Friday Reads 1/26/2024

OK listen. This is going to be chaotic. You've been warned.

I have my book I'm reading at home, and my NetGalley book I'm reading at work. But I also have a couple of graphic novels I'm picking at here and there. Also, the Youth Media Awards were announced this week and I'm reading as many of those as I can. So here we go.

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio - Hoo boy. I heard this was fantastic. I was so excited to pick it up. Then I realized it is so similar to The Secret History that I am getting them mixed up in my head. They don't have the same plot, but they could be set at the same snooty private college. The vibes are so similar. And I liked that other book. But boy is it hard to keep them straight.

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden - I finally got my hands on this! I've been waiting since June. I haven't gotten very far, but what I can tell so far, Mia is a young person (teen?) who has gotten herself placed on this spaceship that goes to various architectural ruins around the galaxy and repairs them. I have no idea what the plot or themes are. That's literally all I've got.

James by Percival Everett - This one I'm loving. I'm about 2/3 of the way through and it just keeps getting better. This is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of Jim, the runaway slave. Jim is great. He's extremely intelligent and educated. He is intimately familiar with the works of Rousseau and Locke and Hume. When he is around white people he uses slave talk so the white people think they're better than him. As far as I can tell, all the parts from the original work are here, but told from Jim's perspective and added parts that Huck didn't hear or wasn't there for. Even if you didn't read the original, this is a great book about a slave trying to find freedom.

We Still Belong by Christine Day - This is one of the books on the Youth Media Awards list. It is a children's chapter book about a Native American girl. She wants to be like the other kids, but her life is very different from theirs and she feels shame about it.

Lovely Muco! by Takayuki Mizushina - I'm doing a training on Manga for teen library services. They had a great list of manga series to check out, so I got several. This is a cute little story about this Shiba Inu who lives with Mr. Komatsu who is a glass blower. Muco works really hard to keep Mr. Komatsu in a good mood, but sometimes she goes a little overboard. It's cute. I have giggled.

Ok. That's all that I've started right now. I have a lot more coming for both of these library projects, so I don't foresee a slow down soon.