Are You There God? It's Me, Monday!

(Judy Blume Doll, from UneekDollDesigns)

The remnants of devastation from reading A Little Life are almost out of my system. Thank goodness, because I was beginning to feel a bit haunted!

I did finish two books last week: Charming Billy by Alice McDermott and Here by Richard McGuire. Hopefully I’ll have reviews up for those shortly. I have also started Susan Engel’s The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood – so I’m adding a little bit of nonfictiony sauce on what has otherwise been a spring full of fiction.

I have two other books on my leaning stack for this week. In the I’m-late-to-the-party category, Hilary St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven finally came in from the library. It arrived just as I was finishing A Little Life, but I just couldn’t take on dystopia after reading such a sorrowful novel. I also want to read Euphoria by Lily King. Both of those novels just came out in paperback, so I’ll let you know if they’re good choices for your summer reading plans.

But the big news is that I’m going to go see Judy Blume on Thursday! I can’t explain how giddy this makes me. I have such a visceral memory of reading and re-reading Blubber under my covers in elementary school.  For young readers at that time, it was rare to find the real world of childhood in a book. Blume’s novels allowed me to “get lost” in reading for the first time.

I think that Judy Blume’s books are now seen as “literature,” but I don’t think that was always the case. My memory is that a Judy Blume novel was not something you’d find in a leveled book bin in your classroom or stamped with a seal of high adult regard. I read Judy Blume on my own, somewhat obsessively, furtively.

I keep coming back to Momster’s question about her eleven year old’s summer reading. It’s no secret that reading is good for you, like kale. But this week I started thinking about the kind of books I did read as a child – Judy Blume books included – and I’m guessing that not a single one of them would have fallen on an approved summer reading list.

I have wonderful memories of riding my 3 speed to the drug store to buy paperback books. Crappy paperbacks! They cost a couple of bucks and were maybe 200 pages long. If I had a friend with me, we’d each buy one and then trade.

Here’s one that I remember reading:

(Did boys look like that in your school?? Gah! Chest hair! I’m thinking that he may have been held back…)

I’m fairly sure that my mother didn’t puff up with pride at this particular reading selection. I’m also certain that the books I picked weren’t aligned with my reading level.  In short, they weren’t kale. But oh, did I read like crazy! I wonder if I became such a good reader – and more importantly, someone who LOVES reading – because adults and their agendas stayed out of it.

 

Judy Blume is in her 70s now. I know that she’ll have an audience of nostalgic middle aged groupies – grown-ups whose memories of summer reading do not include sticker charts and incentive plans and progress toward higher scores on next fall’s Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment.

And YES, I most certainly plan to read Blume’s new novel for adults, In The Unlikely Event. I'm guessing I won't be able to get it for $2 at the drugstore, however. 

(It's Monday! What Are You Reading is hosted by Book Journey. I'm winging it while she's on hiatus)

Dear Corn Syrup: Adventures on the Summer Slide

I wasn’t planning on doing another Dear Corn Syrup column so soon, but some questions are time sensitive! This one is for all you parents out there.

Dear Corn Syrup, 

How can I get my 11 year old kid to read a book? The screens are so alluring and the summer so long. What would be irresistible to him? He was a huge Harry Potter fan at one point. A year ago, he tore through the whole The Giver series. Can't find anything that captivates him these days.

Thanks,

The Momster

Dear Momster,

I am sorry to report that medium sized children are not especially lovely. They are too old to sit in your lap but too young to drive to store and get you a pint of Ben and Jerry’s when you need one. They need to be reminded to change their underwear. They consistently smell like armpit and roll their eyes.

I’m sure that there’s a mother on your Facebook newsfeed who built a “reading castle” in her backyard out of recycled crystal. She is claiming that her children are in there right this very minute reading Proust.  Please realize that she posted that picture to make the rest of us feel badly about our parenting. I bet you all the money I make from this book blog that as soon as she got onto Facebook to brag about it, her children snuck off to play video games. No matter what you hear, most of us do not spend our summers with kids who look like this:

As a caveat, I do need to mention that I am not a reading teacher or a librarian or even a particularly successful parent. But something that I do know is that the most irresistible thing for your eleven year old would be to get into a battle with you over reading. One way for him to become the center of your universe and to suck up all the family’s attention is to raise the concern that he might someday be an illiterate adult man living in your basement.

Some kids prefer reading to doing just about anything else. You probably know some kids like that.  She might be sitting on the playground with a book. Sometimes he gets into trouble at school for reading novels instead of doing class work. I’m sure her parents worry that she doesn’t run around outside enough, but they are likely relieved that the worst thing that will happen is that she will grow up be an academic or a book blogger.

But there is another kind of reader, and both of my kids fall into this camp. They enjoy reading when they do it. They read well. They can answer you when you ask them what books they like. But their idea of a really good day doesn’t involve reading. They would certainly rather play video games than read, and they can get derailed when reading at school is too much about this:

If you are a person who was the kind of kid who would rather read than do just about anything else, it is difficult to accept that reading won’t be the same kind of pleasure for your kid as it was for you. But I do think that it can be a different kind of pleasure. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Still, I totally appreciate that you don’t want to spend your summer doing this:

Here are some strategies (that I’ve used!) that might make your summer mothering just a bit easier:

1)   Don’t make reading the antithesis of screen time. Your kid thinks of screen time as fun, and you don’t want reading to be the opposite of fun. Maybe reading could be part of screen time. Read the book, then watch the movie! Your kid can decide if the movie representation was faithful to the book, or if it deviated. 

