Reading young adult novels helps me sleep.

I’m a pretty serious reader. In my purse right now, I’m toting Mrs. Dalloway and a collection of Rilke’s letters. On my desk I have Tara Parker-Pope’s new book about the science of marriage, and Katherine Ellison’s memoir Buzz.

But I keep the good stuff on my bedside bookshelf. The haul right now: the first four Percy Jackson novels, Harry Potter 7 (which I’m rereading after the movie came out), and Into The Wild, a YA novel about a teenage girl who gets sucked into the world of fairy tales.

This is Mommy’s secret stash: a pile of YA books low on complex vocab words and high on adventure. I eat them like candy in the middle of the night, and dip into one when I’m lying down with a restless toddler for a midday nap.

I’m not alone. Essayist Melissa Taylor tells Babble that Percy Jackson is her therapist. YA novels not only fascinate her, they keep her sane.

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The Worst Best Friend by Alexis O'Neill

A guest post from Melissa Taylor:

Today on Babble, I wrote how much pleasure moms take in Young Adult fiction. Likewise, the children for whom these books are written, learn so much about life through a fictional story: how to solve problems, how others have the same issues, and so forth. One of the biggest issues for children is friendships. With that in mind, here are my picks for the best children’s books about friendships — making, keeping and dealing. See what you think — and if these give your child new ways to look at friends.

1.       The Worst Best Friend by Alexis O’Neill, illustrated by Laura Huliska-Beith (ages 4+)

When a cool new boy comes to school, Mike’s best friend Conrad decides to be friends with the new boy, leaving Mike feeling sad and lonely.

2.      Who’s Your Best Friend by Todd Parr (ages 3 – 6)

Todd realizes that he doesn’t need to have just one best friend — he can have four!

3.      The Sandwich Swap by Her Majesty Queen Raina Al Abdullah and Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by Tricia Tusa (ages 3 – 7)

Based on events in the Queen’s own childhood, this story shows how two best friends can learn to appreciate each other’s differences. Continue reading »

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Too young for Holocaust lit?

Growing up in a tight knit Jewish community in the 1970s, I wasn’t told about the Holocaust on any particular day. It was just something I knew about.  There were people I knew who’d been there.  When I was little, I didn’t know exactly where there was, but as I got older, I found out. As I did, I read Holocaust novels. There are a lot of kids books about the Holocaust and I read as many as I could.  I must have been at least 8 when I started in on those titles, but for me, the stories colored in between the lines I already knew were on the page.  When my kids start reading books about the Holocaust, it won’t be so familiar to them.  It’ll be new information, and it will be scary.

This is the problem Ruth Franklin grapples with in a recent essay in The New Republic.  Franklin, who wrote a book about literature and the Holocaust, had to decide what to tell her 5 and 7-year old about her book and what kids books about the Holocaust, if any, she might show them.  Continue reading »

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Why won't boys read?

If you have a son who is a reluctant reader, despite the fact that his sister will sit for hours paging through the books on her shelf, you’re apparently in good company. Considerably more boys than girls aren’t meeting proficiency level standards on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading report, according to a recent Center on Education Policy report.

“This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls,” Thomas Spence noted in the Wall Street Journal last week. “The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.”

Spence, the president of Spence Publishing Company, thinks he knows why boys aren’t reading enough to get their skills up to proficiency level. It’s not that we’re not giving them books that they’re interested. After all, the publishing industry is now meeting boys “where they are” with a whole gross-out genre of books aiming to appeal to elementary- and middle-school boys predilection for body humor, he argues.

Spence names this trend, charmingly, the “SweetFarts philosophy of education,” after a book, “SweetFarts” written by a self-published author who goes by the nom de plume Raymond Bean. “One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals,” Spence asserts. “If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.”

So if it’s not the reading material itself, why are so many fewer boys reading books – and mastering reading proficiency – than girls?

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Many Stories for Kids Feature Orphans

Always harbored a dream of penning a book for kids or young adults? Here’s a tip: make sure the main character is an orphan.

Think about it. From classics like “Heidi,” “Anne of Green Gables,” “The Secret Garden,” “James and the Giant Peach” and “The Boxcar Children” to contemporary hits like “Harry Potter” and ”A Series of Unfortunate Events,” many successful kid lit books feature protaganists who have lost their parents. Why is that? Continue reading »

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In celebration of Roald Dahl Month, Penguin Puffin just released four new Roald Dahl books, including  The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets. Are you ready to celebrate the splendiferous news with a fizzy lifting drinks?!

The Missing Golden Ticket  includes “Spotty Powder,” a missing chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a recipe for fudge, and excerpts from the late author’s  old report cards.

If your child is an academic underachiever, don’t fret. There’s still hope that he can grow up to be a highly acclaimed, best-selling author like Roald Dahl. Know what some of his teachers said about him when he was a student? Continue reading »

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Reading on the Kindle app. (Recognize the book?)

Summer slide. That’s what they call it when kids’ skills slip over vacation, and teachers say they spend the first few weeks of every school year hauling their students back to where they were before the final bell rang. The number one recommendation for limiting the slippage isn’t workbooks with a page for ever day of summer break (we’ve tried those here, and most of them are around the house somewhere, with about nine pages complete). It’s reading. Reading anything, reading everything. Which sounds so easy…

Is there anyone out there who’s not trying to figure out how to get a kid to read more this summer? Bethany did a post on it yesterday, offering cute tips. I love the outdoor book nook–that would have had me reading in a second as a kid.

But everything had me reading in a second. I love to read. I spent my youth with my “head in a book,” and I even co-authored a book about reading with young children. I never expected to give the question of “reading enough” a thought when I had kids. I have put every book I loved, and plenty I didn’t, in front of my rising fourth grader and met with what can only be called supreme indifference. He’ll read, sure. But he’d rather do just about anything else.

So when I see something like the Chicago Tribune’s How to Get Kids Reading This Summer, I click. I’ll try anything. The problem is, I feel like I’ve already tried everything. Continue reading »

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