I started this blog two years ago as a demo for my high school students. They were asked to use their blogs as a way to document and share reviews of their independent reading. My hope was that they would create an online dialogue around books. That first experiment was fairly successful, as the students' blogs themselves can attest.

My own blogging was a less successful enterprise (the two year gap in posts speaks for itself). I am naturally an introvert, leery to put myself out there in the vastness of the web. I am a busy professional, parent, wife, daughter, sister, friend. Who has enough time to read, let alone write about my reading?

At the same time, in these two years, I have also made a major transition from teaching high school students to teaching future teachers. And if there is a mantra that must permeate teacher ed, it is "walk the walk." So here is the official relaunch of my blog.

The original concept remains (at least for now). This will primarily be a space where I document my reading. The major shift is that I intend to broaden my notion of reportable reading. While I was preaching the idea that all reading was valuable, I still let my bias toward certain types of "literary" books guide my original concept for the blogging assignment.

The importance and power of reading takes on many facets in my daily life. I read with my daughter, Beatrice, almost every night now. I read the education news voraciously, and try to keep up on my professional journals and book titles regarding teaching English as well. Those non-fiction forays are a key element of my reading, and hopefully this modeling will benefit my pre-service teachers. And yes, I still can't help but pick up the latest hot young adult novel, or the occasional Booker Prize winner. So in the spirit of exploring and expanding my repertoire of teaching and technology tools--let blogging (re)commence.

The Latehomecomer

I am reading The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang. I am about halfway in, and so far I am captivated by this powerful story of a Hmong family's escape from Laos after the American War In Vietnam. It is intense and vividly written: both a loving tribute her family, and a haunting story of the life and death struggle which many Hmong families who made this perilious journey faced.

One moment that illustrated this intensity is early in the book. Ms. Yang's parents had narrowly escaped a North Vietnamese prison camp, and were attempting to flee from Laos to Thailand by crossing the Mekong River. Because her father was the youngest, he had no money to purchase a raft like his brothers. Nonetheless, his own mother refuses her seat on any of her older sons' rafts. She explains her devotion to her family:"He was the youngest, you see. And he was poor and I was his mother, but I was poor too. So we got to the river and I could see it glitter and I could not see how to cross it. Your uncles took their wives and their children on the rafts with them; they all would have made room for me. I could not go with them. Your father had no raft. I was his mother. I chose to die with him" (page 36).

This part made me cry. It made me think about the fierce devotion to family evident in this book. As a member of a big family, and a fairly new mom myself, this is a value with which I can strongly identify. However, the circumstances of this moment are also a window for me into another life and time, and to the horrors that war brings to families.