Aliens on Vacation

by Clete Barrett Smith
Disney / Hyperion  2011 

When Scrub is shunted off to his Grandmother's for the summer he discovers that her Intergalactic Bed and Breakfast is more than a name... 

Scrub just knows his summer is going to suck. Having to spend his summer helping his grandmother run her Star Wars hippie-decor B&B in the middle-of-nowhere Washington was bad enough, but knowing that his best friend Tyler was going to be doing basketball camp and tournaments across the country was killing him.  There is no way Scrub would ever make the seventh grade all-star team next year, not with Tyler gaining the coach's favor three times a week in practice and in games on the weekend. But with his parents called off on last-minute business trips, and no way to convince them he could take care of himself at home alone, there is little Scrub can do but suck it up and stick it out the best he can.

Initially he assumes Grandma's business caters to the sci-fi nerds after meeting with one of the guests, a tall man with loose, ash colored skin.  With a better understanding of the House Rules ("Two arms, two legs, one head" and "No harming the natives" in particular) Scrub begins to realize that "Intergalactic" is more than just a name for Grandma's establishment; she truly is catering to visitors from other planets!  But the resort only works as long as the "guests" can remain unnoticed while on vacation, and it falls to Scrub to help Grandma keep her hostel/travel portal a secret. 

Naturally, there are suspicious locals, including Sheriff Tate who is certain that Grandma is up to no good, and Amy who suspects there's a connection between the B&B and life on other planets. And then there's the little issue of the intergalactic transporter shutting down leaving vacationers trapped on Earth. It's only a matter of time before the carefully hidden truth is about be be exposed, right there on the lawn in front of the B&B with world media attention.  But if Scrub saves the day and can protect Grandma and her guests his actions will not only get the Sheriff fired but cause him enough ridicule to force him out of town... taking his daughter (and Scrub's only real friend) Amy with him.  Is there any way Scrub can make the right decision for everyone?

Among all the book's characters I do have a favorite and that's Mr. Harnox, the aforementioned tall guest with ashen skin who happens to be stuck on Earth. Throughout, Mr. Harnox is constantly making discoveries about his new home (a description of cacti sounds delicious) while at the same time applying the lessons Grandma has tried to instill in all her guests, ("Everything deserves a second chance"). Alternately comic relief and an alternate viewpoint on the world, his loopy wide-eyed innocence coupled with his unusual diet creates a character that wouldn't be out of place in a Charles Addams cartoon.

Smith gives readers a solid everykid in Scrub; neither nerdy nor geeky nor uber-hip.  He's just a kid, an easygoing vehicle for dealing with whatever gets thrown his way, which ends up being quite a bit, actually.  There isn't any mystery what Grandma is up to, or that Scrub will figure it out, so much as a question of what is the right thing to do in any given situation, and can Scrub handle it.  What's interesting is how adept Scrub is at his various care-taking duties – helping the aliens prepare to look human before leaving the B&B, shopping for excessive amounts of ammonia and aluminum to keep one long-term guest fed, and even mitigating conversations between the guests and locals to quell suspicions. Scrub finds, as many kids do, that fluid middle space where they are maleable to any given situation and it becomes an empowering thing for a kid to find they are both needed and capable when it comes to being responsible. There's a strong thread of compassion woven throughout though Smith doesn't draw any undue attention toward it. 

Which is not to suggest Aliens of Vacation is a dry "message" story.  It's a solid, plot-driven middle grade book with heart that will have readers longing for distant relatives with intergalactic transporters in their homes.



Full disclosure: Clete Barrett Smith and I were students together at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and I received my copy of the book from his publicist.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days

by Jeff Kinney
Amulet / Abrams 2009

The fourth book in the Wimpy Kid series continues with the misadventures of Greg Heffley trying to make it through the summer with as little effort and trauma as possible.  But if that happened there'd be no book...

After the initial blast of the first Wimpy Kid book, and the subsequent popularity, I sort of let the series go as one of those things that's good for a laugh not not, you know, something I felt obsessive about.  Like Charlie Brown and other cartoon creations, once you know who they are as characters you can pretty much guess their travails and it really becomes a question of individual limits.  I know one summer way back when I obsessively read every paperback that had the MAD magazine logo on it, followed by every Wizard of Id collection I could nab.  It's a kid thing, a summer thing, a perfectly solid way to wile away those dog days of late July and August.

