It's Monday

It's been a weird week. Work has been weird, the kids have been great - sometimes I could do without the grown ups though. lol. The weather has been strange. After days of cooler weather, we had extremely windy days with temps of 70 F, in the afternoons, with very cold nights. The nights have been close to freezing - I know that's warmer that a lot of places at this time of year, but the temperature range has been a little extreme, especially with the wind. Anyway, glad one week's over, and hope this next week is better. However, after 15 years of working with children in the school system, I've learned that even though you might get a "good job" once in a while, most of the time you're expected to work miracles with the homework and behaviour - and this expectation is not only from the parents, but from the teachers and administrators - even though they should know better, since the same thing is done to them. It's a mostly thankless job. Most of the people that I know that are in this line of work are in doing it for a general love of children. It's certainly not for the money or working conditions! Once in a while though, I get a visit form a student from years past - one who says they miss me and the afterschool program. The thing that gets to me is when I get that type of comment from a kid that I was particularly tough on. However they remember me, I know I genuinely have a good time with the children. It's the rest of the job that gets to me sometimes. :) when you get right down to it, what other job gives you an opportunity to laugh at silly things, play an occasional game, read to kids and have the kids read to you and in general enjoy a lot of laughs and hugs from the students. Not many!

It is now time for It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Hosted by Sheila of Book Journey, this is a weekly meme that we use to let each other know what we've read the past week, what we're planning to read and what we're currently reading...and other bits and pieces of life. It's a fun meme - on that I try to take part of every Monday.

True to form, I did not finish many books. I, in fact, finished only one novel, and that one was Devon Monk's latest, Magic On The Line. It was great - as usual. I've come to expect great reads out of Devon Monk, and I haven't been disappointed yet. I think I took a while to read it because I know the series is coming to an end.

There's been quite a few of those lately, series that are being ended by the author - ending on high notes, with readers like me wanting more. These ladies know what they're doing, and thankfully they are all working on new series. Keeping us interested and wanting more. Nice. Better than having a series go on and on and on, changing so much that they don't resemble the beginning novels, or worse yet not going anywhere, the characters saying and doing the same old thing over and over...or a combination of the tw0 - which is really the worst....We don't have to worry about that with Devon Monk, Lili St.Crow/Lilith Saintcrow or Rachel Vincent - all authors who have ended their series after 6 to 10 novels of supreme goodness. :) I have a lot of respect for their decisions and I also think it's pretty brave of them, as well as smart. It must be kind of tough to say goodbye to characters and a series that is still popular; it's gotta be tempting to keep grinding out novels in the same series, that's probably become comfortable to play in - if one can ever consider writing a novel to be "comfortable" - I know it's a lot of work. (lol - some authors actually BLEED on their keyboard and suffer horribly with emo-ness while writing and .....yeah. if you go to the link, please...for God's sake- for the love of all that's SANE, read with a grain of salt. The belief's can be hazardous to your blood pressure or mental health - for a cure, read this reply from a more grounded author.) These authors had a clear vision of how their series was going to go, and stuck with their plan - and are currently publishing new series or are close to finishing new novels. More to look forward to. off to other things, now!

currently reading
Shady Lady by Ann Aguirre - writer of the close to ending Sirantha Jax series. This third novel in the Corinne Solomon series is very interesting - I'm enjoying it more than the second, almost as much as the first novel in the series. Good series, over all. I'm almost halfway through it, and looking forward to finishing it (in a good way, lol)

next up will be a book sent to me for review by Devin O'Branagan. This is her newest novel, Threshold. It looks interesting; two main characters, one an adult, the other a young boy who has either came close, or actually died, brought back and finding himself on a mission, without a clear memory, and many in danger. Sounds spooky! Looking forward to it.

waiting for....(from B&N - again. I go shopping for a book on the book's release day, and it's NOT on the shelves. Have to special order, which means I don't get it the minute it comes out - wouldn't have been able to read it right away, anyway - but it's nice to have that option, right? And what's up? How can the authors get their release week sales, if the stores DON'T EVEN STOCK IT?) <<--- ugh - gettin' all riled up! This happened with Magic On The Line, and also with Reckoning. C'Mon! B&N! I don't have a lot of shopping choices left, please get your act together! make sure your employees are shelving those books! I say this because the clerk LOOKED up the info, and according to the computer, Fate's Edge was IN the store since 11/23, but no one could find one copy of it. And they hadn't sold any. S0- Waiting on Fate's Edge by Ilona Andrews. This is part of the Edge series - LOVE that series. The characters are all twisted, and they live in a twisted world, with twisted animals and problems. So interesting. It's written in a different style than Ilona Andrew's Kate Daniels' series, but I find it just as interesting, the dialog just as snarky as the other series.

I also bought for the school two copies of Diary of a Wimpy Kid's Cabin Fever. I plan on reading it to a few classes. I remember seeing the first novel in the series come out, novel/comic book fusion and thought, wow, this looks interesting - but I really thought Jim Benson's Dear Dumb Diary series was way more funny. Ironically, even though the kids at school have checked out the DDD books over and over, they go ballistic over the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. We have only one copy of each of the series, and they are ALWAYS checked out. This is one book that gets stolen from other kids. Sad - but that shows how popular they are - kids will STEAL the books from each other. I think both series are pretty funny, and they both get boys as well as girls engaged with reading - it's hard to get your average boy to WANT to read fiction.

That's it for now. I've spent way too much time working on links and looking up author pages... I do this every Monday. Plan on a quick post, and go a bit overboard, soapboxing, linking up links, posting pics, ranting and raving...

:) It's fun.