Books...

I love to read.  It is my favorite hobby.  One nice thing about having a nursing baby is I have more built in time to read. Add a Kindle and a library card which allows me to check out e-books for free, and I'm a pretty happy mama (except for the persistent exhaustion, but that's the subject of another post).

Our older 5 children also like to read. But here is where things get interesting...they don't like the same kinds of books as each other!  They don't even like all the books I like.

That should not be a shock and indeed I'm used to the concept now, but I'll admit that many years ago, I fully expected the children to like the books I like and dislike the books I don't like.

Ha!

Each one is a unique human being, and not surprisingly, they have different interests.

The boys have been especially challenging to me in that many of the children's books I like so much are aimed more at girls, with female main characters. Naomi and Lydia, our first 2 kids, were happy with many of the books I suggested. Isaac, who learned to read later than his older 2 siblings, was NOT interested in many of the books I enjoyed.

I discovered that Isaac really liked graphic novels and comics.  I purchased the entire Bentley Boyd Chester Comix series, and Isaac (and then Joseph after him) read those happily.  Boyd's Chester Comix are history/social studies graphic books.

I also checked out a bazillion graphic novels from our library. Some were goofy fiction, but many were about science and medicine and history.  I'm delighted our library has those books.

I even relaxed my distaste for Garfield comics.  I try to be careful about what our kids read -- I AM careful about what our kids read -- but Garfield was a good bridge book for early readers.  Garfield is a turkey at times (well, he's a cat, but you know what I mean!) and Jon (his owner) is hapless, but the comics are clean and not grim.  I found my boys made significant reading progress by reading Garfield comics and Baby Blues and even Calvin and Hobbes.  The latter is a struggle for me and I still feel ambivalent, because Calvin is often not obedient and his parents are moderately ineffectual.  Many of the strips are totally charming in that they celebrate the imagination of a vibrant and vigorous boy.  The strips about school and babysitters tend to be more focused on Calvin's disobedience. Actually, the poor kid (if he really existed) would no doubt benefit from being homeschooled :-).

Isaac is now 11 and I've been encouraging him to read chapter books in the last couple of years.  Mostly he has obediently read books I gave him, but hasn't been very enthused.

Then Lydia handed him book 1 of a series of Christian fantasy by an author named Bill Myer.  The book is "The Portal".

To my astonishment, Isaac DEVOURED the first book. He loved it.  It is a weird book (though good) and I was taken aback by his enthusiasm.  He loved it so much he asked me to get the rest in the series, and thankfully I was able to find them cheap on abebooks.com.

Then I handed Isaac a "Jungle Doctor" book by Paul White, who was an Australian medical missionary to Africa.  White went back to Australia when his wife's health failed, and wrote a series of fictional missionary stories about a jungle doctor.  I bought 7 of them a few years ago (there are a couple dozen in the series) and neither of my girls was very excited about them though I loved them. I really enjoy missionary books.

Anyway, Isaac loved these too!  He has read almost all the ones we own and I bought a few more from (you guessed it) abebooks.com this week.

I realize not everyone enjoys reading for fun and that is fine, but I find reading to be a wonderful way to expand one's horizons.  Plus reading is fun.  And with Kindles, ooh ah, you can have hundreds of books with you all the time. It is fabulous.

And more and more, I'm seeing part of my "homeschooling mama" role to be finding good books for the kids.  They can learn so much from fictional and non-fictional books about history. They can expand their imagination by reading crazy books about dragons and portals.

Now I'll say again, I am cautious about what the kids are allowed to read.  I don't like books with disobedient kids and hapless or evil parents.  I don't like books where adults are totally ineffective and kids have to save the day.  I don't like books that are too intensely grim, at least not for the younger children. I don't like books which celebrate unhealthy romantic relationships.

But even with those caveats, there are so many glorious books out there.