What we’re reading

It’s been a while since I wrote about what we’re reading around here. I am still reading The Iliad to D, my fifth grader. It is much more exciting to read than I expected — though it does get repetitive. I am finding it very easy to read, perhaps that’s because it was originally crafted for oral performance. I find the line widths flow very nicely. On his own, D sped through a favorite from my childhood, The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill. He is now working his way through Lloyd Alexander’s Pyrdain books. A few years ago I read them to the boys during a summer. D keeps asking advice on pronunciations; I was just making them up as I went along so I decided to look them up. Sure enough, I found a website with a pronunciation guide. I was off on quite a few; D says he might not adopt the “correct” pronunciations because once he has begun to use a pronunciation, he tends to keep it. Of course, he’s not reading aloud so it is interesting to me that pronunciation comes up. I find that when I am reading a book that has difficult names in it, I gloss over the them.

G, my eighth grader, asked for Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game so I requested it through the library. It finally came in and he closeted himself for several hours, devouring it. He begged for a trip to the bookstore after a recent visit to the doctor revealed a light case of pneumonia at the tail end of bronchitis. I felt for the kid so we trooped off to the local chain store for another of Card’s books. When I asked where he had come across Ender’s Game, he said Boing Boing. I think he got turned on to that after I bought him a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.

N, the seventh grader, is sticking with the Legend of Drizzt books. He carries them back and forth to school each day and often reads them at bedtime. Richard is working on a star wars novel. I read Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter for book group and have mostly been sticking to magazines lately. I found last month’s Scientific American (the one dedicated almost entirely to Darwin) fascinating. I also read through my friend’s old stack of New Yorker‘s.