http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/how-to-choose-summer-reading-for-students.html
Some Books Are More Equal Than Others
By CLAIRE NEEDELL HOLLANDER
New York Times
June 23, 2012

...

For newly fluent readers, usually age 8 or 9, any reading is indeed good reading.

But for students in middle school and high school, reading selection does matter. Students attain more knowledge of both kinds reading Stephen Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” than they do reading the “Hunger Games” series. When the protagonist of “Red Badge” reflects on his pride in having “donned blue,” it requires both verbal and world knowledge to comprehend that he is proud of having enlisted as a Union soldier.

While “The Hunger Games” may entrance readers, what does a 13-year-old gain in verbal and world knowledge from the series? A student may encounter a handful of unfamiliar words, while contemplating human dynamics that are cartoonish, with violent revolution serving as the backdrop for teen romance.

Reading literature should be intentional. The problem with much summer reading is that the intention is unclear. Increasingly, students are asked to choose their own summer reading from Web sites like ReadKiddoRead, where the same advanced Real World Fiction category includes “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Flipped,” by Wendelin Van Draanen, which centers on divorce and kissing. Both books can be enjoyed by middle schoolers, but how will the seventh grader determine which one to pick?

The issue is further compounded when summer assignments require students to write about what they read. The problem is that the tasks assigned are at once too open and too circumscribed to be of use. What summer reading needs to be is purposeful. But how do we ensure purposeful independent reading given the low accountability of summer assignments?

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The author goes on to list some recommended non-fiction.

I gave up on using the various summer recommended reading lists last year, unless DD wants to read some of them to be part of the conversation, like now she's going through the Percy Jackson books which are pretty cool while being popular.

The Mensa kids site has a wonderful list of books. DD is also finishing Lois Lenski's "Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison" which she loves and before that read an older children's fiction about the War of 1812 (we're now in the 200th anniversary year and it was big around our region).

Older, richer books for children really strike a wonderful balance with advanced vocabulary, learning about different times and history but with young protagonists and good themes. The Mensa list has alot of these for good ideas.

Thanks so much for mentioning the Mensa site! I didn't know Mensa put out reading lists. They are, as you say, heavy on older books, which for the reasons you list makes them preferable to just about everything my kids' schools recommend.

yes...isn't it great? One new book not on there that my DD loved last summer is "Wild Wings" by Gill Lewis, about kids and osprey. Warning...a girl does die in it, by my DD was not shaken up by it (I sure was!) she was more interested in finding out more about meningitis. That's how she is.

Gill Lewis has a new one out just about now about dolphins.

Thanks for the recommendation. It's hard to predict which books might attract my kids; I think for now we'll just go with the ones on the list that we happen to own.

I'm also trying to get both kids to read more non-fiction, so I've put a bunch of popularizing history books out on ds13's dresser. It seems to be working -- he picked up 'The Ghost Map', about the discovery of the cause of cholera during an outbreak of the disease in London in 1854, and has pronounced it 'officially cool'. He wants to use it next year to compete in History Day.

the coolest new thing at our house. Free ebooks, kindle etc from the library. you cant get them electronically and no late fees. when they are due they just disappear off the kindle.
cut down on our book expeditures considerably. ( purchases and late fees)

The "Ghost Map" sounds interesting. I'll note it for the future. Glad another kid is interested in diseases, "officially cool".

I go to the library book sales and used book stores and over time you can often find some inexpensive copies of some of the Mensa-type books, since they're "tried and true" and floating around. Then you can bring them home and put them on the shelf and on a rainy day if no electronic time (hee hee) they'll be forced to drift over and pick up a book.

Do you have to be a Mensa member to access their book list? Just curious - we've never joined, but ds qualifies and I've thought of signing him up.

polarbear

DS4 yesterday was "an amoeba causing bloody diarrhoea" - will have to remember the 'Ghost Map' in a few years time!

Here are links to the book lists for various grade levels:
http://mensaforkids.org/ReaderAward/k_3.pdf
http://mensaforkids.org/ReaderAward/4_6.pdf
http://mensaforkids.org/ReaderAward/7_8.pdf
http://mensaforkids.org/ReaderAward/9_12.pdf

The lists say this:

"The reading list cited is the property of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov. The program is provided as a complimentary service to the public. Reproduction and distribution without modification is allowed."

