This is a guest post written by Emily Mansfield. It’s that time of year again – rainy skies, dark and windy evenings, holiday lights brightening the streets – when curling up with a hot chocolate and a good book seems just decadently attractive. If you’re looking for ideas for what to read this holiday season, here (after much consideration!), are my top ten novels to lose yourself in this winter. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows It’s January 1946, and British writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a man she’s never met, from the German-occupied island of Guernsey. A correspondence begins, and the eccentric, literature-loving inhabitants of the island come to fantastic life for her in this charming and often hilarious story. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary An unexpected French bestseller, this quirky, intelligent novel has a cast of complex and surprisingly loveable characters. Set in … [Read more...]
Read This- Educating Esme: Diary Of A Teacher’s First Year
Originally published in 1999, Educating Esmé is technically the diary of Esmé Raji Codell’s first year teaching in a Chicago public school. But this book is so much more than just "today we did this, the next day we did that". Parents, teachers, anyone interested at all in our country's educational system, you really need to read this book. Hired at 24 to help open a new schoo and to teach fifth gradel, Madame Esmé (as she preferred to be called) soon finds herself taking phone calls from her boss at all hours of the night, teaching phonics to her class by having them make an alphabet museum "for the kindergarteners", bringing in her own reading books instead of using official textbooks, roller skates down the hall to pick up her kids from gym during a unit on inventors, teaches her students conflict resolution, makes a student teacher for the day, and has the kids do the Cha-Cha to learn double digit multiplication. Of all the out-of-the-box things that Madame Esmé describes … [Read more...]
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