Reading list

I've seen a lot of people posting on their blogs about what books they plan on reading in the coming year and I realize I've never done a list like that.  I don't even wonder at the reasons why... I know all too well why I don't.  You see the minute I make a list of books I "need" to read, even if they are books I am interested in, all desire to read them suddenly goes out the window.  Those become the books I precisely do not want to read and I'll go in search of something else.  Nutty, I know.  It's also why I always worked so much more diligently in college on the classes I was auditing than the ones I was taking for credit.  The other reason I don't make a yearly reading list is that it wouldn't really be a yearly list, but more like a couple of months reading list.  This isn't meant to brag, but I read very quickly and I read a lot.  It's just how I am.  I cannot conceive of trying to make a list that would last me the entire year.  And finally, I just don't know what books I want to read ahead of time.  If I find a book I like or am interested in, I will often then read everything else by that author or work my way through the bibliography, which then leads me to other books, and so on and so on.

All that to say, I won't be sharing my year's list of reading material, but I can share what I'm currently reading.  I'm finishing up John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education and I'm in the middle of Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children by Viviana A. Zelizer.  I'm also planning on starting Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leanard Sax.  And because one always needs something light to read as well, Dog On It by Spencer Quinn in on the stack.

As read alouds, we are very, very close to finishing Tom Sawyer (we took December off), and will be starting Call It Courage to go with our new geography study of the South Pacific.  J., after much pleading by TM and D., has just started the first Lord of the Rings book for their nighttime story and I have restarted Anne of Ingleside with A. and P.  I say restarted because it had been a while since I had read to the older girls at bedtime.  With G. and L. nursing and whatnot, it was virtually impossible to read to the girls, but now we can put the little girls in bed and now I am free to go back to reading.  The trouble was, none of us could remember either where we were in the book or what had happened in the beginning, so we started again.

So there you have it... my reading list for the next few weeks.  I'm always open to suggestions, though, it's difficult to keep myself in books sometimes.  Have you read any good books recently?

(Oh, and just a brief, selfish note:  Because I am an Amazon Associate, every time someone buys something on Amazon through my blog, I get a small percentage.  So, if you have ever thought about doing it, now is the time, because once again it doesn't pay to live in Illinois.  Our state legislature has passed a bill, one of the consequences of which is that it would make programs like Amazon Associates illegal in the great state of Illinois.  It was never a lot of money, but every little bit helps and this will be a little bit that won't be helping anymore.  No, I'm not bitter.  Why do you ask?)