Wimpy Kid Greg Heffley starts off by claiming that summer is nothing more than a three-month long guilt trip because while everyone else is outside he'd rather stay in playing video games.  Of course, everything Greg either attempts or is forced to do that takes him away from his game time supports his thinking that he'd be better off indoors and away from everyone.  Which, when you think about it, is a fairly stagnant place for a character to be; anti-social, unable to enjoy anything outside of himself, constantly finding nothing but misery about his situation.  Even his attempts to do something constructive  – start a lawn care company – is driven by his desire to make money to pay off a country club debt and nothing else.  Even when I was laying around reading comics I still had days where I schemed to make money and build massive tree forts that were structurally unsound.

Greg Heffley is a bit of a downer.

But that's what makes him work.  Kids recognize what a downer he is and laugh at him, not with him, in a way that sometimes borders on mean.  I think Kinney comes up with some great situations for mischief and misadventure, where readers can see with devilish glee what unsuspecting Greg is about to get himself into.  But after three books it isn't just wearing thin, its beginning to look like Greg might actually be suffering from sort of brain damage.  How else do you explain a character who, as the mock definition of insanity goes, keeps beating his head against the wall expecting a different result?  Maybe if the kid had something go right once in a while it would make all the other mishaps and screw-ups have more impact.

By now, these books are criticism- and review-proof.  Kids read them, and enjoy them, and despite being mislabeled as graphic novels (they aren't) are perfectly fine amusements. 

Chiggers

by Hope Larson
Atheneum 2008

Abby has arrived at camp first (as usual, due to her mother) and as the other girls arrive everyone slips back into their camp personalities and cliques. Abby's closest friend Rose has returned as a counselor this year and her additional duties preclude her and Abby from hanging out as much.

As the bunks fill in her cabin Abby ends up with new girl Deni beneath her who spends her day complaining about what a dump the camp is and her nights scratching herself into oblivion. The girls come back to their cabin and find Deni mysteriously gone, and quickly the rumor is she contracted chiggers and was sent home.

The next girl to fill the bunk is Shasta, a hippie-esque weirdo who refrains from many camp activities due to her own mysterious illness, a illness that requires a daily medication she refuses to take. While Abby has always been a sort of fifth wheel around her cabin mates, Shasta is the out-and-out weirdo, and when Abby is stuck showing the new camper around she finds herself battling between distancing her self from Shasta and making friends with her.

Shasta, it turns out, was struck by lightning and occasionally finds her hair raised on end and little balls of lightning drift into her cabin looking for her. There's tension between Abby and Shasta when they find themselves attracted to the same boy until Shasta is sent home for failure to take her medicine. Camp ends with a kiss and a bandanna and memories that make camp that place where strangers are friends for life until it's time to go home.

Larson's graphic novel pulls off the trick of being episodic without feeling episodic, telling the story of a summer without a plot. Abby, and all the girls for that matter, are mean and nice, conflicted and assured, friends and enemies. They are kids at that age where everything is possible which means they run hot and cold with the wind. Everything is possible at camp, and Larson picks out those moments that highlight those possibilities; the friendship bracelets, the games of capture the flag, the overnight hike with the ghost stories and a flashlight. None of it cliched or bathed in the patina of nostalgia or underscored with "deeper meaning" than the moment it exists in.


More like this, please.

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever

written and illustrated by Marla Frazee
Harcourt 2008

James and his friend Eamon are going to Nature Camp for a week. It's a day camp near Eamon's grandparent's beach front house where the boys spend their week. If you want to see what they did at camp all you need to read are the endpapers which are snapshots of their time at camp. Their best week ever happened at Bill and Pam's (Eamon's grandparent's) house.

Bill's a nice old guy who has traveled the world, loves penguins, and wants to talk about Antarctica all the time. The boys couldn't care less. Pam's cooking is better than anything the boys get at home, but probably because all she serves them is banana waffles. The boys stay in the basement, sleep on an inflatable mattress that serves as a fort, a trampoline, and a couch for their video game playing. They wear the same shorts all week long.

James and Eamon are boys, true boys, marginally overseen by adults, living the summer that boys dream of. Their week over, the boys look out over the ocean at night, feeling something they can't articulate. But they know what to do: they collect driftwood, small rocks and mussel shells and assemble a miniature Antarctica complete with penguins on the deck. They hug Pam and Bill and hope they can go to Nature Camp again soon.

Frazee knows boys. At the very least she knows these boys, and she knows that with boys everything is indirect. Bill asks them if they want to go see the penguin exhibit at the zoo, they boys say they'll think about it, and then they run away. They aren't trying to be rude, they're just boys doing what boys do, which is run away from conflict. I don't have a problem with this, because Frazee presents this with the same carefree attitude that boys bring with them. At the very end of their week when the boys don't know how to address their feelings of sorrow they do what boys do best: they build things, the express their feeling physically.

