Thursday, May 1, 2014

Savoring a Book

It seems for school purposes that some books have to be read through so quickly to move on to the next in line that you never really get to savor a good book. I have said many times before that I enjoy youth fiction just as much as Grace does. Grace enjoys books but prefers to have some of them read aloud to her or through audio books because she really is not a lover of reading. I learned early on that read alouds in many genres were in our future. Typically I ask her to read a book for history and I choose another to read aloud. We do this with literature as well. I give her something to read on her own and I chose a "fun" book (usually a series we are following) to read aloud 2-3 times a week. She really loves this time even if she did start high school this year. Some of our favorites have been both Percy Jackson series and Michael Vey series. She never really got into the whole Harry Potter craziness.

We just finished House of Hades and the entire time we were reading it we thought it was the final book of the series. Imagine our surprise when we got to the end of the book and low and behold the last book in the series is coming out this fall. The fourth Michael Vey book will be coming out at the same time. We savor these books so slowly that it usually takes us a semester to finish each. Since we will be schooling most of the summer I am thinking about starting the Fablehaven series with her as well.

We were a tiny bit disappointed with a twist that the author decided to bring into the Percy Jackson series. SPOILER ALERT - Having one of the characters have feelings for another character of the same gender really blew my mind. This book started out for kids, tweens, and teenagers. I think the author took a real misstep in doing this. Luckily that was on only about three pages and has yet to really pop up again. It was only discussion of feelings and not acting upon them. I truly hope he does not decide to take it further in the last book. It would really ruin it for us.

2 comments:

A Candle to Read By said...

We all still do reading aloud fairly often. I am reading Ivanhoe with the boys. Virginia and I went back to read The Secret Garden. One of the best we have read as a family was IN HIS STEPS.

Karen said...

We still read aloud too. Keilee likes reading pretty well but she doesn't LOVE it like I do. But we have listened to amazing books on audio ever since she was 3. They have readers MUCH better than I am. :)