TELL ME TUESDAY is a floating feature where I tell you what I read last, what I'm reading now, and what I will be reading next.
THEMES • BUDDY READS • SLOW READ
My June theme was Caribbean-American Heritage Month.
•
My July theme is Summer in the City
(books set in New York City)
✯
A Year of Brontë
•
Little House Series Buddy Re-Read
•
Dickens Year-Long Slow Read
★★★★
LITERARY FICTION
STANDALONE
CLASSIC
HISTORICAL
FEMINISM
Published 1848 - Own Ebook
•
Another book for my A Year of Brontë. Shirley is my my second favorite book of Charlotte's after Jane Eyre. Villette was okay, but it had too much romance in it for me. Up until the end this was going to be five stars (4.5), but there was something done by one of characters that Shirley had previously said she would never tolerate and she didn't bat an eyelash in the face of it. There was also one severely long scene of waffling back and forth over making a decision, between two characters, and I was just short of banging my head on my desk before it ended.
★★★★
MIDDLE GRADE
FIVE BOOK SERIES
CHINESE CULTURE
CHINESE-AMERICAN CULTURE
FRIENDS & FAMILY
Published 2012 to 2017 - Hoopla Borrows + Own Ebooks
•
I read the first series title, The Year of the Book, in May for Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Month. I loved the story so much I purchased two ebooks that were on sale, borrowed one from Hoopla in June and then read them back to back. I still have The Year of the Garden to read, but it's a prequel, so I am waiting for a month I don't need all three of my Hoopla borrows for theme reading.
MIDDLE GRADE
LITTLE HOUSE SERIES THREE
HISTORICAL FICTION
PIONEER LIFE
FAMILY
Published 1935 - Own Paperback and Hardcover
•
After skipping a month, Jolene and I were back to our Little House Buddy read. I was aware that there had been a lot of questions raised about racism in the Little House books since the last time I read them, when I read them as bedtime stories to my little sister in 1980. After re-reading the first two books I was thinking people were over reacting. Then I re-read Little house on the Prairie... and yikes; it certainly needs at least in-text citations and parent/teacher discussion questions at the end of the book. And even though some people will throw their hands up in shock... I would suggest some light editing. These fixes are better than banning them from school and public libraries, as has been suggested, or stopping the publication of new editions. I think they still have value as historical fiction. They just need some adjacent history about the Native Americans.
•
Because we are also reading Laura's memoir, Pioneer Girl, alongside the series, we found out that Pa Ingalls illegally built their cabin on Osage treatied reservation land. Yet he was angry when he found out the government was sending soldiers to tell the settlers they had to move farther north off the reservation.
★★
LITERARY FICTION
STANDALONE
HISTORICAL
CONTEMPORARY
TRINIDAD
Published February 2025- Kindle Unlimited Free Trial
•
This was my first book for Caribbean American Heritage Month and it was the group read for Carib-A-Thon. It was so bad I didn't bother joining the group read. Heh.
LITERARY FICTION
STANDALONE
HISTORICAL FICTION
The 1992 paperback with a Black/biracial Bertha *below* was published after the author's death and also republished as an ebook in 2020.
JAMAICA
Published 1966 - Guttenberg Project Borrow
•
Liis and I are buddy reading this for its "connection" to Jane Eyre; as part of my A Year of Brontë blog theme. Because it is set in Jamaica, and the author is of Dominican descent, it qualified for my Caribbean-American Heritage Month reading. How this is considered a "prequel" when it changed canon from Jane Eyre, is beyond me. And the people who keep saying on Bookstagram that Edward locked Bertha away because she was Black and he was a racist, are SJWs who didn't read the book because Bertha was White. She wasn't even biracial. This fact has been stated many times in the book, and I'm only thirty percent in. The original first edition cover has Bertha depicted as white.
•
"I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement. Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge: but to each villain his own vice; and mine is not a tendency to indirect assassination." From Jane Eyre.
MEMOIR
NEW YORK CITY
GREENWICH VILLAGE
MENTAL HEALTH
FAMILY
1990s
Published 2023 - Hoopla Borrow
•
This will be my first title for Summer in the City. I chose this as my July monthly theme, when I first started following monthly themes, because when I was fifteen I started going on the Shortline bus, with friends, to New York City several times a summer. We would hang out in front of Punk Rock bars, like CBGBs, to listen to the bands play because we weren't, of course, old enough to go inside. The first time we went down we stayed in a hotel, but we soon met locals who were doing the same thing and started crashing at their homes. Many teen Punk rockers were rebellious rich kids back then, so I stayed in some pretty amazing places. I also slept on the floor of some not so great places, too. Ha ha. Anyway, July always makes me think of summer in NYC. I think the last time I did this I was eighteen.
JUNE READING WRAP-UP
⚫
BOOKS READ
SIX
ARCS
NONE
PHYSICAL BOOKS
ONE
EBOOKS
FIVE
AUDIOBOOKS
NONE
MANGA - GRAPHIC NOVELS - COMICS
NONE
MIDDLE GRADE
FOUR
YOUNG ADULT
NONE
ADULT FICTION
TWO
NONFICTION
NONE
RE-READS
ONE
MY FAVORITE BOOK IN JUNE
★★★★
2026
YEAR TO WRAP-UP DATE
TOTALS
31
PERSONAL CHALLENGES
NONFICTION 6/12
MIDDLE GRADE 11/12
NATIVE AMERICAN/FIRST NATIONS AUTHORS 0/3
MUSIC 0/1
PLAYS 0/1
BACKLIST ARCS 0/3
CLASSICS/VINTAGE 11/12
RE-READS 6/12
FREEBIES/99¢ KINDLE BOOKS 6/12
NYT 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY 1/3
BOOKER PRIZE FIRST PLACE WINNERS 0/3
•••
MIDDLE GRADE - 11
YOUNG ADULT - 2
ADULT FICTION - 12
NONFICTION - 6
•
GRAPHIC NOVELS/MANGA - 0
AUDIOBOOKS - 5
EBOOKS - 23
PHYSICAL COPIES - 4
BORROWED - 16
Prompt for JUNE, A Book With a Sympathetic Villain, completed!
In Shirley, by Charlotte Brontë, Robert Gérard Moore was very much a villain in the eyes of many of the work-a-day villagers, but he tried to soften the impact his factory machinery made, on the local textile industry, by finding them work in other fields of employment.
What are you reading? Tell me!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for dropping by.