MAYBE THE LAST 3 BOOKS

I apologize for not updating sooner, but I have been very, very busy. Part of that has been that I have been doing a lot of reading.

Over the past week or so, I have read three new books. They are called Fever 1793, which I wrote about in my last post when I had just begun to read it, The School Story by Andrew Clements, and The Bookstore Mouse by Peggy Christian.

The School Story is about Natalie Nelson who is a 12-year-old who writes a novel. Her mother is an editor at a publishing company and Natalie really wants to publish her book but she doesn't want her mom to know that she wrote it, or people could say that she was giving her daughter special treatment at the publishing company. So she and her friend Zoe and her English teacher Mrs. Clayton make a "publishing club" and they get pen names (all except for Mrs. Clayton). It ends with Natalie's book being published and the people at the publishing company throw a publishing party. That is when Natalie tells her mom that she was the author.

The Bookstore Mouse is about a mouse that lives in a bookstore (obviously). He lives behind the reference section, protected by the books and a wall of words he took from his dictionary, while hiding from a cat. One day a man walks into the bookstore and takes a book that the mouse is leaning on. The mouse falls down to the bottom shelf. He reads a book which transports him into the book, which is about a scribe named Siegfried who lives in long-ago England. Siegfried and the mouse go on a quest to save the four troubadours of the village from the dragon Sensor. The dragon tries to make the troubadours forget their stories about dragon-slaying, and replace them with stories about dragon invincibility. It ends when the mouse flips through the book and finds the stories that the troubadours were forgetting. Siegfried writes them down, then throws them into the dragon's mouth. They explode inside the dragon, who dies. When The Bookstore Mouse ends, the mouse finds himself back in the bookstore, still trying to hide from the cat. But when the mouse tells him what happened to him, the cat wants to learn to read. So the mouse agrees to read him stories if he has freedom inside the bookstore. Sorry, that was so long, but it was a very eventful book. And I didn't even mention the part about the giant.

But you really want to know how long the books were.

Fever 1793 was 256 pages. The School Story was 196 pages. The Bookstore Mouse was 134 pages. That means I have read a total of 1536 pages so far on this Readathon.

If you are supporting me at a penny a page, you should now send $15.36 to the Writers Guild Foundation at 7000 W. Third St. , Los Angeles, CA 90048. You can make your check to the Writers Guild Foundation or the Actors Fund, and put "Industry Support Fund" on the check. If you have already send in some money, then you can subtract what you have already sent, to know what you should send now.

If you are supporting at more than a penny a page, first, thank you! (And thank you to the penny-a-page people, too!). You can multiply or use a calculator to figure out your total to send.

And if you said you were supporting by sending in a certain amount per month, it is now a new month.

Thank you to my two new supporters, Nancy and Bob. And thank you to my current supporters -- You know who you are!

These might be the last books I read for the readathon, because the strike might be over. I'm going to the Writers Guild meeting tonight with my parents, but I don't know if they will let me in, even though I am an "honorary" member. I might have to go to the child care place instead. But I will wear my WGA button no matter what.

Thank you again for supporting this wonderful readathon and all the people who are out of work because of the strike. If you all send in your pledged money, we will all have raised $1824.80 to help them.

When the strike is officially over, I will stop reading for the readathon. But I will still keep reading.

Thank you!