I'm on the fence between calling this a good picture book and a great picture book. It's heart is in the right place, the humor is dry and authentic, but I'm left feeling like their best week ever needed a little more of an anchor, maybe one or two more activities to solidify their week. Their days are taken up with Nature Camp -- which is never shown, and I'm fine with that -- but I wish they'd had more time at Pam and Bill's to build or create or invent some week-long project that could mirror the building of their summer friendship.

Will boys like it? Probably. Will they get it? Maybe. Does it matter? Nope.

Summer Reading, Part Five: The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature

Recently I went to my local library with an odd request: Did the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature still exist, or had it been replaced by the Internet?

The reference librarian looked me over and sighed. It may still exist, she said, but the library hasn't purchased it since 2001 and few people have ever used it, or asked where it was kept. Once a massive multi-volume record of articles published by magazines and organized by subject, it's easy to see how this valuable research tool had been replaced by search engines, but it saddened me. It's one thing to do a Google search on the name Muhammad Ali and get 2.6 million results in 0.13 seconds but it would take you much longer, and more key words, to get, say, a specific selection of magazine articles from 1967 regarding his refusal to register for the draft during Vietnam. You'd still have to hunt those articles down but you'd have a better idea of what was recorded at the time in one quick glance.

The bane of many a school research paper -- now almost completely replaced by Wikipedia -- and no longer the source of much frustration in learning how to properly cite a reference work, I hereby dedicate this last segment on alternative summer reading to The Reader's Guide and to the idea that summer reading doesn't have to be about books.

newspapers

One of the best summers I ever had in terms of reading came the summer of the Watergate hearings in congress. I was thirteen and didn't have a clue what was going on but it all seemed very important. There was no discussion of politics in my house because (I only learned when I was an adult) my parents were of opposing political parties and kept silent to keep the peace.

Pity then, that I couldn't see what the world looked like from the mindset of the day; pity now, that it seems unlikely that people from opposite parties could live under the same roof.

That said, all this non-talk in the house of politics drove me to try and figure things out for myself and every day I had at my disposal the best tool available: The Los Angeles Times.

It is still very clear to me, all these years later, the memory of that first morning I commandeered the coffee table to make room for the entire newspaper. The newspaper was a book in my eyes, and I wanted to view the book as a whole. I distinctly remember how lost I felt at first, reading names and places and processes and procedures and feeling the intimidating weight of everything a newspaper had to offer. But I was determined.

I started with anything Watergate -- that's why I was there -- but quickly began to read about people and places I'd sort of heard about. A few years earlier our local paper put out a weekly digest edition of current events for classroom use so I had some familiarity with what a newspaper would contain, but I hadn't counted on their being so much news! And daily! Here's a section with letters and opinions and a political cartoon making fun of the president! This section talks about movies and music! Peanuts comics I had never seen in book form!

It might seem like I'm making fun, but I'm not. Before that first day I thought of the newspaper as something adults read, some boring part of adulthood. I never took the newspaper for granted after that.

A few years later I had a teacher who tried to get us to use our homeroom time to read the newspaper. She unabashedly had presidential campaign materials decorating one of her walls (Carter*Mondale placards outnumbered Ford*Dole signs 3 to 1) and she would clip interesting news stories among them. I was one of the few who read the newspaper during that time -- mostly to avoid homework, which my friends were busy doing last-minute, homework I would later hastily copy. Most of my friends found the news boring and I didn't see the point in trying to teach them otherwise.

With a little guidance, summer is the perfect time for younger minds to read the newspaper. If there isn't a current events assignment attached it might take a little more prodding than normal, or it might take less given that it's "free reading" without a test attached. I haven't checked out any Lexile or Flesch-Kincaid readability tests lately, but the last I heard the New York Times had a 7th grade reading level. Most papers fall at or below the NYT in readability, depending on readership and locale, and even within a newspaper there are various levels of readability. Good news for readers of the sports section: sports journalists tend to write at a higher level than the rest of the paper, pushing adjectives, similes and metaphors onto sports fans with greater frequency than an SAT prep course.

Walter Cronkite once wrote an article titled "How to Read a Newspaper." Some of the statistical information is a bit dated (I think fewer than 65% of the population gets their news from TV anymore), and many people under the age of 25 might never have even heard of the man who was once considered "the most trusted man in America", but the strategies for approaching a paper are solid even for the most dubious of news sources.

I'd also like to suggest a couple book titles that I think are essential not only to understanding the news in all its formats but in understanding the power of how media and the written word can be manipulated. The first is a handy little tome that's been in print for over 50 years now called How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. In it's breezy 80 or so pages it covers some of the ways information can be misused, including how simple charts can be manipulated to create certain effects (i.e. most infographics in USA Today) and how certain words can imply meaning that isn't necessarily or completely truthful. This book, along with it's equally slender partner The Elements of Style by Strunk & White (and perhaps the US Constitution) should be required materials in every high school backpack.