The K-3 (K-3??) Mensa list is a bit odd, IMO. Alice in Wonderland is reallllly at a whole different level than the Carrot Seed. Maybe that's the idea, but huh.

Along the same lines as The Ghost Map, my DD recently really loved Wicked bugs: the louse that conquered Napoleon's army & other diabolical insects by Amy Stewart. Similar in content and theme.


Another recommendation to go along with the above list--

The ALA's Newbery award books

I heartily recommend the ALA's award booklists. The Newbery books offer an enormous range and a view of children's literature that is matchless in scope. It's a tantalizing look at what experts in the genre deemed the "finest" examples published in each year... and this definition has certainly changed in the past ninety years! It's equally fascinating (and a higher-order activity-- bonus) to read the 'honor' books alongside the gold medal winner for a year, and discuss what it was about the winner that made it stand above the others.

Many of the Newbery winners are completely content-suitable for children under eight; that is a real bonus since the early selections have that same lovely quality of deeper writing. Writing that doesn't read like the next step up from phonetically controlled easy-readers (since those didn't exist then). Writing that asks the reader to explore language and metaphor, to visualize and imagine.

But at the same time, these books are, by and large, for and about children. I love that juxtaposition; it takes a masterful or gifted author to write for pre-adolescent children in an authentic way.

DD, now 13, has read most of the Newbery medalists, and many of the honor books.

Another idea-- pick an author and read his/her works. We read George MacDonald's works (well, what is still in print) one summer. It's easy to see why it is endures.

Oh-- Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide is one of DD's favorite books of all time. That's lovely summer reading for gifties ages 8-15.

For slightly older kids, there are adult fiction series that use some literary classics as a jumping off point. Alan Gordon's Fool's Guild series uses Shakespeare and world history in a fun and innovative way (and the series is pretty devoid of sex and profanity), and there is another that uses, of all things, the world of Beatrix Potter! DD and I have both enjoyed this type of book a lot during her pre-teen years. This is an awkward age for EG/PG kids, since they can read whatever they wish, but there is little written for them in particular. Children's literature is stilted and hobbled by vocabulary and sentence structure which is unedifying, to say the least, and young adult and adult fiction all seems to contain content which is flatly inappropriate for most nine or ten year olds.

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More general observation on the subject of reading and book lists...
While I don't argue against inclusion of really good quality literature for children and adults alike, I'm also of the opinion that there is no such thing as a bad book. Mostly. I love books, and so does everyone else in my family. (Hey-- there's a new book for everyone-- the history OF the book!! No, really-- Books: a living history by Martyn Lyons. I have it checked out right now. Along with thirty-four others. )

Okay, so we probably aren't as discriminating as some people about this sort of thing. I consider summer to be a time for self-indulgence as much as self-improvement. Laissez-faire time, if you will. As long as DD is passionately pursuing some interest that isn't harmful, we're happy with that. I think of summer as a time to rekindle the lust for reading-- to remind kids WHY they love to read. Heaven knows schools seem to do all they can to stifle that understanding during the year...

DD (then 9? 10?) one summer read at least 30 Nancy Drew mysteries, at least half a dozen Trixie Belden mysteries, several astronomy books, one about how to build wacky spy contraptions from household stuff, along with a variety of very tongue-in-cheek books about the Zombie apocolypse and survival planning, which led to The Serpent and the Rainbow (we simply had it on a bookshelf, but she abandoned it mid-way through at the time)... then followed that up with Great Expectations and finished up with Oliver Twist.

That's not that unusual for her, by the way-- thus my statement that I tend to take a hands-off approach with her.

DD's summer reading so far this year has consisted of a variety of non-fiction, mostly contemporary current affairs or political science, legal thrillers (a la John Grisham), and quite a few fanciful Dan Brown-like conspiracy thrillers in addition to the Manga that her friends all love. She loves high fantasy, but has run out of material that isn't overtly sexualized beyond her tastes; the Xanth novels are sly about it and she likes those, but they are not particularly well-written past the fourth or fifth one, either, and she's definitely noticed. It's unfortunate, because she loves the puns.

