Educator Appreciation Week

I totally took advantage of Educator Appreciation Week at Barnes & Noble. This week I bought

• Haunted and Choke by Chuck Palahniuk (Note: This is my second copy of Haunted. This is what I get for lending it to a former student. And I totally didn't realize there was a face on the cover that glows in the dark until I talked to one of the guys at the Barnes & Noble in Albuquerque who said it freaked him out when he was closing one night. He also said that the reason they had to start keeping all the Palahniuk behind the counter was because Palahniuk gives tips on how to steal books.)
• Blankets by Craig Thompson (Note: Clearly, I have a thing for graphic novels right now. Expensive obsession. But Flight looks really cool. And I want it.)
  
• Ball Peen Hammer by Adam Rapp and George O'Connor
• House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (Which I'm going to have to loan to an 8th grader who is not one of my students, but maybe I can get his English teacher to help me keep track of him. He's totally excited about it.)
• Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl (Note: This was for one of my book buddies, who saw it when she was at B&N the other day, surprised that Dahl wrote for adults. For the record, I didn't know that either and Matilda is still my favorite.)
• Tears of a Tiger by Sharon M. Draper (Note: This is my fourth copy of this book. Kids keep keeping it. If they read it, I guess I can't complain.)
• Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson (Note: I bought this one because Anderson wrote in her blog about how people in Kentucky and Indiana are going through the process of having the book removed from the school. I like being defiant in this way.)

So far I've finished Ball Peen Hammer and I'm about a third of the way through House of the Scorpion. And yes, I'm still working on the books that currently appear in my Shelfari list. Sooner or later, I'll get to Hunger Games, which I've heard about a few times in NCTE's Text Messages. I seriously considered picking up Paper Towns and replacing my copy of Looking for Alaska, both by John Green, the latter of which I lent to another teacher in my department and he never returned it.

Hi, my name is Eli and I'm a book addict.
Hi, Eli...