books and reading

Uses the author's own experiences as a child, parent and teacher to discuss the "power of story" and how people learn to read.

A boy who hates books discovers an ink-drinking vampire in his father's bookshop and follows him to his underground vault.

"Princess Violet is plain, reckless, and quite possibly too clever for her own good. Particularly when it comes to telling stories. One day she and her best friend, Demetrius, stumble upon a hidden room and find a peculiar book. A forbidden book. It tells a story of an evil being--called the Nybbas--imprisoned in their world. The story cannot be true--not really. But then the whispers start. Violet and Demetrius, along with an ancient, scarred dragon, may hold the key to the Nybbas's triumph . . . or its demise"--Provided by publisher.

After the death of his older brother, Daniel Anderson became engrossed in recording details about dead people, how they died, and whether their deaths mattered but he is eventually drawn back into interaction with the living by two unexpected friends, Walter and Isabelle.

Four girls, and their mothers, continue their mother-daughter book club via videoconference between Massachusetts and England, reading Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," and try to put friendship before romance.

Four very different friends in Concord, Massachusetts, and their mothers continue their book club, reading Jean Webster's "Daddy Long-Legs," while getting to know their own pen pals from Wyoming.

Entering seventh grade at Walden Middle School, four girls continue their mother-daughter book club, reading Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables" while dealing with a mean, troublemaking classmate.

The mothers of four very different sixth-grade girls pressure them into forming a book club, and find, as they read the classic novel "Little Women," that they have more in common than they thought.

While her mother undergoes radical cancer treatment, eleven-year-old Ella stays with her father's mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she learns about grammar and family history, and helps investigate the theft of an extremely rare book from her grandmother's library.

Twelve-year-old Eugene "Huge" Smalls is short, mean, angry, and brilliant, characteristics which win him no friends, but he is also an amateur sleuth with his first real case, which leads him to believe life might be better if he did not imagine himself a character in a Raymond Chandler novel.