      Here's a list of middle grade books that were turned into movies. And you can find a similar list of movies that came from YA novels here and here and here. 

2)   You and your son could read at the same time. I’m sure you have your own leaning stack to tackle, right? What if you made summer reading a time that you and he spend together rather than something he has to do alone? Plus, you'd be modeling the idea that reading isn't a punishment inflicted on children by nagging mothers. Instead, he'll see it's what happy adults do for fun.

  

3)   Add sugar (corn syrup?). Nothing makes a book go down more smoothly than a tall glass of lemonade. The pinker the better. There is no better way to make reading feel like a treat than to...make it a treat!

For what it’s worth, my kids were game for just about every dystopian Hunger Games-esque spinoff at that age. Maybe the sugary drink will entice your son to read the first in one of these series? (Plus, see #1 above. All these books turn into movies eventually).

If he’s into middle grade books rather than dystopian teen tragedies, there are some good suggestions on this middle school librarian's blog. He could scroll through and find three books that he'd be willing to try. Note that the blogger has category lists at the top (sports, adventure, etc.)

The good news is that everything’s going to be OK, no matter what kind of reading summer you have. Your son has made it to the age where he does enjoy books that he chooses on his own. He might not tell you that he enjoys them, and his choices will probably annoy you. But anyone who can "tear through" a series is already a reader.  That means that if he ends up living in your basement as an adult, at least he will be literate.

Yours,

Corn Syrup

The Joy of Reading

My book club is meeting tonight. We are discussing To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris. I will admit to quitting after 100 pages of this one, for the simple reason that it did not give me any joy. I can often find joy in an unpleasant book, especially if I’m going to get the opportunity to whine about it in community. But the labor of getting through this one was greater than the thrill I’d get from dissecting it later.

Joy is really at the heart of it for me. I felt joy as a kid when my mother read to me at night. I feel joy when I find an un-put-downable book. I feel joy when I read something outside of my usual zone and find that it's amazing. I feel joy when a favorite author comes out with a new title. If I didn’t feel joy when I read, I probably wouldn’t do it.

That brings me to an ongoing concern: I worry that my kids, or any kids, will not find that kind of joy. In particular, I worry that school might rip the joyful potential of reading right out of them.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this topic as the months go on, but I thought I’d share a story about my kids’ experience in middle school Language Arts. Last year my boys were in sixth grade and encountered the Common Core for the first time. As you probably have heard, the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts bring an increasing emphasis on nonfiction reading as well as on real-world literacy skills.  One of these real-world skills, it turns out, is book clubbing! Woo! Well, more specifically, the skill is “engaging effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade level topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing your own clearly.”

The class activity to address this standard was participating in a “Nonfiction Book Club.” The only requirement was that the book be rooted in truth and that all members had to agree on the selection. One of my kids was in a group of four boys, and they chose a book on explosions. I’m not sure, but I think the title was simply Explosions! (with exclamation point).  It concerned things that explode, the processes of explosions, and the noises that explosions make (Kaboom!).  So the group was successful at finding a mutually satisfying “informational text” to anchor the conversation.

But wait, this is school, and everything must be assessed. And I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, so the first question in my mind was, “How do you get an "A" in book club?”

I got my answer:

The column in the middle indicates the characteristics of a book club discussion that would yield its members a grade of “meeting standard.” To you and me, that means the student would get a "B." The column on the right indicates the characteristics of a book club discussion that would yield its members a grade of “exceeding standard.” And that, my friends, means “A.”

Since getting an A required using 2 of 3 of the “listening strategies” on the list, the boys decided to focus on “courteous attention” and “pausing for at least five seconds” between comments. Here’s how the conversation went:

Boy #1: I really liked it when that building exploded.

(Boys #2, #3, and #4 staring, immobile, with eyes open wide to maintain eye contact and stillness)

Boy #2 (counting): One, two, three, four, five.

Boy #3: Yeah. Me, too.

Boy #2 (counting): One, two, three, four, five

Boy #4: Dude, that must have been amazing.

Boy #2 (counting): One, two, three, four, five.

Boy #3: Dude, yeah.

Boy  #2 (counting): One, two, three, four, five.

Boy #1: My eyes hurt. Can I blink now?

 The good news is that my kid got a shiny "A" in nonfiction book club. He promised to work on “asking meaningful questions” at the next opportunity in order to further develop his skills (e.g. Are explosions still cool if people get hurt?).  I’m not so sure he experienced the joy of reading, but I’m pretty sure he racked up more evidence that adults and their expectations are ridiculous.

I, meanwhile, will be practicing “pausing for five seconds” tonight at my own book club. That will probably happen as I’m stuffing food in my face, joyfully. I’ll let you know if I meet standard.