I love sharks. I will read anything with a shark on the cover. A book about the Megalodon, ancestor of the Great White Shark? Yes, please. I picked up and read this book around 2010. I still have the physical copy I read on my bookshelf. I didn’t remember much of it, but I remember enjoying it a lot, and I want to read the sequels, so I gave it a reread. It’s as good as I remember.
This book is a whirlwind of a read. It starts heavy and it keeps up its intensity to the end. I read huge chunks of the book in a sitting because I found it so difficult to put down. It reads like a movie, carefully plotted, with excitement at every turn. I hear this book has been made into a movie, and I kind of want to watch it, but I doubt it will be as good as this book.
I watched the Dexter TV series on Netflix a while back, and after discovering it was based on a book series, I sought out the books. I have three of them on my Kindle. I add books I want to my Amazon Wishlist and snag them when they drop in price, and the first three must have dropped below $3, or I wouldn’t have them. They have been on my to-read list for a while, anyway. I am just now getting around to reading one. I can’t tell you how good it feels to read something I want to read, for fun rather than for school. 
It occurred to me that in all of my years running this blog, I never introduced myself. I’ve just been this rando writing about books. Let’s fix that.
I recently taught Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix to two Eighth Grade ELA classes. I have essentially read this book three times: on my own before teaching it, and aloud to two different classes. I’ve had enough. I did not like this book. It has been taught by other teachers at my school for years, and when I was given my classes, I was given the book. I made the most of it. In this entry, I’m going to tell you what I did not like about this book. However, acknowledging its merit to student, I’m going to discuss the benefits of teaching it as well.