Our Reading Stack
As in any homeschooling home, many things are being read most of the time. Here’s a recent run-down:
Reading for a 9-year-old girl
Mica (who is 9 and 3/4, which seems oddly appropriate to note in a post about books ) recently discovered Trixie Belden, which tickles me no end because I loved Trixie when I was her age. Much more so than Nancy Drew, which was my best friend’s girl detective of choice.
However, we are checking these out from the library and I was tardy in finding the fourth book for her when she was ready to read it, so we had to dig something off the shelves and at the moment she is really enjoying Half Magic. Edward Eager is another of my favorite children’s authors!
Reading for the teen and preteen boys
Meanwhile Colter (15) has been working through Sherlock Holmes. On a recent two-way six-hour drive to church camp, he managed to get most of the way through the book, despite the heavy metal that was the musical choice of the rest of the boys in his van. I’m a little surprised (but happy!) that he is enjoying this so much, because they’re not the easiest reading and the plots are somewhat simplistic compared to the sophistication today’s kids are accustomed to in movies, television, video games, and books.
Reading for the 17-year-old girl
Noa has picked up on my obsession with Neil Gaiman and just finished reading Good Omens. The stack of reading beside her reading chair is almost as tall as mine; though, Neil Gaiman aside, most of the subject matter is very different. She is a writer and so is also working on nonfiction books such as Bones: A Forensic Detective’s Casebook and
Corpse: Nature, Forensics, And The Struggle To Pinpoint Time Of Death. She was quizzing me on these subjects and while I didn’t know much off the top of my head, I did know enough to stop at our favorite used bookstore on the way home and lead her straight to the true crime section where she found these gems.
Noa and Colter both have been reading Stephen Baldwin’s excellent book The Unusual Suspect, a biographical account of how he came to faith in Jesus, for a discussion circle.
Reading for the mom
I have to pick and choose among the books recently finished (a lot), or partially finished and laid aside for the moment (nonfiction; I never do this to a good fiction book!), but I’ll start with the one I’m right in the middle of which is A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans. This book is considered somewhat controversial by many of my Christian friends but so far I have not found anything I would consider so; but even if it does turn up something outside the bounds of American evangelicalism, I really enjoy reading things that make me think, give me a deeper perspective, or give me a good challenge to my faith that I have to work though. This book is in the style of The Year of Living Biblically, in which A. J. Jacobs (who claims “I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. Not very.”) spent a year trying to live out all the various Old Testament laws; Evans similarly scoured scripture to find all the rules that applied to women, and spent a month focusing on exploring each command.
And that’s it for our reading stack for now! What have you been reading lately?
