Boy, it would be cool to have nothing at all to do all summer long but read. I’d go for that in a heartbeat. I have been reading (every chance I get) and I’ve jumped back on the Goodreads bandwagon to track my books.
Two of my kids have summer-reading assignments. Middle Sister’s school has a “One Book, One School” policy where students, faculty and staff all read the same book for the summer. This year it’s The Hunger Games. While at first I thought the school was selling out by choosing a popular book like that, I’ve changed my tune; I read the book (and the rest of the series) and there is a LOT in there that high-school students can discuss and analyze–and not just in English class.
Little Brother is required to read two books. One, A Dog’s Life, is required, and he has a generous list of others from which he must choose one more. He’s worked his way through most of that list (Encyclopedia Brown, anything from Dan Gutman’s “Baseball Card” series, and a few others) but he steadfastly refuses to touch one of the books: Charlotte’s Web.
I’d almost let him take a pass on that if he’d said that it’s a girls’ book. But he has not used that as an excuse. “It’s too big” doesn’t fly with me, since last summer he read all the Harry Potter books. Then he tried, “It’s a children’s book!”
“Yes, and you’re a children,” I retorted, using grammatical incorrectness to make a point.
Since he’s in the middle of A Dog’s Life, I asked him how that one was going. He said that so far it’s a sad story, and launched into a long tale about dogs being left by the side of the road by “one of the wives in the couple,” which led Big Brother to muse that this is really a book about Mormons.