GreenBeanTeenQueen

Please welcome Tami Lewis Brown to GreenBeanTeenQueen! Tami is the author of the middle grade novel, The Map of Me . Tami has a great post about libraries that warms my heart! I hope you love it too! Why I Read Dangerously—or How the Sidney Eline Library Saved My Life The motto on my website says READ DANGEROUSLY. It’s a directive I take seriously—both as a reader and a writer. Read with open eyes and an open mind. Seek out new writers, new genres, new ideas. Read to foster life long learning. For me reading dangerously isn’t about reading books with “bad language” or drugs or promiscuous behavior. It’s REAL danger. It’s reading books that make you think. But I wasn’t always an adventurous reader. In fact, the odds were against me being any kind of reader at all. Decoding came hard. By second grade I was barely keeping pace with Dick and Jane and the Sparrows reading group while the Bluebirds and Cardinals soared into chapter books. No one in my family was an enthusiast...

Please welcome Uma Krishnaswami, author of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything ! I love hearing about libraries, especially libraries around the world-I hope you do too! In Praise of Two Libraries, Forty Years and Half a World Apart Libraries were not a part of my early childhood. I grew up in several cities in various parts of India and public libraries were not as central to communities are they are in the US. We had a lending library in one of the neighborhoods we lived in, where you paid a small fee for each book you borrowed. It dealt mostly in comic books, which I borrowed from time to time despite the fact that my parents disapproved of them heartily. I had a small collection of children's books that I just read over and over. When I got tired of them my parents were quite willing to buy me more. They didn't buy me everything I ever asked for, but they never said no to books. I was 15 when a library became a part of my life. We had moved to the mountain state of Himachal Pr...