On Friday when I finally got to the middle school to pick up Janae and Alaina, Janae came walking across the almost empty parking lot, barely looking up from the book she was reading.
This was kind of unusual for Janae--she's usually much more into musicals and popular culture than books--but she was really into her novel, and I'd told her earlier in the week that it was due back at the library on Saturday.
When Janae got into the car, I told her (as I'd realized earlier in the day) that she had the book for another week. She was pretty upset, declaring she had been "speed reading" all day to try to finish in time. The book was that good.
What was this book that so captivated my daughter, you might wonder. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. How many kids in Grade 8 are reading THAT for fun? But Janae stayed up until almost midnight on Friday, finishing the novel in only two weeks.
And before that? She'd read Les Misérables, the complete and unabridged version (not in its original French, though, not yet).
Alaina has a similar--though slightly longer--reading history. Halfway through Grade 5, she started reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Although this book took Alaina six months to read, she followed it with Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tale of Two Cities, and Emma, taking breaks in between to read the Divergent series (twice), These Is My Words, and a biography of Alexander Hamilton.
I always dreamed that my kids would read the classics, but I never expected they'd read them on their own at such a young age.
And what about the boys?
Even though he's had a heavy workload all year with high school, Ben is currently reading a 1000+-page fantasy novel and bought a psychology book with his Christmas money. He's also writing a novel of his own, working on it during his rare spare time--he's completed over 20,000 words and plans to have 60,000 by the end of the summer.
Eric's Grade 1 reading is really coming along, too, with noticeable improvement from week to week.
At bedtime, we read novels together, and Eric is always begging for "one more chapter" as I close the book. We just finished the five-book Trials of Apollo series (sometimes edited by Mom mid-sentence). Eric is a big Rick Riordan fan, and we've read all of Percy Jackson twice as well as The Heroes of Olympus series. Eric has also enjoyed The Mysterious Benedict Society series (we're currently listening to the prequel again as an audiobook on our school drives), The Land of Stories series and pretty much everything by Roald Dahl and Gordon Korman. Now we're reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was too scary last summer but is going over very well now. And after that, The Half-Blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows. He's ready.
Now, you might think I've pushed my kids to read these books, but in some cases (i.e., The Grapes of Wrath), I've actually actively discouraged it (especially right after Les Misérables ... can you imagine anything more depressing?). I'd rather keep them younger longer, and have wondered about their exposure to mature themes, often involving racism, poverty, corruption, marital difficulties, extreme dangers and death.
But in the end, I hope reading will help them to make sense of these ideas and form their own values and opinions. I know that's been the case for me, and I'm happy that each one of my kids has a definite "bookish side."
