Summer Reading Project!
I’m posting this before I second guess myself. Lizzie Skurnick wrote a book called Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading based on a popular column, Fine Lines at Jezebel. It’s goes through the various books many of us read growing up, their themes, their strengths, their flaws, etc.
(It’s rather like a Teenage Girls’ Canon, a pop-cultural milieu many of us, especially those who came of age in the late 70’s/80’s/early 90’s shared.)
Examples: Chapter 1, “YA Heroines We’ll Never Return” includes A Wrinkle in Time (Meg!). Chapter 4: “Read ‘Em and Weep” includes Jacob Have I Loved and Bridge to Terabithia. Chapter 7 on Romance includes Forever, and Chapter 10, “I Can’t Believe They Let Us Read This”, includes Flowers in the Attic, My Sweet Audrina, Clan of the Cave Bear, Wifey and Domestic Arrangements. It’s one of the three chapters where I read all the books. Heh. The oevres of Judy Blume, Lois Duncan, Madeleine L’Engle are all well represented in it.
I don’t think there’s a way to do a reading challenge and ask that people read all the books she references even if they’re often super short–72! BUT there are ten chapters, and twelve weeks between June and August.
I propose a chapter a week starting the first or second week in June, and reading ONE book from the chapter a week, then coming here to discuss it. And I’d add an eleventh week (it’ll be so good it’ll go to 11!) for what book you loved that isn’t included. (Mistral’s Daughter. Ahem.)
SO, you’d be reading one chapter of Shelf Discovery, and one short YA book a week, perhaps one you already read as a child, and perhaps for you parents even one you could read WITH your kid. (Not Wifey, but maybe A Little Princess, right?)
Whaddya think?
If there’s interest, then a schedule and bibliography to come.
May 22nd, 2012 at 12:26 pm
I’m in!
(was there any doubt?)
May 22nd, 2012 at 2:26 pm
You know I’m in.
May 25th, 2012 at 7:57 am
I’ll do it! And I’m glad you loved Middlemarch.
May 25th, 2012 at 10:18 am
I’m honored! Let me know if you want some special vintage prize-package signed-copy thinger at any point.
May 25th, 2012 at 11:33 am
Well, that totally saved me an email I was going to send today! Woo hoo!