Summer Reading

My kids have Summer Reading assignments--and now, so do I.

Mine doesn't come with a test at the end, or a book report to write, or a poster to draw. It does, however, come with the promise of an intriguing online discussion.

That's because my Summer Reading is coming from the brand-new Lawn Chair Catechism series at Catholicmom.com.

We're reading Sherry Weddell's Forming Intentional Disciples:  The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus.

Learn how you can read along, or even join the discussion without reading the book. (Try THAT with your traditional Summer Reading assignment!) The series starts tomorrow, but you can still order the book at a deep discount--with free shipping--through June 6.

Find out more!

Summer Reading

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.

When In Doubt, Make It Up

My Kindle was on the table, in screen-saver mode.  Many of the screen-saver images feature famous authors.

"Anne Ghoul-berg!"  Little Brother exclaimed when he saw the picture on the screen.

"Who?"  I said, picking up the Kindle.  "This is Agatha Christie."

"Oh!  I thought it was Anne Ghoul-berg," he explained.

"Who's Anne Ghoul-berg?  Where did you hear of her?"

"In my mind," he replied proudly (I should have known).

I switched on the Kindle and resumed reading my book.  After a few quiet moments, Little Brother inquired, "Is there an Anne Ghoul-berg?"

Poetry Fan?

This morning I came upon a quote from one of my very favorite poems.  Despite the fact that I was an English major in college and grad school, I've never been a poetry reader.  Yet again and again, I've run into two or three poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and that makes me realize that there can be magic in poetry.

Here's Pied Beauty:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him. --Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918

Maybe the rest of the time I've just been reading the wrong poets.