This week I’ve got two more middle grade readers that I thought were great reads.
The first is Kwame Alexander’s newest book called Booked. I was actually drawn into this book because of the cover, which has a soccer player on it. One of my boys really loves soccer, so I wanted to read the book and see if it was one I’d add to his summer reading list.
I found that the book was a little bit mature for him and, I think, other middle grade readers. If I had been categorizing this book, I might have put it in the young adult category, just because the language is a bit mature. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good book, because it definitely was. It’s just that I’ve come to expect certain things from middle grade literature. Something I’ve noticed is that romance seems to be popping up in the middle grade literature, and this is weird to me, because when I was a 10-year-old, I wasn’t even remotely interested in boys. So this book has an element of romance, but it also uses some mature language—words like hell and damn—that I just wasn’t comfortable with my 9-year-old reading just yet. Keep them innocent while you can and all that.
All that aside, Booked was a great read. It dealt with the issue of divorce and some of the bad things that can happen to you. The main character, Nick, is a soccer player, a really good one, and before a big game of his, he gets stricken with appendicitis. His parents are also in the middle of a divorce, so there’s a lot going on in Nick’s life.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the book was the voice of the main character. Nick is sort of a sarcastic kid, which makes the prose humorous. His dad is a linguistics professor, and Nick is tasked, every night, with the assignment to read his father’s dictionary and learn all the words in it, because his dad is a little obsessed with Nick pulling ahead of his peers in the vocabulary department. Their exchanges and Nick’s asides make for some great comedy in the book. I should mention, also, that this book was written in verse, which, if you’ve been around, you know I love.
The Thing About Jellyfish, by Ali Benjamin, was full of emotion and beauty and sorrow. Suzy, the main character, loses her best friend, Franny Jackson, during a summer vacation. Franny drowned, but that doesn’t make sense, because Franny could always swim, and so Suzy sets off on a quest to prove that Franny actually died because of a rare jellyfish sting. She becomes obsessed with her quest, effectively keeping her sorrow at bay.
I loved this book, because it looked at the crazy time kids go through, right around sixth and seventh grade, and brought all those issues—the ones where kids worry they’ll be too weird and they won’t have friends and things are never going to get better—and brought them to light. Suzy is kind of the odd girl out, and Franny was about her only friend. I also loved how Benjamin inserted so much information about jellyfish into the story. You could feel Suzy’s obsession in her research of the jellyfish. It was wonderful.
Here’s a passage that displays the sort of emotion that comes off the page and keeps a reader reading:
“I think about my hair, about the tangles I battle every morning. I have spent so many hours of my life trying to brush out tangles. But no matter how carefully I try to pull the individual strands apart, they just get tighter and tighter. They cinch together in all the worst ways, until they are impossible to straighten out. Sometimes there is nothing to be done but to get out a pair of scissors and cut the knot right out.
“But how do you cut out a knot that’s formed by people?
“I don’t like where this is going at all.”
I highly recommend both of these books for great summer reads—but maybe leave the first one for some older children.
Learning
Right now I’m pooling some resources, trying to learn as much as I can about the business of writing. One of the people I followed a while back is Tim Grahl, a book marketer who’s worked with people like Daniel Pink and Hugh Howey to successfully launch author careers. Grahl has a new free training series out called Hacking Amazon, and it’s written specifically for beginning authors. I’ve been watching the videos, even though I know most of the information he has to share, because I’ve been doing this for a while, but it’s always nice to have a refresher and be reminded of what matters in the business.
Sometimes there are so many business things to take care of, every day, that you can easily lose sight of what’s the twenty percent you absolutely need to do and what’s the eighty percent that you don’t really need to worry about right now. This video series had been great for reminding me of that.
Grahl is also the author of Your First 1,000 Copies: The Step By Step Guide to Marketing Your Book. You can learn more about Tim at timgrahl.com.
Personal
I promised you last week that over the next several weeks I’d be sharing my boys’ summer reading lists. I thought I’d start with my 9-year-old, who right now is my most voracious reader, but he’s also the oldest and so has been reading the longest.
Every summer we sit down and discuss summer reading lists, because I like to have a plan. My boys don’t really care one way or another—they’re probably always going to read—but I like to give them goals and help them achieve those goals. So this year, I let the boys pick out eight books they were going to read, and then I added seven books and two bonus books (which will earn them two extra dollars on their end-of-summer reward).
I had a bit of a hard time figuring out the books I wanted my 9-year-old to read, mostly because I’ve been reading such great books lately, and I wanted to make sure I took all the best and put them on his list. This is harder than it sounds. But here’s the list I came up with for him.
1. Just My Luck, by Cammie McGovern
2. Pax, by Sara Pennypacker
3. The Red Butterfly, by A.L. Sonnichsen
4. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
5. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
6. The Nest, by Kenneth Oppel
7. The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown
The two bonus books include
1. Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
2. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
I’m challenging him a bit with those bonus books, but I think he’s capable.
As a family, we are also going to read aloud four books:
1. Rules, by Cynthia Lord
2. Doll Bones, by Holly Black
3. A Little Princes, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
4. The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman
Next week I’ll also talk about the audio books we’re going to read together this year.
I enjoy summer reading just as much as my boys do. We have instituted an hour-long Silent Reading time in our house, right after lunch, and so far it’s going magnificently.
Writing
Someone sent me a message this week asking about how to get started with a blog and whether I would recommend blogging. This is sort of a complicated question for me. I’ve been blogging for about three years now, posting every week. Some weeks that feels really easy for me, and some weeks, it feels like just another obligation.
It seems weird to say that blogging feels a little hard when we’re a writer, but what it boils down to, I think, is that blogging feels like a project all on its own. And I’m usually working on book projects. So recently I’ve changed my blogging techniques a little.
But what I would say to someone who is just starting out with blogging is to first ask yourself some questions:
Why do you want to blog?
How would it help you, if you’re doing it for business reasons?
What would you talk about?
One of the things I try to maintain with my blog is consistency. I post on the same day at the same time every week, so even though I don’t advertise that on Mondays at 10 a.m. there will be a new blog, people just get used to seeing writing from me on Mondays. Consistency also helps us develop a voice and a purpose and community in our blogging. I don’t recommend blogging just to blog, unless you’re doing it for your family memories or something. But I do feel like we all have something significant to share with the world, and blogging is a great place to start.
I use wordpress for my blogging, because it has a very friendly interface and is easy enough for someone like me to understand. But it’s really up to you what blogging platform you use. But I would highly recommend taking a deeper look at your reasons for blogging before you make the commitment—because it is another commitment.
Listening
I recently finished listening to a theatrical version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. It was produced by the BBC and included an entire cast of people. I enjoyed it so much. Even my kids would sneak downstairs when I was listening to it, because they wanted to hear it, too.
I plan on listening to the other two books in the trilogy, and I think I’ll probably enjoy them just as much as I enjoyed this one.
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