December 2019, I came across a book considered a classic, which fits my definition of a cozy mystery. Just in time for Halloween, Christopher Morely’s The Haunted Bookstore continues the saga of Parnassus on Wheels. It describes the bookstore of Roger Mifflin, proprietor, whose sign in the window welcomes booklovers, but warns, “This shop is haunted.”

    The story is set in 1915 Brooklyn, NY. Enter Titania Chapman, enlightened daughter of a business magnate father who asks Mifflin if he will hire his daughter as an assistant. A budding career girl, something new to Mifflin and his wife, Titania is full of “new views” and ways to improve the comfortable old bookstore. Meeting a young ad salesman who tries to get Mifflin to advertise, Titania puts him through the paces and hoops of earning a young girl’s affections. There is mystery; there is romance; there is humor–all told in a charming style of writing that endears these characters and this novel to the reader. “Lively spirits” seem to be the cause of the things that go bump in the night, and the mysterious shadow men who appear are obviously up to no good.

    All is revealed and satisfyingly resolved at the end, something modern readers seldom get enough of. I highly recommend this novel.

  • NEW POST ON LITERACY AND ME

    For information on reading and Americans’ current library use is available on http://literacyletters.wordpress.com

  • dance to the absurdities of life

    dance to the absurdities of life