Summer Reading Challenge, 2011
There are lots of ways to do a summer reading challenge. As a child, I would sign up each summer for the summer reading program at my branch library, diligently filling out my sheets with lists of titles and authors and (I have never seen or heard of this anywhere else) making my oral book report to the librarian who manned the summer reading club booth at the branch (it looked kind of like a puppet theater).
And I would walk away with... bookmarks! And other things, I think, equally unimpressive, and I would have read the books anyway, but the lasting impression for me was that summer reading clubs and competitions are generally pretty lame. Bookmarks? Seriously?
So, rather than go that route with Princess Sarah, we have our own, at-home summer reading challenge, with prizes that a kid can actually care about. Not that she wouldn't read anyway, but, well, it's fun to compete at something you're good at, against someone who ought to be more than a match for you, yes?
In 2010, then, our challenge was to see who could read the most books, straight up. And despite travel and a pool membership and all sorts of distractions, she cleaned my clock. I forget the final score, but I think she beat me by more than a dozen.
This summer, I was determined to be more competitive. I needn't have worried; this summer, despite the fact that the pool was blown away by the tornado and (so far) nobody died (lots of funerals last summer, very rough) and I didn't sign the kids up for any camps because, well, MomFail, I did have one very important player in my corner: Santa Claus!
I have, for years, nixed every attempt my children have made to acquire Nintendo DSs. But in 2010, my children did an end-run around wet blanket Mom and asked Santa Claus for Nintendo DSs. And Santa Claus came through for them, as Santa often does when Mom says no (but since you only get to ask Santa for ONE THING, you have to think very hard about what that one thing will be): Princess Sarah acquired a shiny blue Nintendo DSXL, and Miss Chief got a red one.
That little video game player totally saved my bacon this year in the summer reading challenge.
Instead of doing an outright head-to-head competition this year, I set a goal: For every twenty books, there would be an award; for the overall winner, an additional reward, agreed upon in advance. The contest officially ends this coming Tuesday when we start our fall semester. And as of today, the score is Princess Sarah 21, Pirate Mom 18. I expected when I set that goal that the Princess would achieve 40 books this summer -- she fell just shy of it last summer, if I remember correctly -- but thanks to the magic of Mario Brothers, she has only read 21 books this summer. She still gets two prizes -- one for winning, and one for reading 20 books, so she's happy (she chose a new DS game -- of course -- and lunch at the tea room, which she adores. Me, not so much. I like the tea room, but it's time consuming and expensive, so I try to mostly avoid it).
I set the goal as a way of trying to clean out my nightstand, in/on which there were 20 books at the start of summer, but although I ultimately read six of those twenty titles, I only actually read three of them in dead-tree form. The rest, I read on my Kindle. Which, turns out, I love!
Anyway. This summer, I have read eighteen books! I know that is probably not impressive to my heavy-reading friends, but for me, it represents a great deal of focused effort on my own behalf -- it's hard, with work and two young kids, to find time for my own hobbies. So, I am proud of myself, because this summer I read:
Farmer Boy and Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. These are actually the books I read aloud to Miss Chief at bedtime, one chapter at a time, and I was not going to count them, but Princess Sarah insisted on counting the books her father read to her at bedtime, so, I figure I get to count these. I am trying to remember what they read, and failing. FWIW, we read these in trade paperback.
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card, Reckless by Cornelia Funke, and Passion Play by Beth Bernobich have the distinction of being the three books I actually read in hardcover this summer. If I finish my current read this week -- The Sun Over Breda by Arturo Perez Reverte -- it will be the fourth. Princess Sarah stipulated that I had to read the books on my nightstand from the top down, in the order they were in at the beginning of the summer, because she thought that would prevent me reading the shortest books first -- a strategy I resorted to last summer in an effort to not be completely skunked (it didn't work). It didn't work exactly like she envisioned. I did start with the top book on the stack -- Over the Sea: CJ's First Notebook by Sherwood Smith, in trade paper, but after that book was unfortunately mauled by a child with muddy shoes (we call her Miss Chief for a reason), I bought it for my Kindle and finished it there. I read Passion Play, Reckless and Pathfinder in the stipulated order, but then came to The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet, by Perez Reverte, which is the fourth Captain Alatriste novel, and I had not yet read the third, so I traded that one out for The Sun Over Breda, which was actually on the shelf in the living room. The other book I read out of my nightstand was The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I had apparently bought in trade paperback and stuck in my nightstand, forgot about, and read a free copy I picked up on my Kindle. I ended up giving the brand-new paperback copy to a friend who really enjoyed it.
That accounts for eight of the summer's eighteen books, and all of the ones I read or meant to read in dead-tree form.
