My 13 year old son and I enjoy reading together and discussing what we read. We are currently reading It Looked Good on Paper--Bizarre Inventions, Design Disasters, and Engineering Follies which always leads to more reading on Wikipedia, which is still one of my son's favorite things to read--he likes it so much that he sometimes just reads a random Wikipedia article. My son really likes reading the top 10 lists on listserve.com and he talks me into reading the ones he thinks I will find more interesting and he is usually right. Again, this leads to reading more Wikipedia articles. We also read sciencedaily.com articles almost every day. We are studying biology this year so we read a lot of biology and medical related articles. Yesterday we looked up lots of info on brown recluse spiders for my dad who had been bitten by one. The Wikipedia article had most of the info we needed. My son likes to read politifact.com and talks me into reading some of that too. Melatonin does not work well enough on him so he spends a lot more time reading than I do. Last night we read the sparknotes plot overview for Atlas Shrugged. There are references to this book in one of the video games he likes to play and his online friends mentioned this book several times so he is thinking about reading it or at least the sparknotes version. He says his online friends think he is about 18. I think he wants to make sure he knows enough about the things they like to talk about that they won't figure out that he is only 13. We were reading The Zombie Survival Guide that my son bought over a year ago last month which I didn't think was too bad if we didn't read too much of it at one time. We got half-way through it. We might read the rest next year. We just bought the New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge and are reading some of that too. My son wants me to read some of his manga, especially Death Note. I did read a little of it but I just don't like manga that much. I would rather watch online episodes with him.
I am also spending more time reading online dictionaries, yes dictionaries, with my son, who used to do spelling bees, because I notice that he has an advantage (besides being much younger) in quickly learning biology terms because he knows what the prefixes and suffixes and word roots mean. When he prepared for spelling bees, in addition to learning to spell words, he learned the meaning of the word parts and this is something I never bothered with. I just wasn't interested in etymology when I was a kid but now I am taking an interest in this.
