MUS has a good summer reading program, but for people who really like to read, the list is way too short. Here are some voluntary book choices selected by our book clubs for some additional good reading:
For my club, which was LS but is now rising 8th and 9th graders ("Guys Read"): Read The Door Within by Wayne Thomas Batson; also finish the Lord of the Rings trilogy if you haven't already done so. There will be a new movie version of The Hobbit in the next couple of years, and we want to be ready.
Mrs. Crosby's club ("The Finer Things"): Going Bovine by Libba Bray and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Several people are already looking forward to being in this group, which is usually made up of juniors and seniors.
Mr. Reese has agreed to sponsor a new Harry Potter book club in the fall, so look over those books again during the summer if you'd like to participate.
I'll try to put out a list of suggested summer reading before the end of school. If you want to recommend a book that we never read this year, send it to me and I'll include it. And if you still want to go to a movie, we'll meet and decide next week.
I also was lucky enough to live across the street from my parents’ college and have access to the children’s reading room, set up for teachers in training, and filled with books for all ages. My friend Debra and I spent one summer, when we were 9 or 10, riding our bikes to that library every day and reading right there in that room—no need to check anything out! We had a good public library in town and we used it too, but the college library was right there and the reading room was a little hideaway we had all to ourselves.
When I try to imagine a world without physical books, where everything is digital and electronic, I always wonder how our kids would be exposed to the stories? Would they choose to pick up an e-reader and scroll up and down on a tiny screen, or would they just default to the video game and television set sitting right in front of them? How would they be aware that the books exist? I know they say that a person’s educational success can be predicted by the number of books in their parents’ house,* so what would happen to the kids’ intellects if there were no physical books to look at? That’s one of many reasons I think the physical book will never go away, although e-books are fine for some purposes.
Wal-Mart is said to have a display system called “Actionality” where likely impulse purchases are put right out in front of the consumers in order to attract their attention and sell more items, whether they were intending to get those things or not. Books need to be out in front of kids, where they can see them, pick them up, and flip through them. Else they will probably never know that a lot of these books ever existed.
*“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports [a] study in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books."
Our final book for the year will be The Demon King by Cinda Chima, author of the Warrior Heir trilogy. The one copy we have was checked out immediately, but we're getting another one, and people will circulate them pretty quickly. We talked about The Looking Glass Wars this week and several people had finished all three books of that trilogy. We were sorry that several couldn't make it because of schedule conflicts. I personally enjoyed comparing it with Alice in Wonderland, which if you haven't read it is much cooler than you might think. But this story takes it way on down the track and has tons of action and suspense.
At our final meeting on April 23, we'll have pizza and will find out about our end-of-the-year party for all book club members school-wide. See you then!
The protagonist of this book was in Memphis last week, speaking at St. George's Independent School. A student's grandfather had heard him speak and paid for him to come visit the school. The new Change the World book club had already selected What Is the What by Dave Eggers, and it's too bad we didn't know he was coming--we might have been able to arrange a visit here too. Well, maybe next year. Valentino Achak Deng is a real person who spent 17 years running and hiding in Sudan while horrendous wars and deprivation assailed him. Then, when he was able to escape to the US, he was assaulted in his Atlanta apartment and robbed. Since then he's been the subject of the Dave Eggers book (which is based on the truth but had to be written as fiction because of the impossibility of reconstructing a factual account of the details of Deng's childhood), and Deng has become a widely traveled speaker. If you get a chance to read it, it might be one of those books that changes your view of the world.
Update: We postponed our meeting and are trying to see if more people will read it. It's hard to put down--funny, sad, and thought-provoking at the same time.
The Lower School Guys Read group met on March 1 and discussed Michael Grant's book Gone. One of the members had recently read The Prince and the Pauper, which led to a discussion of books involving twins. The treatment in Gone is about as different as you can get from the Mark Twain book, but the guys are about the same age. Everyone liked Gone and said it was their favorite book club book so far. It's been followed by Hunger, and at least two more books are set to be published about the FAYZ, where everyone over the age of 14 suddenly disappears. An older book about twins that you might want to read is The Other by Thomas Tryon. It has a great, scary movie counterpart.
For March, we'll be reading the first book in a new series by Frank Beddor: The Looking-Glass Wars. No one had really heard much about Steampunk, but I had brought up the new genre because of the Scott Westerfeld book Leviathan. Seamus nominated the Beddor book, and now it turns out that there's a bit of Steampunk action in this book--it involves robotic creatures and contraptions during Victorian times. On top of that, it's well-timed to coincide with the opening of Johnny Depp's new Alice in Wonderland movie. But this book has a lot characters you won't see in the movie: Hatter Madigan, Dodge Anders, someone named Redd, and the generals Doppel and Ganger. (Yes and someone named Alyss....)
Part of the fun of this book club has been the fact that almost all of our choices have been made into movies, after we read them. It's fun to compare the books and movies, and it's challenging to keep up with all the comments made by our garrulous members. Next meeting is planned for Friday, March 26.
The LS book club is going to meet on Monday, March 1, instead of Friday, Feb. 26.
The US Change the World book club will meet on March 24 in the conference room instead of March 3.