John Allen Paulos' A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper would be another highly recommended title for anyone who actually wants to understand the news. Middle grade and YA readers are consuming information all the time but understanding -- even questioning the quality of that information -- is given little attention. This book reaches into news stories and pulls out their numerical "facts" and plays around with them so show that how a number is stated often misleads or misrepresents the statistical information involved. it is nowhere near as dry as I'm making it sound here.

newsweeklies

In 7th grade my social studies teacher (ah, Mr. Grove) suggested we not limit ourselves to local newspapers and that we expand our horizons to include reading one of the prominent newsweeklies, either Time or Newsweek. It was very deliberate on my part when I caught my mother in a distracted moment and told her I need $12 for some school supplies and, oh, could you make it a check and leave it blank so I could fill it in? Four to six weeks later my mom met me at the door when I came home from school holding my first issue of Time magazine aloft, demanding to know when I subscribed. I explained it was for school and she scowled; I assumed it was because I hadn't been fully honest though I later suspected it was because Time was considered the more conservative party line newsweekly and my mom was decidedly more liberal.

I read Time magazine cover to cover. If I had read any of my class textbooks as religiously as I read that magazine I might have actually earned some good grades. I can barely remember what the heck the Treaty of Ghent was but I vividly remember to this day the special edition concerning CIA-taught torture methods used in Central America (this was in the late 1970's, which shows that torturing political prisoners abroad isn't a recent phenomenon). I even remember the specific names of some of the torture techniques, so vividly were they drawn and planted into my head.

Just a thought: What if, instead of textbooks, we published weekly magazines for students that contained materials and lessons for all their classes? They could keep the magazines and build a collection -- use their art class to build storage boxes and teach them how to bind volumes -- and have a growing library of all their studies! Naturally they would have to hold the same quality of commercially produced magazines, but the content could be solid and being produced on a weekly basis would allow for current (and relevant) events to be placed contextually alongside one another. Or is that just too radical an idea, to make educational materials fun, relevant and interesting?

By the time I hit high school I had switched to Newsweek and mailed in a "bill me later" subscription postcard for Rolling Stone magazine. I paid for RS with money from my first job and am proud to say I was a subscriber back in the 70's when it not only covered music but politics and popular culture and had staffers like Cameron Crowe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Klein, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, P.J. O'Roarke, among others. As I got older, RS seemed less hip and I ventured into Spin (for culture more than music, the first magazine that featured a monthly column on AIDS while the Reagan Administration denied its existence) and even later Options (for music that was way off the charts).

I sorta miss what those magazines did, and did for me, over the years and I don't know that there's anything really picking up that slack today -- maybe Mojo for the hardcore music purists out there. Most of what kids seem attracted to in magazines today is what they have been told to like, the crassly created advertisement delivery devices we recognize as Teen Vogue (or anything with the word Teen in the title), FHM (the triumphant return of misogyny), and, yes, Rolling Stone which has lost so much of its original backbone that it doesn't even rate as a cartilaginous fish much less the political shark it once was. It isn't that there aren't good magazines out there, it's just that the bad ones have got their alluring tentacles down to a science.

For the young set, yes, go to the library and check out Cricket and Cobblestone and all their relatives , and for the slightly older kids I'd say purchase a subscription to a newsweekly and a topic-specific magazine of their interest (Communication Arts, Sports Illustrated, Found, Premiere, ReadyMade...) in their name. Even if they end up reading them out of boredom at least they're reading, right?

tabloids

The Bat Boy. The Alien that predicts presidents. Elvis sightings. These and many other fine pieces of American journalism have all appeared in The Weekly World News the "mock tabloid" creation of those geniuses behind The National Enquirer. This gem appears in supermarkets all over the country and as much as I hate to admit it I don't think there's a humorous periodical that's been able to touch this since the collapse of Spy magazine.

It's hard to imagine a more perfect publication: it appeals to those who believe it's every fiction and to those who "get" the joke and feel all the more superior for it. I have seen the WWN's rival, The Sun, and there's just no comparison. And what else can you buy that provides this much entertainment for a buck. You practically can't get a candy bar these days for a dollar.

But is it quality reading? About ten years ago I read an article about how journalism graduates were having a tough time finding jobs because newsrooms were downsizing and papers were consolidating and one of the best paying jobs were at the tabloids. So, despite their lowbrow sensibilities, you've got Berkeley and Columbia and Northwestern grads pretending to be redneck Americans complaining about liberals and creating detailed histories of the appearance of Jesus on foodstuffs. It might all be crap but it's well-written crap. Bring one home every once in a while and see if it doesn't replace a night of television.