At this point, I'm not into limiting what she does read, as long as she's reading in volume and in a fair degree of variety-- which she does all on her own. She has an e-reader and library cards at both the public county library (one of the best in the country for its size) and also the local uni, so she's pretty independent.

We figure that she needs proficiency in cultural idiom and the autonomy to do as she pleases during the summer just as much as she needs additional capital-L Literature. We know that she gets the latter in abundance, and we have a lot of those books just hanging around the house.

I've not used book lists as a "choose something from this menu" tool, but probably because I've not needed to. We've used book lists more as a 'checklist' the way birders use one to build a life list. LOL. She's a kid who has always been a voracious and indiscriminate reader, though, so the real battle is getting her to get her nose OUT of any book she finds.

Oh, and one other caveat about using that 9-12 list in particular?

Be aware that it contains pretty much the entirety of the reading selections for AP English Literature, so if you want to have those selections be NOVEL for a gifted HS student, you might want to choose carefully.

Over the course of DD's three years of honors high school English, she's read at least eight of those already as mandatory literature for class.

(I've deliberately held off on some things like Fitzgerald and Hawthorne so that they will be novel when she sees them in class.)

HTH.

Notice - you won't find Dahl, Mysterious Benedict Society, Captain Underpants, Mr. Men series, or Far Side on these lists. At least Tomie dePaola's, Stega Nona, is on the Mensa K-3 list, but not Art Lesson or Tom. No Pratchett or Pythonese books, of course. Nothing bawdy like Marcia Williams's, illustrated Chaucer book. Didn't see Harry Potter either.

I've noticed with similar reading lists from schools and libraries that tend to select books that are not controversial or have a minimum of it, nothing too funny or subversive either. Though lately there's been controversy on Newberry winners - being selected based on what adults think children will read or should read rather than what may appeal to them.

So what is the message here? You've got to read to increase your vocabulary to ace the SAT or prepare for college - for a means to an end? Perhaps that's fine for some students, but it turns off a lot of students from reading when we force the classics or other books down kids' throats. Why does everything have to be aimed at material gain or success, even reading? Why do we have to 'teach' a moral or lesson through reading (so 19th-century)?

NY Times, UK's Guardian, Amazon, and other reading lists may be more helpful if you have a child who is a reluctant reader or more motivated to read if something is funny.

I guess you won't be buying "Wuthering Heights: A Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic" and other books in the Kaplan series .

I guess that I am in cdfox's camp. If you are reading something that you enjoy, you will read more and are more likely to try and figure out those unfamiliar words. My DD12 reads voraciously so I am not worried about her vocabulary. She plowed through The Hunger Games in a few hours and went on to read other books, lots of them, some with advanced vocabulary, some not. If I had told her to read Red Badge of Courage, she probably would still be slogging through it and resenting every minute of it. It's just not her kind of book.

For the record, I hated Wuthering Heights and will tell my kids to avoid it like the plague until they have to read it for a literature class.

I'm chuckling about The Red Badge of Courage. My DD read it for ninth grade English, and yes, it was definitely not her cup of tea, so to speak. She slogged through it anyway, but it was rather like getting her to drink a wheat-grass shake or something. I feel this way about both Steinbeck and Hemingway.


DD felt the same way about Walden, much to my amusement. One of the funniest one-liners I've ever heard from her was when she learned that her 11th grade English class would be reading The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.

"Hmm. {long pause} Jail-- I mean, having read Walden, I can speculate personally that he SHOULD have been incarcerated for writing such self-absorbed, smug, ignorant DRIVEL, so don't get me wrong. I'm just wondering what they charged him with..."

(uhhhh-- wow.)

The MENSA high school lists are the older version of the NEH lists, and yes, they tend to completely ignore anything published in the last forty years, nevermind anything controversial.

That's another reason why I mentioned the ALA lists. Those kinds of books do (increasingly, anyway) make some of those lists.

Recent publication is hardly a barrier to high quality. The Book Thief (which appears on the modern NEH list for 7-8th) is a fine example. Even Harry Potter can be read as allegorical in much the same way as Lewis' Narnia series.


We've found that many 'fluff' books tend to be "gateway" books. This is how my daughter has wound up reading classics. She read some news articles that led her to the contemporary non-fiction of Michael Pollan, and wound up interested enough to tackle Orwell's 1984, and eventually even Sinclair's master work, The Jungle.


