Heard Any Good Books Lately?

Sam's requirements for his "free read" were as follows: Funny, non-fiction, well-written.

Did I mention funny?

After a good deal of thought, we zeroed in on an old favorite from my childhood - Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals." It's certainly funny, and I knew Sam would respond to the nature study aspect... plus we thought that it's Corfu setting wouldn't hurt, given that Greece and Rome are a big part of this year's curriculum (OK, ancient Greece and Rome, but still.)
The problem was that Sam was daunted by the density of the book - not to mention the smallness of the print.

Sam is a distinctly aural learner. When he was just three, we learned he had strabismus, a condition in which the eyes do not team properly. Physically, this appears to be nothing more than a "lazy" eye, one that occasionally turns in slightly when he is tired or stressed. My mother and I have the same thing. ("Oh, but it's not genetic..." the western pediatric opthamologists told us - that's another blog.) What is actually going on, brain-wise, is a whole lot less subtle. When the eyes do not team, the brain must constantly choose which eye to use in any given moment, and the vision is only ever out of one eye at a time. Activities like reading can be therefore be supremely fatiguing. Though vision therapy has made a huge difference for Sam, under the circumstances it's amazing that he reads as much or as well as he does.

His ears are another story. He is a passionate musician with perfect pitch. He has an uncanny ear for mimicry and accents, and his memory of things heard is infallible. The psycho-educational assessment he took in 6th grade affirmed this, and the psychologist recommended that, given the predominant role his ears played in his learning and retention, he should consider recording his spelling words, for instance, and listening to the playback as opposed to studying the words on a sheet.

Sam is, therefore, a perfect candidate for audiobooks. And since he had just received a new iPod for his birthday, this seemed the perfect opportunity to give it a shot. I was elated to discover "My Family and Other Animals" on Audible.com - just put up this year - with the venerable English actor Nigel Davenport narrating. We played a sample and Sam nodded. We downloaded it to his iPod.

After listening to the first chapter, Sam pronounced, "This is great. It's slower than reading a book - but SO much better. It's like being read to!"

He's now on chapter ten. This may be a revelation for him.

NB: For visual learners, the graphic novel could be a similar revelation - though slower on the uptake in terms of adaptations of classics...

Open Destiny

It's happened again. The otherwise terrific school where my son Sam attends 7th grade has assigned yet another dark, depressing book for required reading.

In fairness to them, I appreciate what the school is trying to do. The "spiral curriculum" takes the kids up through history, and integrates their learning in all areas with the time period they are currently studying - so it stands to reason that this term's reading should include something about the Mayan culture. But why must these books always be so relentlessly dark?

The day Sam began the book, he woefully announced, "Well, I'm on page 7 and already there have been five deaths - woops, make that six. Oh, now the parents have died. We're up to eight." At least he has a sense of humor about it.

But for me, being hell bent on trying to reinforce the connection between reading and pleasure so that my kids will continue to love reading, and seek it out as a preferred activity, this is something akin to sabotage.

In "Raising Bookworms" I talked about going through this same experience with him in fifth grade. One book after another featuring war, death, destruction and children in peril. The year culminated with a book titled "My Brother Sam is Dead" - a worthy book, but the title alone was enough to send my Sam, older brother that he is, straight back to the TV.

I also wrote about being inspired by Barbara Feinberg's book, "Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories and the Mystery of Making Things Up," in which she wrestles with the same issue with her kids. She writes: “I have realized what is missing in those books: Open destiny.
It’s from a line in a Grace Paley story. She describes how she hates stories that move from point a to point b, toward an ending that’s fixed before starting out. You know, contrived. She says she hates that absolute line between two points…not for literary reasons, she says, but because it takes all hope away. ‘Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.’”

God knows I am not advocating censorship. I do believe these assigned books are important reading, and I know many kids who find it reassuring to read about people whose lives are harder than their own. I also know they provide important lessons, not only in history but in awareness, compassion, perspective. But with only so many hours in the day, and most of them allocated to school work - classes from 8 - 3:30, an hour or more of homework, often a music lesson or a vision therapy appointment afterwards - there is precious little time left in a day for elective reading of the kind he loves, the kind that feeds his spirit and makes him want to read more, let alone for time to just noodle and be a kid. And I worry that for a sensitive young man like Sam, this relentless darkness will only serve to push him away from books altogether.

So I will reach out once again. To the school, to the teachers, to Sam especially - to keep the dialogue open, and I will continue to surround Sam with the books he loves: the comedies, the fantasies, the biographies. In this way, perhaps I can keep his destiny open.. as a reader, if nothing else.