Kristy R. Langstraat-Bolte

It looks like I forgot to write up book 1 of the series Kathryn and I are reading! It was called Sisters also by Raina Telgemeier! And I just realized there aren’t 3 books in the series, there are acutally 5!!!

This was another book that Kathryn picked out from the school library and we read every night! It was the 2nd book in a series and it’s called Smile by Raina Telgemeier. I loved the first 2 books, and now Kathryn and I can’t wait to check out the 3rd book from our local library!

This book was called Lawrence Welk: The Life and Legacy of the Famous Bandleader and Television Host by Charles Rivers Editors. This is actually the 2nd Lawrence Welk book that I have read. I don’t really watch his shows reruns, but my dad watches them all over and over again! I have seen some and they are good, but his life it pretty interesting!

This book was called The Secret Message by Anna Stuart and was very good! It was during the Holocaust but instead it followed the people of Poland who were occupied, and it’s actually another story within the Holocaust and WW2 that I didn’t know about! How the Polish people created their own armies and fought back, and were supposed to be aided by the Russians, only to be left on their own! So many died, but it was just another amazing story and hard to believe that it’s true!

So this is a book that Kathryn checked out of her school library and I read to her! It was really good. Although it was in comic strip type instead of regular reading. I used to not like that, but now it’s kinda fun reading a book that way and a lot of the books the kids seem to read now a days are like that! And I’m definitely counting it in my 500 book count!!

This book is another one of my Elvis books! It was called Being Elvis: A Lonely Life by Ray Connolly. Obviously, if you can’t tell I love Elvis and want to know everything. I’ve read a ton of books now, and I feel like I already know the majority that there is to know, but every so often I learn another little fact or tidbit, and I will just keep reading until I’ve learned everything about Elvis that I possibly can!

So this book was one Kathryn brought home from her school library, called Cat Found by Ingrid Lee. She checked it out because it had a picture of a cute kitty on it. At first it was ok, about homeless kitties, and good kids who are trying to take care of them and help them. But then it got dark with a town of people who hated them and wanted to kill them all. Then in one chapter a poor mother kitty gets shot, while it is having it’s kittens, I couldn’t read it to her anymore and she didn’t want to have it read to her as it would give her nightmares. So we stopped reading it, but I just had to finish it. Luckily it ended up better, but I still couldn’t get that sad part out of my head.

So how we got this next book is very interesting! The first week in October, my dad, Kathryn and I went to Wisconsin Dells. We stayed at a hotel we’ve never stayed at before, it was in downtown Dells and called Blackhawk. Of course one night while swimming Kathryn made friends with 2 kids. The played for hours but I had gone back to the room to do some stuff. When tons of time had passed and my dad and Kathryn hadn’t come back I went back to the pool to check on them! My dad was talking to the mom of the 2 kids. The kids and Kathryn liked each other so much the mom had written all her info down so that Kathryn and them could connect on kids messenger! So sometime after we got back I contacted the mom and we got our kids connected. Then one day on her facebook page I see that she has written a book! So my dad and I get the book and read it! My dad read it first, and he loved it, so then I read it, and I also loved it! Seriously, this was a first time published author, and this book is so good, such a fast read, and it’s a really unique story you don’t hear about all the time! So I highly recommend this book! It is called Chateau Merlot and her name is Kari Pohar. Give it a read!!!

This book was called Elvis In Vegas: How The King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show by Richard Zoglin. It was definitely an interesting book and I enjoyed it very much, but not because it was an Elvis book, surprisingly enough it wasn’t even about Elvis all that much! It was more about the full history of how Las Vegas became Las Vegas, and how and when the hotels were built and about the other entertainers like the Rat Pack! Like I said, super interesting, just not what I was expecting, but I still really enjoyed it!!

So we actually read this book when Kathryn was at Haskin for the One School One Book program, but she had checked it out from her library, so we read it again! It was called The Adventures of a South Pole Pig by Chris Kurtz. I decided that since I am reading her chapter books at night before bed, that I need to count it as my books of 500 before 50 so here we go! It was a good book, a little sad here and there, but pretty interesting!

This was another Elvis book called Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him by Alanna Nash. I really enjoyed this one because it’s his same story only this time and talked about every single woman he ever dated, hooked up with or was a girlfriend of his, and it talked about it from their perspective! It was really interesting. I don’t think I will ever tire reading about Elvis, so it’s fun that every book I’ve read has been from a different point of view, but in the end they are really all the same!

Even though this is technically a small kids book, A Little Golden Book to be exact. It was a book that I purchased for myself, even though I did read it to Kathryn! It’s because it’s called Disney Figment! Figment is my all time favorite Disney character (after Dumbo as a child) so when I saw this book I had to have it! Again, I may have liked it more than Kathryn, LOL…..

So this book was a chapter book that I read to Kathryn many nights before her bedtime. A chapter a night, so figured I should include it, seeing as I am the one who read it! It’s called The Wish List: The Worst Fairy Godmother Ever! I think sometimes Kathryn may have gotten bored, but I really enjoyed it and couldn’t wait to see what would happen! A fun, cute little story for sure!

This book was called The War Orphan by Anna Stuart! It was another Holocaust book but it was a little bit different. Yes the characters were in Auschwitz, but it was more about what happened after they were liberated when a mother and daughter were separated, and the daughter had to try to move on, while the mother was doing everything in her power to find and be reunited with her daughter. I don’t want to say what happened, but it was a very moving book, and an amazing look at what Jews went through even after the war was over. In a way for them it wasn’t over, even though all other people got to just go back to their lives, almost like nothing had even been happening!