The rest, I read on my Kindle. I acquired the Kindle in March, without ever having intended to do any such thing. But I had bought a Kindle for Puck for Christmas, and when in March I was preparing to go away for three weeks, Puck suggested that a Kindle might be just the thing to have along on my trip. At his urging, I bought one. On my trip, I used it mostly for playing Scrabble, but this summer I did quite a bit of actual reading on it, including:
My Own Kind of Freedom by Steven Brust. I'd had this Firefly novel on my computer for ages and ages, and never actually read it until I could put it on the Kindle. Yay Kindle!
The Confessions of Peter Crossman by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald, which, truth? I love Peter Crossman novels and all, I do, but it was *ahem* short. In my own defense, I also read Two From the Mageworlds and The Queen's Mirror, short stories by the same authors, and didn't count them toward my summer reading total.
Do the Work by Stephen Pressfield. *hrm* short but also, when I picked it up, free, and also also, if my own personal novel ever actually makes it out of my head, it will owe something to Pressfield's book, so, it counts!
Writing Horses by Judith Tarr. One of the things I lurve lurve LURVE about my Kindle is this ability to download and read in a very comfortable format books that would be unpublished, difficult to obtain or nonexistent without electronic publishing. I enjoyed this book a lot, and without the Kindle, I might not have (I think it is available POD, but I probably wouldn't have bothered if I'd had to pay shipping, and that would have been a shame).
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. I'd had my eye on this book for a while, but I was initially reluctant to pay for content for my Kindle, because my HOUSE is packed solid with printed books, some of which I will never get around to reading, and I could just see me filling up my Kindle the same way, with stuff I'd paid good money for but would never read. This book was one of the first books I bought for my Kindle that I paid as much for as I would have paid for it in hardcover -- I'd picked it up and put it back down several times at Barnes & Noble -- and I'm glad I finally bought it. It's an excellent read, and I recommend it highly.
My dad's memoirs. See note above about stuff I wouldn't otherwise be able to get hold of/read conveniently. My dad works in one of those super-exciting professions you see all the time in TV dramas -- you know how people are always saying "Oh, Jeezy Pete, not ANOTHER TV drama about airport executives! Can't they come up with anything else to do a TV drama about? Lawyers, maybe? Cops? Firefighters? Doctors? Come on!" Anyway, being an airport executive, at least the way my dad did it, was always surprisingly interesting -- remind me sometime to tell you about the time I found a bug -- not an insect, but a covert surveillance device -- in our house while I was vacuuming, and it was there because of my dad's exciting job. As a result, I have been after him for years to write all this stuff down, and he retired this year and FINALLY did! He sent me the word document, and I sent it to my Kindle and read it there, and I say it counts toward my total.
Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell. I was hoping to find a great space opera series here. I... didn't, sadly. But I did read the whole thing, all the way to the end, and it counts!
What am I up to, fifteen?
The White Mountains by John Christopher. I had read this one as a child, and actually downloaded it to my daughter's Kindle, which is on my account (yes, we are now a three-Kindle household; my husband got his for Christmas, insisted that I get one in March, and then we decided together that really, the heaviest reader in the household, whose books were going to require very soon that we buy a larger home, should have one, too -- it may sound like a princely gift for an 11-year-old, but I tell you, it's cheaper than real estate!) because I thought she would enjoy it. I ended up rereading it, and loving it as much as the first time around. I am waiting not-very-patiently for the publisher to make the rest of the books in that series available for Kindle.
Have Gun, Will Play by Camille LaGuire. This is one of Camille's Mick and Casey westerns -- see my note above about books that would otherwise be yadda yadda. I LOVE Mick and Casey, and I hope that they someday find a home with a traditional publisher and/or an audience of the size they richly deserve. I also read a Mick and Casey short, The Curse of Scattershale Gulch, but didn't count it separately toward my total.
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. This one had been on my "I need to get this" list for a while, and then I got roped into being the "faculty advisor," more or less, for a homeschool novelists' club that includes Princess Sarah. They're working through a video curriculum called The One Year Adventure Novel that uses this book as an example, so I read it preparatory to that.
Like I said, I'm working right now on Book 19, which is the Perez Reverte. Since Harry Connolly's new book came out today, and is waiting now on my Kindle (I had preordered it; I forgot I'd done that! Next year I plan to hide my own Easter eggs and buy my own Christmas presents), it's a tossup whether I'll finish the hardcover Alatriste novel or the Kindle edition of the Twenty Palaces novel first.
I need to make the Princess write up her summer tally. Although most of it could
probably be summed up as "She read The Hobbit, plus a bunch of horse books."
ETA: You know what? I have left two books OFF this list. Either I've counted wrong, or some of the books above were read prior to the official start of summer, or both. Because in addition to the above, I read two Sherlock Holmes novels this summer: A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, both on my Kindle. I had never tried Sherlock Holmes, because in general I dislike mysteries, but it turns out I rather enjoy Sherlock Holmes. So... maybe I made twenty after all!