'zines

I'm sure they're still out there but not like they used to be. To some extent, you're reading one. These days what many people put on the Internet in the form of web sites and blogs is exactly the sort of things one finds in zines. Opinions, how-to articles, factoids, more opinions, computer generated designs or cut-n-paste masterpieces, whether fan- or hobby-based or thematically connected, the zine was a first step toward the democratization of the individual voice that is now the given hallmark of the Internet. DIY (do it yourself) was the mantra, born out of the punk movement, and is as alive today as the nearest photocopy store.

Instead of suggesting readers go in search of zines, I'm saying they should get out there and produce a zine of their own! Why? Because it's fun, because it involves writing (which requires reading), because it is an activity that staves off summer boredom, because in a rule-filled world it offers an escape from rules and expectations. Did I mention fun?

I mean it. I've created a few zines in my day and despite never turning legit and running a media empire I did manage to get my zine picked up for distribution and actually sold a few copies to strangers in places as exotic as Singapore and Portland, Oregon. It was always a financial loss but I never did it for the money.

Having gone to art school I learned quite a bit in a formal setting about layout and design, printing and binding processes so I didn't need much in the way of instruction. But in this post-print age kids might need some visual inspiration and instruction and for that -- yes, you guessed it -- I have a couple books to recommend. Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? The Art of Making Zines and Mini-Comics by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson is a great sloppy mess of an instruction manual for the serious and casual zinester alike. It covers the full range of topics, from what to write about, how to lay it out, printing types and styles, even resources for conventions and libraries that collect and display zines. This book can be read in a day and used as a spring board to produce several issues of a zine throughout a single summer; everything in this book took me years, and a lot of trial and error, to learn on my own.

For more of a read about a zine, with a bit of how-to thrown in, try Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally...Found Myself...I Think by Pagan Kennedy. Kennedy reprints the eight issues of her zine and gives explanations and historical background for her personal zine, which brings up another great point about zines. Many zines out there were personal narratives, observations through the individual eye on a particular subject or interest. Even if the zines were little more than expanded diary entries or summaries of what happened at different music club shows the zine somehow managed to elevate the personal life into something slightly more meaningful.

I would totally be remiss if I failed to mention Francesca Lia Block and Hilary Charlip's book Zine Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines. In addition to being co-penned by the slinkster-cool Ms. Block this book has a very grrl power feel to it, but a totally suburban-acceptable grrl power. A gay friendly, totally suburban, grrl power vibe. Like zines, books about them take on their own personalities and choosing the right book makes all the difference. Boys will probably want the Whatcha Mean... title while girls would do well with any two of the above. There's also plenty of zine info on the Internet, of all places.

I'm not trying to suggest that zines have the power to act as a form of therapy, morale boost or increase a zinester's sense of self-worth... although they can. As the saying has been hacked to death, the journey is the destination, and a zinester's journey no less so. With a little financial backing (and the promise not to meddle) plenty of bored summer readers could become, overnight, content providers for their friends in need of some good summer reading, if not future media moguls.

Let a thousand zines bloom!

* * * * *

I'm pooped. A little over six weeks ago I conceived this idea of suggesting alternatives to summer reading and, as with most of my projects, bit off way more than I could chew. To meet my own expectations I probably should have started six months ago, but that's not when I originally conceived the idea.

After each of the five posts in this series I usually had a couple other ideas that I realized could have fit, a couple more titles, some better worded suggestions. That's just the nature of the beast, isn't it? I joked with myself that I should probably start collecting these leftover ideas for another installment about summer reading next year.

Next year. A year ago I hadn't even started blogging about kidlit, I couldn't have conceived where I would be this year. Perhaps by this time next year I will have an entirely different approach to summer reading to share. Perhaps not. We'll see.

Thanks to those of you who have checked in, both in the comments and those who have lurked in silence. If this has been a help to you or a reader in your life, if you found any of these ideas successful (especially if you have any success stories) I would love to hear about them. I am also considering some back-to-school ideas for a post at the end of the summer, taking suggestions for essential reading that might be a bit off the beaten path. Feel free to drop me a line at delzey (at) gmail (dot) com.

Heat Wave

by Eileen Spinelli
illustrated by Betsy Lewin
Harcourt 2007

Lumberville is headed for a heat wave. Small changes are made to accommodate the small town's citizens -- the Sunday sermon is shortened, the movie theatre (before the days of air conditioning) is closed. But day by day as the heat wave lingers the people of the town cope as best they can. Kids sell lemonade but eventually resort to selling ice. Fanning oneself gives way to multiple showers a day. Men and women strip down to the barest of clothing and take refuge in the shade. Beards are shorn. By week's end people are sleeping outside, on fire escapes and rooftops and eventually many in the town congregate at the river to sleep in the cool coming off the water.

