BACK TO SCHOOL: No School Reading For Me, No Sir

Today, I am excited to bring you our final guest post in honor of Back to School, courtesy of Rhea at Rhea's Neon Journal Book Blog.  She has taken a little different perspective, and it is one that you do not want to miss.

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In case it isn’t clear, I love reading. More than eating, and sleeping, and donuts, and coffee. Definitely more than breathing. And now that I’ve bared one part of my soul to you, here’s the other:

I absolutely loathed reading anything in school. I just couldn’t, you know? I couldn’t put my mind to it and I distinctly remember not ever wanting to even pick stuff up from the school library…Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Enid Blyton. None of this stuck with me and I’ve always hated reading something I’m forced to.

But woah, you guys, hold up. It was a completely different scenario at home, with my mother having made peace with the fact that I would probably never eat food in front of the idiot box. Like, you know, the rest of my family. It would always be Harry Potter, dinner and me. I read and re-read and re-read and read Harry Potter (all six of them) again and again and again though middle school and high school. Then HP and The Deathly Hallows was released in July 2007 and I had to wait until September for it to step into my outstretched arms. And the re-reading process started all over again. 

Of course, teenage girls craved glittery vampires in 2008, and I was bitten by the Edward Cullen bug. I saw the movie, went completely bat shit cray-cray, bought all the books, and sadly, HP was cast aside for awhile. Remember, all this while, I still hated reading school stuff. It irritated me to no end that Rick Riordan and Neil Gaiman were being forced on me, when all I wanted to do was run back to the Cullen Clan. Sigh. Horrible times, those.

And then came college. I took up learning Commerce and I got busy. Crazy busy. All books were kept aside and for two years, I managed to read nothing but a few books that were a part of my rather pathetic English curriculum in College. And yet, in the summer of 2014, I found a way to reintroduce books into my life, when I gave a big Fuck You to accounting and book-keeping and took up studying what I really wanted to study—Law.

Law and Literature are helplessly intertwined and thank god for that. Blogging introduced me to the kind of books I would never willingly pick up for myself. Reading NA was never my thing, MG to me was only Harry Potter from years 1 - 4, and YA, what YA? But getting out of school and Junior College was probably the best thing that ever could happen for me, reading-wise. I still hate reading books that I have to, but hey. At least I’ve moved on from the stage where I’d come home, cry to my mother and tell her I had another book to read that wasn’t Harry Potter. *winks*

BACK TO SCHOOL: Books That Inspired My Love of Reading

Today I am excited to share with you a special guest, Jessica from Scrap Paper in honor of our Back to School month.  Please give her a warm welcome!

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Back To School – Books That Inspired My Love of Reading 

I fell in love with reading from a very early age. I was always "that" child who had her nose stuck in a book. My passion for reading was inspired through my schooling years by a wide range of books. I have hand-picked six books that I feel became the cornerstones of my passion.

Primary School 

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams - This book is my earliest memory of a book making an impact on me. I was a cuddly toy collector and used to believe that they came alive at night. Reading a book that confirmed the realness of the toys I adored made me rejoice, and probably encouraged my cuddly toy obsession way past an acceptable age! As a little girl reading about the Velveteen Rabbit's journey towards realising what it means to 'be real', I don't think I truly understood its profoundness until I was much older.

A quote that sticks with me from the book is from the Skin Horse who says:

"When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real."

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis - As well as believing that my cuddly toys came to life, I used to imagine that I was in another land/world. The imaginary land that I spent the most time in was definitely Narnia. I hoped and prayed that one day I would open my parent's wardrobe and Narnia would appear.

Middle School 

The Philosopher's Stone by J.K.Rowling - Everyone knows the boy who lived. I think anyone from my generation (90s) would say that this book defined our childhoods. Harry Potter was my age when I first started reading the books and to follow his journey as I myself was growing up, was an incredible experience. As Harry's thought darkened and the novels grew longer, my thoughts grew more profound and my stamina coped with the additional pages!

Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman - This book was when my love for the fantasy genre truly began. After reading His Dark Materials I permanently went to the fantasy section of W H Smiths, hungry for more. This book also unfortunately fuelled my imaginary friend obsession. I had a daemon follow me around for a couple of years ... I was quite a lonely child!

High School 

Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison - I began reading Georgia Nicholson's series as I first discovered the opposite sex. Georgia's failings in attracting boys became my own and made me feel better about being a complete and utter loser in love.

Animal Farm by George Orwell - This book was the turning point in my GCSE choices. I vividly remember studying this book and thinking that I wanted to study books like it at University - fast forward to 2014 and I graduated with an English Literature degree. This book showed me the depths and layers of meaning that can be unearthed from the pages of a book.

The most famous quote from Animal Farm is 'All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others'. I would rephrase this sentence to 'All books are equal - but some are more equal than others.' In other words, there will always be "those" books that affect us more than others, it doesn't mean they are better than other books, it just means that they imprinted on our hearts and minds.

BACK TO SCHOOL: School-Related Books

Emma from Words and Peace is here today to bring us a very bookish topic related to Back to School.  Read on and get your TBR list ready!