And I would walk away with... bookmarks! And other things, I think, equally unimpressive, and I would have read the books anyway, but the lasting impression for me was that summer reading clubs and competitions are generally pretty lame. Bookmarks? Seriously?
So, rather than go that route with Princess Sarah, we have our own, at-home summer reading challenge, with prizes that a kid can actually care about. Not that she wouldn't read anyway, but, well, it's fun to compete at something you're good at, against someone who ought to be more than a match for you, yes?
In 2010, then, our challenge was to see who could read the most books, straight up. And despite travel and a pool membership and all sorts of distractions, she cleaned my clock. I forget the final score, but I think she beat me by more than a dozen.
This summer, I was determined to be more competitive. I needn't have worried; this summer, despite the fact that the pool was blown away by the tornado and (so far) nobody died (lots of funerals last summer, very rough) and I didn't sign the kids up for any camps because, well, MomFail, I did have one very important player in my corner: Santa Claus!
I have, for years, nixed every attempt my children have made to acquire Nintendo DSs. But in 2010, my children did an end-run around wet blanket Mom and asked Santa Claus for Nintendo DSs. And Santa Claus came through for them, as Santa often does when Mom says no (but since you only get to ask Santa for ONE THING, you have to think very hard about what that one thing will be): Princess Sarah acquired a shiny blue Nintendo DSXL, and Miss Chief got a red one.
That little video game player totally saved my bacon this year in the summer reading challenge.
Instead of doing an outright head-to-head competition this year, I set a goal: For every twenty books, there would be an award; for the overall winner, an additional reward, agreed upon in advance. The contest officially ends this coming Tuesday when we start our fall semester. And as of today, the score is Princess Sarah 21, Pirate Mom 18. I expected when I set that goal that the Princess would achieve 40 books this summer -- she fell just shy of it last summer, if I remember correctly -- but thanks to the magic of Mario Brothers, she has only read 21 books this summer. She still gets two prizes -- one for winning, and one for reading 20 books, so she's happy (she chose a new DS game -- of course -- and lunch at the tea room, which she adores. Me, not so much. I like the tea room, but it's time consuming and expensive, so I try to mostly avoid it).
I set the goal as a way of trying to clean out my nightstand, in/on which there were 20 books at the start of summer, but although I ultimately read six of those twenty titles, I only actually read three of them in dead-tree form. The rest, I read on my Kindle. Which, turns out, I love!
Anyway. This summer, I have read eighteen books! I know that is probably not impressive to my heavy-reading friends, but for me, it represents a great deal of focused effort on my own behalf -- it's hard, with work and two young kids, to find time for my own hobbies. So, I am proud of myself, because this summer I read:
Farmer Boy and Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. These are actually the books I read aloud to Miss Chief at bedtime, one chapter at a time, and I was not going to count them, but Princess Sarah insisted on counting the books her father read to her at bedtime, so, I figure I get to count these. I am trying to remember what they read, and failing. FWIW, we read these in trade paperback.
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card, Reckless by Cornelia Funke, and Passion Play by Beth Bernobich have the distinction of being the three books I actually read in hardcover this summer. If I finish my current read this week -- The Sun Over Breda by Arturo Perez Reverte -- it will be the fourth. Princess Sarah stipulated that I had to read the books on my nightstand from the top down, in the order they were in at the beginning of the summer, because she thought that would prevent me reading the shortest books first -- a strategy I resorted to last summer in an effort to not be completely skunked (it didn't work). It didn't work exactly like she envisioned. I did start with the top book on the stack -- Over the Sea: CJ's First Notebook by Sherwood Smith, in trade paper, but after that book was unfortunately mauled by a child with muddy shoes (we call her Miss Chief for a reason), I bought it for my Kindle and finished it there. I read Passion Play, Reckless and Pathfinder in the stipulated order, but then came to The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet, by Perez Reverte, which is the fourth Captain Alatriste novel, and I had not yet read the third, so I traded that one out for The Sun Over Breda, which was actually on the shelf in the living room. The other book I read out of my nightstand was The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I had apparently bought in trade paperback and stuck in my nightstand, forgot about, and read a free copy I picked up on my Kindle. I ended up giving the brand-new paperback copy to a friend who really enjoyed it.
That accounts for eight of the summer's eighteen books, and all of the ones I read or meant to read in dead-tree form.