And just before the heat wave breaks they all share the same dream while they sleep: they dream of cool rain. And just as abruptly as a heat wave, the book is over.

In both text and image the story recalls a by-gone era of small town life. There is a quaint nostalgia in a time before the modern comforts of the climate-controlled malls, for communities that would still rally around their commonalities even in discomfort. Subtle details in the illustrations speak to the early part of the 20th century -- a wood stove in the basement, two spinster sisters keeping their perfume in an ice box, an old dome-shaped parlor radio -- but many others (squirting each other with hoses, sleeping in hammocks) remain contemporary.

Lewin's breezy watercolors with their lose sumi ink outlines capture the wilted, wavy quality of the heat where her warm palate (and occasionally relief from cool blue highlights) sets Lumberville glowing in the heat. That's a flowery way to say that the pictures capture the loose, slightly uncomfortable feel of the heat wave while at the same time remain fluid and fresh.

No one asked me, but were I editing this book I think I would have ended with a wordless coda showing the townsfolk of Lumberville about their business in cooler times, just a simple city scene in cooler tones of color (I was starved for green!) to offset the heat wave and give a glimpse into what things looked like when they weren't so hot. It can be a tricky proposition to know when to end a story, or to even suggest when a story needs more information. I don't think the book is flawed as it stand, I would have enjoyed a bit of balance, a breather after all those pages of heat (and a dabble of cool) to feel refreshed.

Summer Reading, Part Four: Shorts

Warm weather, the dog days of summer, time to break out the shorts. Nothing more refreshing and cooler than lounging about, unencumbered, with plenty of free time to lounge and let the mind flicker an wander. The perfect time to snack on short stories and other collected short works.

I am opening this one to the floor because while I feel I could cover this topic myself I've found myself more and more wondering how others would answer the following question:

What collections of short stories, sudden fiction, or essay collections would you recommend to a summer reader as a nice, occasional pick-me-up?

I already feel that regular readers know that were it not for my discovery of Kurt Vonnegut's short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House when I was in my early teens I might not have been the reader I am today. But that wasn't my first brush with the single-author short story collection. No, that honor goes to Ray Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun, a book I remember toting around with me in the fifth or sixth grade. I couldn't tell you where it came from or honestly say I remember the stories it contained (although many of the titles are deeply familiar in some way) and this book is among others on my NTR (Need to Re-read) list.

(Speaking of Mr. Bradbury, apparently we got it all wrong when we've read Fahrenheit 451 as an anti-censorship book; looks like it's an attack on television. Add another book to the NTR pile...)

There are, of course, collections aimed at middle grade and young readers that aren't half a century old that are widely available and enjoyed by kids. Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (and its sequels) is only a quarter century old! Schwartz is a collector of folklore and his tales represent those that are often told aloud and by necessity short enough to be memorized. I would consider these stories essential for campfires and slumber parties -- in fact I remember many of them from campfires when I was young, a testament to their lasting power. The stories themselves don't scare the reader as much as they might a listener as a large number include directions at the end for grabbing someone while screaming the last crucial line.

On the quieter side of things there's Cynthia Rylant's collection Every Living Thing gathers a dozen short stories where an animal plays an integral part in changing a person's life. I have to admit that the stories caught me a little off guard at first because they have an almost "adult" feel to them. "Planting Things" tells of an older retired couple, a man who likes to work the garden for the joy of it while his wife is housebound with illness. A jay makes a nest in one of his flower pots on the porch and while he delights in watching the fledglings grow and leave the nest his wife is content to stay in her bed and hear his second-hand tales. When the birds have flown off he collects the nest with the intention of setting it out the following spring to "grow" another family of birds.

And when I finished I couldn't help wondering "What would a kid make of that story?" Indeed, what do young readers make of stories that don't exists to push a happy ending or solve a particular riddle but instead celebrate small, changing moments in life. It's thoughts like this that lead me down a trail of optimism that the revival of the short story is immanent.

Another fine collection aimed at the middle grade reader is Richard Peck's Past Perfect, Present Tense, a brilliant title for a short story collection if ever there was one. Peck's collection begins with an introduction that briefly explains how short stories work. He then provides an introduction to his first-ever published short story including what his assignment was and how he approached it. Many young writers will appreciate the insight as much as they will the humorous story that came out of his thinking. Like many good teachers, Peck shows and tells giving his voice authority without scaring readers away. Each of the books sections contains an introduction that explains their grouping or origins. I wish there were more books like this.

Or are there?

