What should I read now?

1. What should I read now?

2. Being in Charge • Lawn Boy - This short and hilarious tale pitches an ordinary kid with an old riding lawn mower into a dizzying ascent up the financial ladder. His sights set no higher than a new inner tube for his bike, the young narrator is thrilled to make $60 in one day, mowing his neighbors' lawns. Just as demand for his services skyrockets, he meets Arnold, an honest, home-based stockbroker who becomes his business manager . . . the thousands of dollars he earns goes into some wildly successful investments--including sponsorship of a rising prizefighter whose help comes in handy when the burgeoning enterprise attracts a shakedown artist. • Flying Solo - What happens when a sixth-grade class is left unsupervised for a whole day? One might imagine that anything but learning would occur. But when a class usually led by a gifted teacher is left to its own devices, something unusual happens: when the substitute teacher fails to show, the children in Mr. Fabiano's class decide to run the class by themselves.

3. Different Time, Different Place • Lisa’s War - Lisa is 12 years old when the Nazis invade Denmark. Angered at her country's surrendering without a fight, Lisa and her family each join the resistance, doing their part for their country while trying to hide their activities from the others. Lisa starts with a small assignment of delivering some pamphlets (and finds that frightening enough), but by the end she is helping to organize a mass evacuation of Danish Jews to Sweden. • Black Star, Bright Dawn - When her father is injured while training for the Iditarod (the famous 1200-mile dogsled race between Anchorage and Nome), Bright Dawn eagerly takes his place. She is a strong, courageous heroine--crossing rivers, mountain ranges, and vast stretches of frozen tundra--with her team of dogs, including the lead Black Star. While the rush of wind and relentless, blinding stretches of ice are exhilarating, the dangers involved make Bright Dawn realize that it's not only the race, but her life that she's entrusting to her team of dogs.

4. It’s Always Something! • Joey Pigza Loses Control - The disaster-prone Joey is in charge of his attention deficit disorder and ready to greet the world as a normal kid--with the help of his new and improved meds, of course. Now that Joey has a handle on his actions, he feels prepared to face the most mysterious member of his family--his estranged father, Carter Pigza. He convinces his skeptical mom to let him spend part of his summer vacation getting to know his dad again. The only problem is that Joey's dad is just as wired as Joey used to be. • Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing - Nine-year-old Peter Warren Hatcher has resigned himself to losing the battle of sibling rivalry; his two-and-a-half-year-old brother Fudge manages to get all the attention -- upstaging Peter in front of his father's business associates, ruining the poster he has made for a school project, getting lost at the movies and (the unkindest cut of all) swallowing his pet turtle.

5. What Really Happened? • Something Upstairs - when 12-year-old Kenny Huldorf moves with his family to Providence, Rhode Island, he finds himself embroiled in the century-old murder of a teenage slave named Caleb. Not only is Kenny haunted by the injustice of the murder, but also by the ghost of Caleb himself, who summons Kenny back in time to the early 19th Century, where the boy must solve Caleb's murder to return to his own century. • The Summer I Shrank my Grandmother – Nelly is spending the summer at a seaside cottage with her grandmother while her scientist parents are away on research projects across the country. She is an avid experimenter herself, and is delighted to discover a mysterious antique chemistry set in the cottage basement. With it, she concocts an anti-aging formula, and secretly applies it to her grandmother. It works only too well, and Nelly soon finds Grandma growing rapidly younger: first a 30-year-old, then a teenager, a 10-year-old, a toddler, and finally a fast-disappearing infant, all within a few days.

6. Definitely Not Ordinary • Boots and the Seven Leaguers - It all started when Gog ventured into a dangerous, haunted alley and ripped off a poster of his favorite rock group, Boots and the Seven Leaguers. He knew he was taking a terrible risk, messing around with magic, trying to finagle a ticket to the big concert at Rhymer's Bridge, even making a deal with a greenkid. But what do you expect from an adolescent troll? • Bunnicula - This story is told from the point of view of a dog named Harold. It all starts when Harold's human family, the Monroes, goes to see the movie Dracula, and young Toby accidentally sits on a baby rabbit wrapped in a bundle on his seat. How could the family help but take the rabbit home and name it Bunnicula? Chester, the literate, sensitive, and keenly observant family cat, soon decides there is something weird about this rabbit. Pointy fangs, the appearance of a cape, black-and-white coloring, nocturnal habits … it sure seemed like he was a vampire bunny.

7. Time to Laugh! • Dear Dumb Diary - They were just a soft, ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans until Jamie Kelly tried them on . . . Then they became a tight, scratchy, slightly smelly, and utterly ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans with an embarrassing haunting problem. Do the pants have the power to soothe a vengeful beagle, vanquish The Prettiest Girl in the World, or make the wearer irresistible to the eighth cutest guy in the grade? Are the haunted pants so dazzling they can hurt and maybe permanently damage the eyes of onlookers? Or are the haunted pants just, well, haunted (which is kind of gross when you think about it)? • The Classroom at the End of the Hall – This book focuses on peculiar happenings such as students' encounters with such creatures as a genie who appears from a cloud of chalk dust and grants the ill-conceived wish of the class "Pain-in-the-Neck" to become the teacher; a hairy pest that takes over a girl's hopelessly messy desk; a witch who upstages the class braggart during a Halloween party; and a bug that whispers answers in a girl's ear, breaking her of the habit of copying off her classmates' papers.

8. Pick a partner and pick a book! Start reading! Plan your project. Have fun!