My Summer Reading List

My daughter, and now my granddaughter, are avid readers.  I just never was.  (Never mind that I was an English teacher!  I read enough American and English literature to keep me ahead of my game, but I was always busy doing other things.)

I've never been a fan of fiction. Oh, I read fiction to my classes, but if I were to pick out something to read in my spare time, it would be a biography or an account of an historical event.  Don't know why.  I guess I just like to read about things that are real.  (Truth is stranger than fiction!)  In any case, trying to keep up in conversations with my granddaughter, who often causes her mother to read the same books that she is reading, I've been prodded into the fiction world.  Last fall, I read Breaking Lenin's Nose, which was a short book written from the point of view of a youngster in Leninist Russia.  This last visit, I read two of Robin's picks on Megan's Kindle:  The Fault in Our Stars, and Wonder.

The Fault in Our Stars just came out in a movie.  In fact, it premiered the day before the family was to move...yet Megan and Denis took Robin to see it (it was that important to her).  The story is about a teenaged terminal cancer patient who is forced to go to a support group by her parents.  She is a practical kid...doesn't see that the group can possibly do her any good...but she goes and meets another cancer patient, seemingly in good health, with whom she falls in love.  They have an adventure whereby they are granted a dying wish by a foundation, and they choose to go to Amsterdam to meet a reluctant author whose book she adores.  Thereafter, the boy's cancer returns, in spades, and he ends up dying before she does.  It is a testament to strength and love and reality.  At one point, the main character, who is upset by the fact that her parents seem to have put their own lives on hold in order to be there for her in her illness, refers to herself as a grenade.  She knows that when she dies (explodes) the shrapnel of her life is going to mess up everyone else's who love her.  She feels like a burden.  In the end, she feels relief in hearing that her mother has enrolled in some classes to help her help others in the same situation.  I think John Green (the author) hit the nail on the head with that one!  (Are you reading, Shari??)

The second book, Wonder, was about a pre-teen boy born with multiple facial abnormalities that made him ugly to look at and suffers from all of the ugly behaviors that occur around him because of the way he looks.  The author seems to have caught most of the nuances of the middle school mentality--both his and his classmates'.  The story is first told from the main character's point of view...then chapters thereafter capture the points of view of the other characters, one by one.  In the end, it is familiarity and understanding that finally succeed as he is defended, physically, in a fight with older boys who are strangers, by some of the very kids that used to attack him, emotionally.  Only one of the original characters fails to evolve to understanding--as it would be in real life.

I'm glad that Robin is reading and recommending these books.  As she gets a little older, I'd like to see her progress to some classics (although I hated classics when I was a kid!!).  She has the literary schema necessary to make sense of what she reads.  That's my girl!!