A New Project for ProfessorMom

So, I’m at my fifth conference for this year. It’s my absolute favorite—The ALAN Conference. (ALAN stands for the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents with National Council of the Teachers of English). Basically, it’s two days of listening to authors speak on the books they’ve written for young adults (which Emery is not yet, but I can’t wait for him to be). One of the biggest draws for the conference are the books that publishers give to attendees. When I first started attending ALAN conferences in 1993, we used to get a bag of 10-15 books. Today, we get boxes with approximately 40 books. Usually, I keep a select few for myself (usually the Little, Brown ones) and give away the rest to my students and teachers.

I’ve never read every single book that I’ve been given at ALAN.

I’m going to this year.

And I will blog about each book.

Yes, I have a goodreads account and will probably duplicate my reviews there, but this project kind of feels like a Julie/ Julia blog project or The Daily Varnish, a blog on which two friends blog about a different type of nail polish each day. The books this year just look so good and so inventive, I want to read all of them, but I feel like I need to hold myself accountable somehow.

I’d like to be finished by the end of my semester break which I think is in early January.

The only rules I will follow are Daniel Pennac’s Reader’s Bill of Rights. I completely support these rights as I think they are essential to building life long readers:

They are

1. The right to not read 

2. The right to skip pages 

3. The right to not finish 

4. The right to reread 

5. The right to read anything 

6. The right to escapism 

7. The right to read anywhere 

8. The right to browse 

9. The right to read out loud 

10. The right to not defend your tastes

Look for my first post on A.S. King’s Reality Boy soon. I’m having trouble putting it down.