CSotD: Summer reading
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A quick return to "Big Nate," because, having escaped with his life from Junior Lifesaving training, Nate has now joined the summer book club down at the library. He's there for the snacks, but, as you see, he's about to read a book.
Or pretend to. We'll see.
At some point, perhaps in just a few weeks, somebody in comics land will start riffing on the dreaded Summer Reading List. I have nothing to say about summer reading lists that wasn't said better in this Kate Messner blog entry.
Kate is someone I first met when she was a reporter at the local TV station just about straight out of college. She left journalism (which she was good at) to become a middle school English Language Arts teacher. I visited her class and she's good at that, too, and now she has added "award winning children's author" to her credentials. Which I say primarily to induce you to click on that link, but for those who don't, her premise is that Required Reading is the quickest way to kill the desire to do Unrequired Reading, and she's right.
Book clubs and reading groups are a different matter, though Nate's too-cool-for-school attitude should make his attendance at Book Club pretty interesting. But Lincoln Peirce, who has done time as a middle-school teacher himself, has picked a good title for the club.
There are book groups — both kids and adults — that meet privately, and they can set their own standards because they are small, cohesive collections of people with presumably some shared interests.
Some are genuinely "private" and meet in homes (one of my granddaughters is in one this summer), and they can decide if they want to read old classics or new best sellers, and they can also decide for themselves if they are apt to freak out and have nightmares over "Hunger Games" or fall in love with it.
Others are not pre-selected but are strongly directed, like the group I was in at an Episcopal church which met each Sunday in Lent before services to talk about "The Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century work of Christian mysticism. We talked about the book, but only after the Colorado College professor leading the group had taken 10 minutes to explain what the hell we had just read.
The more open the group is to drop-ins and people of un-pre-selected backgrounds, the more you have to choose books that will be accessible to everyone. "Lord of the Flies" is certainly one of those books.
But here's one, by contrast, that isn't: I had a friend and colleague in the Newspapers-in-Education business whose town decided, in 2005, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote by having a series of events in which the whole town would read the book over the summer.
"The whole thing?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "And they can choose to read it in English or Spanish, so it's a chance to be inclusive."
I couldn't provide much practical advice on how to tie in her own programs to this effort, but I was at least able to brace her for the fact that the only uniting factor for the community in this inclusive event was going to be that nobody was going to actually read "The Ingenious Man Don Quixote de la Mancha."
It's a fine book. But you can't expect a voluntary, loosely-structured community reading program to plow through all that verbiage on any sort of schedule. It ain't gonna happen.
That's not condescension on my part. I'm as guilty as anyone else.
What they needed to do was to wait five years and celebrate the 50th anniversary of "To Kill a Mockingbird" instead. Harper Lee's classic is one of the most frequently assigned group-reads of all time [citation needed my ass] for two reasons:
1. It's short. People will get through it.
2. Its moral is clear and won't spark a lot of debate over what it means and whether it's right about that.
"Lord of the Flies" is a similar group-read favorite. Like "To Kill a Mockingbird," it has enough heft and quality to feel like literature, but there's not a lot of ambiguity to confuse readers. They can discuss the book without getting swept up in side issues, though I once had a friend tell me it was about the conflict between capitalism and socialism.
This surprised me because she had gone to a girls' boarding school. I had only gone to summer camp, but even that limited exposure was enough to let me know that "Lord of the Flies" was about human nature as observed in barbaric, isolated anarchy. "Lord of the Flies" was "Tom Brown's Schooldays" without the presence of Arnold of Rugby to rein in and guide the little monsters.
Which makes it a lovely book for a group-read in a middle-school library book club. And I have a feeling that it will make "Big Nate" a lovely read for the remainder of this story arc.
As compared to, say, a book that everyone praises but nobody has read like this one, as described in a classic "Sheldon":
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