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So happy to be participating in Back To School at Book Bloggers International!

Whether you have children, grand-children, or not, you can't escape the special flavor in the air in mid-August to September. It's time to go back to school, to get back on track to learning, possibly to set your own goals, and of course keep an eye on all the new books for the Fall.

So I was curious to see what my own Goodreads shelves were telling me about school and learning.

As I revisit the books I read with school/learn in the title, it really strikes me they all have to do with love. Actually, shouldn't it be the very first goal of learning? How to love? Unfortunately, our current Western system of education does not seem to emphasize that part. 

Here are the books I have read with school/learn in the title: Click on the covers to access the Goodreads page

The play The School For Wives is a classic for all French students, so I must have read this when I was in my early teens. It was written in 1662 by Molière, think the French Shakespeare. It's a comedy that "depicts a character who is so intimidated by femininity that he resolves to marry his young, naïve ward and proceeds to make clumsy advances to this purpose. It raised some outcry from the public, which seems to have recognized Molière as a bold playwright who would not be afraid to write about controversial issues."



Inside The School of Charity was actually written by a friend of mine in 2009. Drawing on her journals from living inside the enclosure of Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey (a community of twenty Cistercian nuns) for three months in 2003, her reflections on the unexpected challenges and insights that emerged during that time, and on her own experience as a professional woman, wife, daughter, and mother, Trisha Day delves into the questions of how the centuries-old wisdom of monastic life can challenge, inspire, and guide those living outside the monastery. Filled with stories from her own life and fascinating details of daily life in the monastery, her book is sure to strike a spark with all those seeking to live in a fully human and Christ-centered way. I reviewed it on this blog. 

In The School of Love is an anthology of Early Cistercian texts (published in 2000) The Cistercian Fathers and Mothers quoted here lived in the 12th-14th centuries. They invite us into a 'school of Love', into the domain where the heart knows what the mind can never grasp.     I recall with great pleasure reading 

The Joy of Learning and the Love of God in my early twenties. This collection of essays was published back in 1961 by a Benedictine monk and scholar who spent all his life researching and writing, tons! His essays are fascinating, full of erudition.     

 There's a story close to my heart behind this book. When I was a child in a tiny French village of 250 inhabitants, at one point some people came to settle in a rather dilapidated house. They were very peaceful and very kind. I learned later they were Buddhists, and had been persecuted for their way of life and their actions, as they had helped many people escape Vietnam. The woman in the cover had very long black hair. Then she became a Buddhist nun. Learning True Love: How I Learned and Practiced Social Change in Vietnam are her memories, and she talks among other things about her years in my village, which she calls 'potato village'. 

And Here are the books on my Goodreads TBR list with school/learn in the title: Here the themes are more diversified: languages, reading, and nature, basically my most favorite hobbies! 

KATO LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will thus be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.


Multilingualism is on the rise in the coming decades, as many as two billion people will learn English as a second language. The next stage up from multilingualism is the domain of the hyperpolyglot or superlearner: someone who claims to know at least six languages. But what does it mean to know a language? Can a person claim to speak a language fluently if it isn't their mother tongue? What role does culture play in learning languages? In Mezzofanti's Gift: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners (2013), an accessible and enthralling book, Michael Erard discusses the upper limits of the brains capacity to learn languages and sheds light on the hyperpolyglot phenomenon, from the Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak as many as seventy-two languages, to the superlearners of the 21st century.

How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading Too Much (Feb 2015)

While debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre.

With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives.

My Backyard Jungle: The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover Who Turned His Yard into Habitat and Learned to Live with It (2013)

For James Barilla and his family, the dream of transforming their Columbia, South Carolina, backyard into a haven for wildlife evoked images of kids catching grasshoppers by day and fireflies at night, of digging up potatoes and picking strawberries. When they signed up with the National Wildlife Federation to certify their yard as a wildlife habitat, it felt like pushing back, in however small a way, against the tide of bad news about vanishing species, changing climate, dying coral reefs. Then the animals started to arrive, and Barilla soon discovered the complexities (and possible mayhem) of merging human with animal habitats. What are the limits of coexistence, he wondered? To find out, Barilla set out across continents to explore cities where populations of bears, monkeys, marmosets, and honeybees live alongside human residents. My Backyard Jungle brings these unique stories together, making Barilla’s yard the centerpiece of a meditation on possibilities for coexistence with animals in an increasingly urban world. Not since Gerald Durrell penned My Family and Other Animals have readers encountered a naturalist with such a gift for storytelling and such an open heart toward all things wild.

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Back to school, to learn how to love and how to live. I encourage you to look at your Goodreads shelves and see what the words school and learn tell about yourself, about your past and your future. Feel free to share, if it's not too private.

Emma at Words And Peace and France Book Tours @wordsandpeace

BACK TO SCHOOL: Starting the New Year with a Wonder-ful Book

Let's give Meghan a warm welcome today as 

she shares a particularly wonderful book with us!