The rest, I read on my Kindle. I acquired the Kindle in March, without ever having intended to do any such thing. But I had bought a Kindle for Puck for Christmas, and when in March I was preparing to go away for three weeks, Puck suggested that a Kindle might be just the thing to have along on my trip. At his urging, I bought one. On my trip, I used it mostly for playing Scrabble, but this summer I did quite a bit of actual reading on it, including:
My Own Kind of Freedom by Steven Brust. I'd had this Firefly novel on my computer for ages and ages, and never actually read it until I could put it on the Kindle. Yay Kindle!
The Confessions of Peter Crossman by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald, which, truth? I love Peter Crossman novels and all, I do, but it was *ahem* short. In my own defense, I also read Two From the Mageworlds and The Queen's Mirror, short stories by the same authors, and didn't count them toward my summer reading total.
Do the Work by Stephen Pressfield. *hrm* short but also, when I picked it up, free, and also also, if my own personal novel ever actually makes it out of my head, it will owe something to Pressfield's book, so, it counts!
Writing Horses by Judith Tarr. One of the things I lurve lurve LURVE about my Kindle is this ability to download and read in a very comfortable format books that would be unpublished, difficult to obtain or nonexistent without electronic publishing. I enjoyed this book a lot, and without the Kindle, I might not have (I think it is available POD, but I probably wouldn't have bothered if I'd had to pay shipping, and that would have been a shame).
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. I'd had my eye on this book for a while, but I was initially reluctant to pay for content for my Kindle, because my HOUSE is packed solid with printed books, some of which I will never get around to reading, and I could just see me filling up my Kindle the same way, with stuff I'd paid good money for but would never read. This book was one of the first books I bought for my Kindle that I paid as much for as I would have paid for it in hardcover -- I'd picked it up and put it back down several times at Barnes & Noble -- and I'm glad I finally bought it. It's an excellent read, and I recommend it highly.
My dad's memoirs. See note above about stuff I wouldn't otherwise be able to get hold of/read conveniently. My dad works in one of those super-exciting professions you see all the time in TV dramas -- you know how people are always saying "Oh, Jeezy Pete, not ANOTHER TV drama about airport executives! Can't they come up with anything else to do a TV drama about? Lawyers, maybe? Cops? Firefighters? Doctors? Come on!" Anyway, being an airport executive, at least the way my dad did it, was always surprisingly interesting -- remind me sometime to tell you about the time I found a bug -- not an insect, but a covert surveillance device -- in our house while I was vacuuming, and it was there because of my dad's exciting job. As a result, I have been after him for years to write all this stuff down, and he retired this year and FINALLY did! He sent me the word document, and I sent it to my Kindle and read it there, and I say it counts toward my total.
Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell. I was hoping to find a great space opera series here. I... didn't, sadly. But I did read the whole thing, all the way to the end, and it counts!
What am I up to, fifteen?
The White Mountains by John Christopher. I had read this one as a child, and actually downloaded it to my daughter's Kindle, which is on my account (yes, we are now a three-Kindle household; my husband got his for Christmas, insisted that I get one in March, and then we decided together that really, the heaviest reader in the household, whose books were going to require very soon that we buy a larger home, should have one, too -- it may sound like a princely gift for an 11-year-old, but I tell you, it's cheaper than real estate!) because I thought she would enjoy it. I ended up rereading it, and loving it as much as the first time around. I am waiting not-very-patiently for the publisher to make the rest of the books in that series available for Kindle.
Have Gun, Will Play by Camille LaGuire. This is one of Camille's Mick and Casey westerns -- see my note above about books that would otherwise be yadda yadda. I LOVE Mick and Casey, and I hope that they someday find a home with a traditional publisher and/or an audience of the size they richly deserve. I also read a Mick and Casey short, The Curse of Scattershale Gulch, but didn't count it separately toward my total.
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. This one had been on my "I need to get this" list for a while, and then I got roped into being the "faculty advisor," more or less, for a homeschool novelists' club that includes Princess Sarah. They're working through a video curriculum called The One Year Adventure Novel that uses this book as an example, so I read it preparatory to that.
Like I said, I'm working right now on Book 19, which is the Perez Reverte. Since Harry Connolly's new book came out today, and is waiting now on my Kindle (I had preordered it; I forgot I'd done that! Next year I plan to hide my own Easter eggs and buy my own Christmas presents), it's a tossup whether I'll finish the hardcover Alatriste novel or the Kindle edition of the Twenty Palaces novel first.
I need to make the Princess write up her summer tally. Although most of it could
probably be summed up as "She read The Hobbit, plus a bunch of horse books."
ETA: You know what? I have left two books OFF this list. Either I've counted wrong, or some of the books above were read prior to the official start of summer, or both. Because in addition to the above, I read two Sherlock Holmes novels this summer: A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, both on my Kindle. I had never tried Sherlock Holmes, because in general I dislike mysteries, but it turns out I rather enjoy Sherlock Holmes. So... maybe I made twenty after all!