Don’t lose those grade-level gains you worked so hard to make all year long! Reading over the summer prevents the traditional summer loss of reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. And it’s so easy—a virtually stress-free, fun way of learning. Just pick out a few good books and get started. I’ve put together a great list of summer books using recommendations from the best sources. I plan on reading and reviewing these books all summer long. 

Join me! As you read, feel free to make comments on any of the books by clicking the comment link on the review. All of the books I’ve picked out are available in multiple copies from the Ontario City Library at both the Colony and Ovitt branches. And don’t forget—any that you read will count toward the Ontario City Library’s summer reading program, so you can pick up some prizes as you go. If the title of the book is hyperlinked, I’ve already reviewed it, and you can make comments now. For the titles that are not—I’m reading! Check back soon!

This summer’s theme:

Compassion and Camaraderie

(Life is full of bullies—let’s understand each other)

Laurie Halse Anderson

Speak

Wintergirls

Twisted

Catalyst

(Don’t miss Anderson’s moving poem/tribute to the readers of Speak. She reads it here.)

John Green

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

An Abundance of Katherines

Paper Towns

Looking for Alaska

(He’s a video blogger, too—see him here.)

Jay Asher

Thirteen Reasons Why

Sarah Dessen

What Happened to Goodbye?

Lock and Key

Just Listen

Gayle Forman

If I Stay

Where She Went

. . .

Genre Fiction for Fun:

Fantasy

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Sapphique by Catherine Fisher (sequel to Incarceron)

Fire by Kristin Cashore (This is the sequel to Graceling)

Eon and Eona by Alison Goodman

Sword Fighting and Combat

Ranger’s Apprentice Series by John Flanagan

Horror for Guys

The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod by Heather Brewer

Sports

Heat by Mike Lupica

(and if you like the book, Mike Lupica has a lot of good sports books)

Historical Fiction

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Try a Classic:

Dracula

Frankenstein

Things I Just Want to Read for No Particular Reason:

Matched by Ally Condie (VOYA best Sci-Fi of the year)

Unwind by Neal Schusterman

Bad Girls Don’t Die by Katie Alender

Yesterday afternoon, I met with Beverly Speak, who gave me a tour of the clinic, and presented her with a boxful of brand new Scholastic titles that we earned through our book fair. Everyone in the clinic was excited to have them.

Kids Come First always needs new and gently used books, so if you have any that you’d like to donate, bring them by the library, and I’ll make sure they get to the clinic. The clinic serves teens all the time, but they have special ‘teen’ hours on Thursday evenings from 3:30-7:30 PM. They are located at 1501A Bon View (between Francis and Mission), in Ontario. They have a great, welcoming staff whose goal is to help kids!

Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight text on web pages and then gives you a small link to the highlighted page.

Here’s another book I enjoyed reading while I was looking for non-fiction I thought you’d like. The Worst Hard Time is about the Dust Bowl—the southern Great Plains, particularly the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and Kansas—during the Great Depression.

I think you’ll like it  just because it’s hard to believe the sheer enormity of the Dust Bowl—the idea that dust storms could roll in like 10,000-foot high mountains and suffocate all the farm animals (and people stuck outside) in their paths. That people could lock themselves inside on a regular basis and tape around all the window and door seams, drape wet sheets over all, and still come out coughing and spitting up black muck, could die of the ‘dust pneumonia’ that these “black blizzards” caused. (The animals outside would die because their lungs were so full of dust that they literally suffocated, unable to breathe air.)

Egan tells us many times that the environmental disaster was manmade. Settlers who came in and tore up the grasslands—which had been intact for thousands of years—created the perfect ingredients for a plague of Biblical proportions once a drought came. And ‘plague’ isn’t hyperbole—the loss of farms and livelihoods led to hunger and even starvation. The loss of arable land, the constant streams of dust led to other plagues—of rabbits, clubbed and killed in the thousands in Sunday recreational round-ups; of grasshoppers in the millions, eating everything in their paths; of centipedes crawling through the walls of houses.

It’s difficult to imagine how anyone could have managed to stay through years of the dust bowl conditions, but some people did. Egan makes the book interesting by following them from the early days when the land was plowed and wheat was planted through the 1930s when all their dreams were shattered.

There are so many reasons to like this book! It will show you why writing matters and why reading matters. It will direct you to some excellent books, both fiction and non-fiction. It will make you think about what matters in life and in the world.

The Book That Changed My Life is a series of fifteen interviews with people who have won or have been finalist for a National Book Award. At the end of each interview is a list of works written by the interviewee as well as a list of books that influenced him or her, that shaped the writer’s life.

Each author, without being didactic, ends up telling us, in some way, why books matter. Here’s a great example from Barry Lopez’s interview:

“I believe you can say that most English-language literature today is about community—what makes it coherent? What makes it fly apart? Can it be put back together? And I think this literature is generated by a fear that disintegration of communities—families, neighborhoods, tribes—means an end to a fundamental part of human life. . . . look at the way in which we in this country have indulged ourselves in extreme notions of individual privilege, and what that has done to our social fabric—that’s something I want to write about.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the fate of the culture of which I am a part, or about how writing a story can help. If, in essays or short fiction, you can bring back the intensity of something forgotten or vaguely understood, by sharpening the image and making it succinct, then you’re helping. A young person reading a story of yours could be inspired to attempt any number of things. An adult who has been abandoned by a lover or a child could read a story and find the reason that he or she wants to get up off the floor. All of those are good reasons to write. You’re helping people do the things that are far more important than literature.”

If you are an aspiring writer, you need to read this book!

“When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother’s illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it.”

So, Jamaica Kincaid has written a small book about the death from AIDS of her youngest brother. At 198 pages, this memoir comes so close to that 200 page minimum for a book project that you might get your teacher to overlook those last two pages. After all, Kincaid is an established literary writer and she has all the stuff your teachers hope you’ll enjoy in literature—a style of her own and the many literary elements you are taught and tested on, especially wonderful figurative language. This book is as much a writing exercise as it is a memoir, as much the story of Kincaid’s love/hate relationship with her mother as her relationship with her brother.

I first came in contact with Kincaid’s writing through The New Yorker, which was regularly publishing her short works. I loved her style and would always check to see if she had something published in the weekly magazine. If not, I would toss it aside to read later. If so, I sat down and immersed myself in the story immediately. That said, I’d also like to note that her style would be a lot of fun to parody, if you should get such an assignment. While everyone else in the class is imitating Hemingway and Faulkner, you can try something like this passage from My Brother:

“It must have been wonderful in Miami then, but I will never really know, I can only repeat what other people said; they said that it was wonderful in Miami and they were glad to be there, or they wanted to be there. But I myself was in Miami, and I found Miami not to be in the tropical zone that I was from, and yet not in the temperate zone where I now live; Miami was in between, but its in-betweenness did not make me long for it. I missed the place I now live in, I missed snow, I missed my own house that was surrounded by snow, I missed my husband, the father of my children, and they were all in the house surrounded by snow. I wanted to go home.”