The updated NEH lists are here:

The K-8 list.

and the high school list, also updated;

NEH's college-preparatory reading list This one is largely derived from the College Board's recommendations.


It's helpful to me to remember, when I attempt to parse out what is "Art" versus trashy pop culture...

that to their contemporaries, Dickens and Austen were both writing contemporary popular fiction intended for mass consumption, not posterity. Dickens' work was frankly propoganda in many ways.

With that in mind, I figure if a work of literature or art 'speaks' to a person, then it is meaningful and worthwhile for them personally.

I, um, loved Wuthering Heights.

Well, this is it - using 'fluff' as a 'gateway' book. That can work in some cases, but not for others.

Some kids are ready emotionally and developmentally to read classics. Others are not and may never be. Some of us love classical literature; some of us can take it only in small doses; others hate it like the plague.

Printed text has dominated learned discourse. Education has been dominated by print and book learning for hundreds of years. The division between the learned and popular culture has existed since the printing presses. It's not going to go away by forcing kids to read classical literature. In the 17th century, the pulp press regaled readers with witchcraft, cuckolds, miracles, violent crime, and so forth during the English Revolution/Civil War (read Jerome Friedman or Chris Hill's books). Today, well, this has expanded tremendously and beyond print media to television, video, the Internet, etc.

I agree that "if a work of literature or art 'speak' to a person, then it is meaningful and worthwhile for them personally."

Ozzy Osbourne is a very successful musician, whatever any one thinks about him. He also happens to be a severe dyslexic who has written (probably with voice-recognition software) an autobiography that perhaps would appeal much more to reluctant readers than Hawthorne or Hemingway. Now others here can sniff all they like, but Ozzy's a 2e and has an inspiring, captivating story that can motivate a child to read or listen to a story (ie. audio version for dyslexics) more than a classic might. Ozzy might 'speak' to them more and in their language.

Many tend to associate the use of words with intelligence and this can have an adverse effect on an individual and society as a whole. Many associate reading the classics, not reading Ozzy's autobiography, with being erudite and more worthy to prep for the SATs and life (since many are consumed with standardized testing it seems today). That's fine for some gifted students, but not for all or for general population as a whole.

i used this list and assisted my DS8 with choices

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_children%27s_classic_books

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/b...t-fans-classic-books-get-bold-looks.html
To Lure ‘Twilight’ Teenagers, Classic Books Get Bold Looks
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: June 27, 2012

Teenagers are still reading the classics. They just don’t want them to look so, well, classic.

That is the theory of publishers who are wrapping books like “Emma” and “Jane Eyre” in new covers: provocative, modern jackets in bold shades of scarlet and lime green that are explicitly aimed at teenagers raised on “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games.”

The new versions are cutting edge replacements for the traditional (read: stuffy, boring) covers that have been a trademark of the classics for decades, those familiar, dour depictions of women wearing frilly clothing. In their place are images like the one of Romeo in stubble and a tight white tank top on a new Penguin edition of “Romeo and Juliet.”

The covers are intended to tap into the soaring popularity of the young-adult genre, the most robustly growing category in publishing. In the last decade, publishers have poured energy and resources into books for teenagers, releasing more titles each year. Bookstores have followed suit, creating and expanding spe-cial sections devoted to them.

...

Sales of some young-adult versions have been strong. The HarperCollins edition of “Wuthering Heights” has sold 125,000 copies since it was released in 2009, an extraordinary number that sent the book back to the best-seller lists.

Because titles like “Pride and Prejudice” and “Persuasion” are in the public domain, any publisher can release a version, leaving the text inside the books untouched while redesigning the cover. And for the young-adult reader, publishers are scooping up all the material they can find.

Now the new versions of the classics are fighting for space on the young-adult shelves of bookstores. In a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan last week, a display featured four new editions of novels by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters alongside more contemporary offerings of paranormal romances. (Upstairs in the adult-fiction section, more traditional versions of the classics were lined up on the shelves.)

At the Book Revue bookstore in Huntington, N.Y., new versions of the classics have sold briskly, surprising the store’s owner, Julie Klein.

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If I can get my kids to read good literature by buying books with cool covers, I will. Once you've spent money on summer camps and private lessons, books seem pretty cheap.