Howdy! Welcome to the June Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour. We’re talking Beach Reads this month. I’m not heading to the beach this summer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a perilously tall TBR pile.

I’m currently reading something decidedly un-beach-like on my Kindle. John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. It’s eye-opening, to say the least, but, unfortunately, it all rings true. I choose to believe most people participating in the education system, especially at the teacher level, are not intentionally seeking the results Gatto says are happening, but I can see it, at best, as an unintended consequence. I can also see that at some level, I’m not certain what level that would be, this is an intentional process to ensure we have a compliant work force for Walmart and the service industry in general. My husband recognized this at the junior college level (that classroom teaching was secondary to the true purpose of churning out compliant employees).

At some level, I must have recognized it, too, because virtually no job I ever held matched my education and training. Everything I did was learn as I went.

I’ve derailed my post. Beach Reads. Right.

I have a lot of books waiting to be read on my Kindle. Some have been thumbed aside, but several others are on my, “I do want to read this” list.  They are:

Secrets: The Steamship Chronicles, Book One, by Margaret McGaffey Fisk

Paralan’s Children, by Katharina Gerlach

Crow Hollow, by Michael Wallace

A Dark Lure, by Loreth Anne White

Close to the Bone, by Stuart MacBride

The Jungle Inside, by Avril Sabine

What lies in wait on your pile of books to read?