This is where I wanted to open up the floor for discussion. What I like, what I am attracted to, are stories by a single author because I can see the breadth and variety of the author's thinking. If I like an author's style I'll want to read more, and while I understand the benefit of a story collection by many hands if a particular story doesn't catch me I might not search out that author to see if something else does.

Additionally, I am curious to know if anyone out there can recommend essay collections for children. I have seen in the past chain bookstore attempting to push David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day on their Teen Beach Reads table and scratched my head. In the beginning, Sedaris' essays were funny but they don't leave a lasting impression and I never said to myself "Teens would really love this!" Still, as I said, I am curious to know if anyone has encountered collections of essays that would be enjoyed by younger audiences.

I will add that as far as non-fiction goes I think there could be better coverage of collections on music, politics and general interest. The Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Non-required Reading, and the Da Capo Best Music Writing anthologies, among others, are totally acceptable for teens but what's out there for the younger reader, the pre-teen who might be interested in general non-fiction topics but wants something more substantial than a collection of factoids? Any ideas?

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Our story thus far...
Episode One - Low Humor
Episode Two - Non-fiction?
Episode Three - Trash
Episode Four - Shorts
Stay tuned for the final episode in the series: Part Five - The Index to Periodical Literature

Summer Reading, Part Three: Trash

"Read the Dell paperback."

You have to be of a certain age to recall when those words would come at the end of a movie trailer. It was usually some genre film, something a little exploitative, a summer popcorn movie that was either based on the kind of paperback people would buy at the checkout stands in supermarkets or was written in haste between the editing of the film and the release date. I think half of these movies were produced by Roger Corman's American International Pictures because that was usually the first part of the announcer's sign-off: "An American International picture. Read the Dell paperback."

How many people bought those books? It's hard to say though there's a booming business of these titles on eBay. It's nice to know there was a time when major motion pictures and the venues that advertised them -- theatres and television -- once actually used to use summer as a time to promote reading, even if it was merely an attempt to wring every last penny of profit from their films.

Today I am singing the praises of that ghetto of fiction known as Trash, or sometimes Beach Reading, and almost always as Genre. I'm not necessarily digging into the actual trash mentioned above but that fiction which tends to get marginalized because of its connection to popular culture. I won't attempt an exhaustive list of titles or suggestions, instead I'm taking a look at some of the books that many of my friends and I read and passed around during the summers when we were teens. My goal is to suggest some older titles that are still around and just under the radar of most young adults. If some of these titles seem like classics of their genre, well, I can't pretend any of us knew or cared about what sort of shelf life these titles would assume when we first read them.

One of my first "adult" summer reads was Ian Flemming's Bond classic Diamonds Are Forever. I bought it at some yard sale, among the go-cart parts and old kitcheware, laid out on a blanket with a bunch of other trash. I was eleven and it cost all of a quarter. I had seen a couple of Bond movies prior to reading this book and I might have already seen the film version, but on a lazy July afternoon I picked this thing up and started to read.

It might sound obvious to say this, but at the time I remembered thinking the book was nothing like the movies. There was something way more adult about all this, the language was foreign to me, the pacing and storytelling alien. It was tough slog at first because I was still trying to marry the book and images from the movie into my still-developing cranium. And then there was all that narrative, all those points where the author explained Bonds thinking and rationale. Huh, there was actually some thinking going on behind all that action, some deep cover and intel gathering. He wasn't just a spy or a man of action but a trained agent in the British Secret Service. There were dimensions to his character and *pop* suddenly Bond is a bit more real. Oh, and here's a surprise: it was really about diamond smuggling, with no evil villain planning to send a laser into space to blow up parts of the world.

I had two other Bond books in my collection -- did I pick them up at the same time? -- but I don't recall reading them. And I've meant to go back and reread Diamonds Are Forever or any other Flemming that looked interesting to see what my adult mind makes of it all. A few years back they repackaged the covers of the books, upped them to trade paper size (mine were the smaller paperbacks), which I found appealing. I would need to reconfirm this, but readers deep into the Alex Rider series (or even the Young Bond series that's a few titles in) might enjoy a little old school cold war spy genre fiction. From here one could suggest some Robert Ludlum, John le Carre, or Len Deighton. I am a particular fan of Deighton's Harry Palmer books and equally of the movie adaptations which featured Michael Caine. It's Caine's spymaster turn that is the physical inspiration for Austin Powers which is better appreciated when you get the joke. You might even be able to introduce a spy fiction buff to the broccoli that is Graham Greene, especially Our Man in Havana which borders on parody of the genre.

The penultimate summer movie, the one that actually created the mold for all summer blockbuster movies, is Jaws. When it came out I felt compelled to read the book first. In fact, knowing it was a bestseller before a movie I almost felt a certain sense of indignation that a movie had been made from the book and that most people would see the movie and never actually read the books.

