The 12 Books I Read This Summer, Part III: Controversy and disappointment

Sometimes, when you pick up a book to read, what you expect and what you get are completely different. Most of the time when this happens to me, it's because I'm surprised by a book; I picked it up out of mild interest and I become enraptured by it. I remember that this was the case when I read the Hunger Games trilogy for the first time.

However, sometimes the opposite is true.

This next installment was really a doldrum in my summer reading. I expected much and got very little. But nevertheless, we're just over the halfway mark in the 12 books I cracked open during summer 2015!

The 12 Books I Read This Summer, Part II: Novels I might have used for class (but didn't)

The account of my summer reading continues!

If you made it through my first entry regarding my indulgence in graphic novels, you may be sorely disappointed in this post. I mean, at some point, every adult needs to go back to work and I really did prolong that as long as I could. Heck, I thought summer reading itself would delay the feeling of "work" (and in large part, it did). And although I thought about pitching a graphic novel unit to the power that be at my school, I decided that it would be better to shift to the novels and start hunting for one that could work in place of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.

So, once again, here are (the next three of) the 12 books I cracked open during summer 2015!

The 12 Books I Read This Summer, Part I: Indulging in my graphic novels

One of the greatest ironies of my life as an English teacher is that I have no time to read for myself. I mean, I've read Shakespeare's The Tempest five or six times in the past four years, I've read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird about the same and I've read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson slightly fewer times only because I'm not using it this year. In fact, many of the books I'm about to share with you I read because I was looking for a worthy replacement for Speak. Some of these books were duds (I read them until I determined that they wouldn't work in class with my students) but some of them I was reading purely for my own enjoyment.

Now, a quick note about this post and the series that follows it: I began writing this as one continuous post and, before I got to #5, it was already much bigger and ungainly than I anticipated. So for the sake of brevity and theme, I've broken the list into parts (and you can find part ii here, part iii here, and part iv here). Please don't feel like you need to read all of them; you're more than welcome to use the tags in the right-hand column or at the bottom of the post to just read about recommendations you may already like.

Without further ado, here are (the first 3 of) the 12 books I cracked open during summer 2015: