Turning the Page

This is what our summer’s looked like so far. Kid reading – All. The. Time. Kid saying, “I just have to finish this page / this chapter / this book.” I haven’t once had to say, “Stop playing video games!”

The thing is, it’s not our reading kid doing this.

It’s our other kid.

To be fair, our younger son has always loved English. He aces it. His teacher called me in partway through the year to explain to me why she felt she had to give him 100 per cent on his English assignment even though, technically, there is no such thing as 100 per cent in English. So, he’s always loved words, but usually ones he’s written himself.

This reading other people’s words – avidly – is a new thing.

It started – or, at least, seemed to start – with a certain series, and from there he just took off and hasn’t pulled his nose out of a book since.

So, in the interests of others out there, who are hoping / wishing / praying their older tween / young teen boy would become a bookworm, here are the books that have been consumed in our house so far this summer. Maybe one will stick for you?

The series that started it all: Young Bond

This is Book One in the series. The first five books were written by Charlie Higson, and it was then taken over by Steve Cole. Both my kids have read the entire series. Both seemed to like all the books pretty much equally – lots of discussions about how great the plot is, how much action, etc. General consensus is that all the books have errors in them (!) which quite bugged my kids, but the later, Steve Cole books, have even more mistakes.

Parental pain-in-the-a** alert – these books are (for some reason completely unfathomable to me) pretty much impossible to get new in North America. Why?

We got books One and Two in Waterstones in Cardiff in March, and they were prominently displayed in the teen section so I thought, “Great, I’ll just order the rest at home.” Yeah, right. For some reason, the publisher doesn’t seem to want to actually sell these books.

So, what can you do? They are easily available from Abebooks, where you can find them used, but in very good condition, and they’ll cost you $1 US, plus about $3 US shipping. Totally worth it. I was also able to find some of them at our library, and some are even available as audiobook borrows from the library.

When we ran out of Young Bonds to read: The Last Thirteen

These books have been in our house FOREVER – my older son saw them in a Scholastic catalogue and they were some great price for all 13 of them, so my parents bought them for him for his birthday. They weren’t being read, but he didn’t want to get rid of them, so we took them to the cottage where, suddenly, BINGO, change of scenery, my younger son was completely willing to pick them up and start reading.

He plowed through nine-and-a-half in one week. The remainder have been on hold, since there were some more Young Bonds waiting from Abebooks when we got home, but he plans to read the rest of the series before the end of the summer.

Parental pain-in-the-a** alert – Thirteen is Book One. I know … duh. I think somebody was trying to be cute, or clever, but I don’t find it either. I just find it confusing, and possibly tear-inducing, when you decide to buy one, to see if your kid likes it, before you buy the whole series, and you buy One, only to find that is the final book in the series, and the mystery’s over. So, buy the whole series, and get your kid to read Thirteen first, or if you’re only buying one book, buy Thirteen (I know … it’s confusing just writing it … when my older son warned us about this, I thought he was being a jerk and trying to mess his younger brother up).

Other books: