Why Summer Reading Sucks

For mothers,  nothing says 'autumn'  like digging out the summer reading list.  You know--that crumpled piece of paper with a dollop of sun screen on the back side and a smidgen of melted chocolate on the front. I couldn't find it.  I didn't even look.  The library interceded on my behalf.

I had bribed my son with the promise of a Mine Craft session on the PC in the young adult room upstairs while I browsed the new fiction downstairs.  When I finished checking out I went upstairs to drag him away from his diamond shovel and his creeper catcher.  That's when I saw it--a sign saying "Summer Reading Books" with a neatly organized cart in the corner with all of the summer reading books shelved by grade.

There were two books--one required and one optional. He let me choose. 

I chose Death Watch by Robb White for his optional book. I read this book when I was his age.  I loved it.  It's about a college student from a tiny town who agrees to take a hunter into the desert for the chance to shoot a bighorn sheep.  There is lots of blood and several guns.  More importantly for me, it's the inner story of a kid who sticks to his ideals even though doing so may kill him. The other book-Warriors Don't Cry,  is a memoir of a woman who helped integrate a school as a black child in the South. 

The very first thing I did was look up both books on Amazon to see if either one was on CD or the Kindle.  Kid 2 listens better than he reads and sometimes the Kindles one-page-at-a-time format is helpful for staying on track. No luck--which meant I'd be reading them aloud to him--a task that I don't mind that much.

We started with Death Watch and he hates it. 'It's boring.  Nothing happens and there are really only two guns!'  I held my tongue and kept reading about the hero Ben and the truly awful Madec ,who waits for Ben to die of thirst as he treks nearly naked across miles of open desert. 

Okay, the descriptions of the desert and the rock formations are a bit slow but the story is excellent. There is a lot of thematic meat on these bones. Does the death of one man really matter? Are all people worth the same or are some people more important than others? Was Mr. Spock right--do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Or should you do what you know is right regardless of any hurdles or incentives to give up your principles? To me, these are all fascinating questions. To Kid 2, it's a "meh". There are too many distractions to worry about abstract questions surrounding characters in a book...any book. 

At thirteen, Kid 2 has nearly 150 online games stored on his computer.  He can build ships and design airplanes or join with a hundred or so other gamers and form a real time team to attack an evil group of aliens on another planet.  There are single player shooter games with dozens of different types and sizes of weapons.  In a sense he can be a hundred other places even as he sits at his desk in the dining room. For him,  reading a book on paper can't compare.  If he could play out the story onscreen as Ben,  maybe it would be easier for him to discover the ideas behind the action.  Heck, in a video format Ben himself could talk about the deadly choice he has made and why.  Then it might sink in. Then the underlying themes might hit home. 

It's the same with Warriors Don't Cry.  That book is probably not going to resonate much either.  He downloaded the movie '42' on Netflix the other day because he was curious--or bored (I wonder if as the century progresses, boredom and curiosity will become one for many people.) He told me this and then said something about not having realized what blacks had to endure while segregation was in force.  If the point of reading the memoir was to drive home that message then I think he probably already got it from the Jackie Robinson movie.

Can he write about the ideas in either book? We shall see.  That's what the summer writing program was all about...