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Starting the New Year with a Wonder-ful Book:  R.J. Palacio’s Wonder

Hello everyone! I’m Meghan from Living a Life in Books.  I’m a mother of a beautiful little girl, a middle school Literature teacher, and a lover of great books (specifically middle grade and YA).  I’m here to share the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio.  If you haven’t heard of the book Wonder, then you’re in for a treat!  It’s about a fifth grade boy named August Pullman who was born with facial differences that cause him to be stared at wherever he goes.  Sometimes kids even run away from him.  Due to a number of surgeries, he has been home schooled--up until now.  As Auggie starts school for the first time, he learns a lot about friendship and himself during his fifth grade year.

Wonder is the first novel I read and studied with my sixth graders because it encompasses so many great ideas and literary elements.  Broken up into into six different perspectives, we hear Auggie’s, his older sister’s, his new friends’, and even his sister’s friends’ points of view.  From a literary standpoint this allows for a lot of discussion on character development as well as point of view and plot.  From a much deeper level, it allows for an exploration of the perspective in life.  

What I really love is that Wonder is about acceptance and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes--and not just in Auggie’s.  As readers, we make assumptions pretty quickly about some characters (just as we do in life), but then we hear their story, their side. Suddenly things make a little more sense, maybe we were a little quick to judge, or maybe we were right in our initial judgement.  Nonetheless, it’s a lesson on getting all the information and taking a step back from your own life and seeing what it’s like for someone else.  

I start the year with this book because in our school, sixth grade is when students start switching classes and things get crazier. The students are switching classes each hour, they have lockers, they aren’t walked from one class to the next, and they have a lot more freedom than they have ever had before. The cliques, which already were starting in prior years, become more solidified and it just gets tough to be a kid. My students need this at the start of the year.  It is the theme that carries us throughout the year in Literature. I end each class with the reminder, “Choose Kind and Make Good Choices.”  Choose Kind is the anthem that Wonder readers have embraced and I embrace it for my classroom. Make Good Choices is just my own good piece of advice that I hope they take with them into life. I read aloud the short companion piece Julian’s Story to help round out that perspective and we discuss. Acceptance is tough in middle school.  It’s hard to accept yourself, to accept others, and to accept change. Kids need help guiding them through and I hope that this wonderful book can help them do that.  

Wonder really does make for a positive start to the school year.  Whether you’re a teacher looking for a class novel or read aloud, a parent on the lookout for a great novel for your 4-7th grader, or anyone else for that matter, this book will make you want to change the world one child at a time.  It’s heart wrenching to read as a parent and an educator, but uplifting at the same time as you witness the growth in the characters.  I also recommend checking out the website devoted to Wonder and the Choose Kind initiative.  If you’re interested, there is also an interview on youtube with R.J. Palacio as she discusses Wonder and its importance and impact on the lives of children who have facial difference.

BACK TO SCHOOL: Back to School Shopping for Bloggers

Today, I am excited to kick off our first guest post from Kai of Fiction State of Mind.  She is here to talk about preparing for blogging, and the perfect time to stock up on all your blogging supplies is during the amazing Back to School sales.  I leave you with her tips!

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Confession Time. I was “That Kid” when I was in school. The kid who couldn’t wait to get their new backpack, notebooks and backpack . I still love seeing all the supplies at Staples and other stores, and since I became a book blogger I now have a yearly tradition of buying new supplies for my blogging life. Here are some of my favorite supplies I stock up on every year:

Blog Planner
This time of year I’m on the hunt for a new organizer to finish out the year and get a head start on 2016.  

Sharpies 
Sharpies are my thing. I use them for book signings and to highlight my blogging week. I really love the new Sharpie Clear View markers. The yellow are cool but I just discovered they have a pink one as well.

Pencil Cases, Tablet Covers & More 
This is also a great time to grab some essentials : Pencils, Erasers, Pencil Cases, Notebooks and Pens.

Where To Shop 
I get most of my supplies from the 99 cent store and another store by me called Dollar Tree. I also visit Staples every year because they have amazing deals from 15- 50 cents. I love visiting Target also, especially their one spot area where I find lots of products with lots of Disney and Star Wars themed merchandise.

Happy Blogging! Now go shop!

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Thanks for your tips Kai!  

Do you have any of your own Back to School shopping tips for your own blogging needs?

It's BACK TO SCHOOL Time!

We have a great month planned for you here at Book Bloggers International with a special theme of Back to School!  I already have a number of bloggers that have submitted there interpretation of the theme, and there are more to come.  In fact, there are even some slots still available.  If you are interested in contributing to "Back to School," email us at bookbloggersintl (at) gmail (dot) com.

In addition to our themed posts, you can still expect to see a handful of our usual interviews of fellow book bloggers.  If you are interested in being interviewed, be sure to check out our How to be Featured tab at the top of the page.

Last, but not least, don't forget to be checking our new feature, the Book Bloggers Community Calendar!  This is a great way to stay in-the-know about current and upcoming events.  If you have an event, don't forget to submit it as well and we can help you spread the word.

Wishing you all the best of luck in the season of back to school, whether you are preparing to go back to school yourself, or maybe sending your own kids off to school, or just braving the crowds when you are going shopping!