May 2010 Archives

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."