June Coffee Date
It’s June, hooray! I always have a sense of freedom when school is out for summer. I have more time to leisurely sip my tea in the morning and enjoy a coffee date! Thanks to Coco and Deborah as always for hosting. If we were having coffee together… I would ask you how you enjoyed middle school. For me, “enjoy” was definitely not the correct word. Is there a word that means “suffered permanent damage to one’s self esteem”? That’s the one I’m looking for. Seventh grade ties for the worst year of my life (the other being the year my daughter was two, but that’s a whole other topic.) Both my kids loved seventh grade, which boggles my mind. It may partially be because they didn’t have to take PE, which was the worst bane of my existence in middle school. But I also think the schools are doing a much better job of preventing bullying. Do you remember the Judy Blume book Blubber? When I reread it as an adult, I noticed that most of the really bad stuff happened while the kids were unsupervised during lunch. How odd, I thought, that they would allow the kids to eat lunch alone in a classroom. But when I look back on my own middle school experience, we were strangely unsupervised a lot of the time as well. I think the schools now realize that packs of middle school kids are not to be trusted, and have cracked down accordingly. Whatever the reasons, my daughter is actually SAD that seventh grade is over! Go figure. Speaking of books, I just finished this one: WOW. This was fascinating and intense. Dystopian novels aren’t usually my thing, but I read about this on another blog and it sounded so interesting I decided to read it. In the futuristic world of this novel, Roe vs. Wade has been overturned, abortion constitutes murder, and convicted felons are injected with a virus that alters the color of their skin to match the class of their crime. The main character, Hannah, is now a Red after being convicted of murder (having an abortion.). Life for chromes is fraught with danger, and this is a suspenseful story. When I was close to the end my husband tried to start a conversation and I was like “Get away from me! I have to see how this ends!” This book was written in 2011, and it’s interesting that a topic so current in 2022 is part of a dark and dangerous “future” that the author imagined eleven years ago. Thank you to whoever it was that recommended this book- I can’t remember which blog it was (if you’re reading, please let me know it was you in the comment section!) I’m almost through my library holds, and I have another one waiting for me, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. This is another one that got some amazing reviews, so I’m excited to start it. AND, the next Cormoran Strike mystery (by Robert Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling) comes out in August! I already have a library hold on it and am counting down the days. That’s it for this coffee date! What are you reading now? Ever read Blubber? What was your experience in middle school?