I was a teenage boy and self-righteous indignation, especially over things I knew little or nothing about, came naturally.

I don't remember how I came into possession of my paperback of Jaws but I do know that I lent it out twice before trying to read it myself. I just had a hard time getting started. I must have reread the first 20 pages a half dozen times before I sat down determined to bust my way through it. I gave myself a 50 page deadline and had finished twice as many pages before I thought to look at the page numbers. The rest of the book came easy and when I finally saw the movie... well, let's leave my views about Steven Spielberg for another time and forum.

Jaws, at its simplest, falls into the man-against-nature horror genre. Typically there is a thing that is out to get people and there's a lot of running around trying to sort out what the thing wants and how to kill or outwit it. Character plays second fiddle to the action, which requires the story to be populated either with people of average or lesser intelligence than the reader to luck into a resolution or, at best, a challenge of wills in which the strongest (protagonist/s) survives.

For somewhat similar books I don't imagine there's any harm in Michael Chrichton's Jurassic Park, though I think The Andromeda Strain is a lesser known story that teen readers might enjoy. Also Robin Cook's Coma, William Wharton's Birdy, William Goldman's Magic (skip the film, the adaptation is atrocious), and Benchley's post-Jaws follow-ups The Deep and The Island.

For many I knew growing up summer reading could be summed up in two word: Stephen King. Personally I had some problems with early Stephen King where the characters had a paranormal abilities that were referred to as "the push" (in Firestarter) or "the shining" and I couldn't fully grok King the way my friends had.

Until The Stand.

Much talk these days about apoca-lit in YA fiction, much talk about how kids really seem to dig the political, ethical and moral questions that arise when the world faces a destructive-yet-unifying cataclysm like a comet knocking the moon off course or a plague devouring humanity. But when you weld these elements together with the muscular fists of a writer like Stephen King you have the ultimate in summer reads. Biological weapon released, killing a vast majority of the population who are haunted by visions of either an old woman near a corn field or a handsome stranger in the desert, drawn to either one in a battle of good verses evil for the survival of mankind. I haven't even glanced at this book since it's original publication and I can still remember images clearly from the book, more so than things I have read in the past year. Rib-sticking, something that isn't going to leave you feeling empty, yet nothing that's going to show up on an SAT test.

I would say that any Stephen King would work but I haven't read them all and I have encountered some duds, especially in the 1990's. Stick with the classic King, the books that made his name, like Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, Firestarter or The Shining. If you've got a reader who's already run those books down why not give them a taste of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, David Seltzer's The Omen, or Jay Anson's The Amityville Horror. These aren't exactly apoca-lit titles (I've got one coming up next) but they are still very sturdy reads.

I read another book the same summer I read The Stand and that was Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Now here was something fun: a newly discovered comet originally believed to pass Earth appears to be on a collision course. While the scientific community assures the public that impact isn't likely a televangelist fans the flames of fear and suddenly everyone's on a survivalist kick. The comet breaks up as it nears Earth and lands in various places across the planet, causing earthquakes, volcano eruptions and tsunamis-a-plenty. What's left of civilization is in ruins, fighting for survival among militant cannibals. Fun!

Larry Niven's name is probably familiar to science fiction fans for many books including the Ringworld series. I have tried to start other Niven/Pournelle collaborations but they just didn't click for me. That aside, what were talking about now is science-fiction which has steadily increased in its general approval since when I was a lad and is now (finally) practically respectable literature. Why, 30 years ago Phillip K. Dick might have had the word "wacko" in front of his name but now after Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly -- films all made from Dick stories -- he is being embraced as a unique and genuine American voice. Blade Runner and Total Recall were not the names of Dick books (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale respectively) and it might be fun (in a devious way) to present the originals sans mention of their movie adaptations on the cover to a reader to see if they make the connection.

A younger reader with a hunger for actual science fiction or fantasy may have already discovered the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker series, or the Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pern books (one was good enough for me, thanks), or Octavia Butler's dystopian Parable titles -- all fine suggestions if they haven't been previously experienced. But there was one book that really tweaked me one summer and that was Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human. There was something truly alien about the feel of this story about a group of people with various powers who could blend together as one, sort of a next step in human evolution. To my younger self it felt like The Fantastic Four crossed with The Twilight Zone and only later did I understand some of the more psychological aspects. Sturgeon also wrote the novelization for the movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, giving him some true trash credentials. For something a bit more light and fun, a bit more Renaissance Faire-meets-Star Wars, try Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, the first-written-but-middle-title in the timeline of his Majipoor series. I think it makes a good transition from a fantasy world reader into the more politicised sci-fi world. I'm sure that statement's going to upset someone. So be it. It's what I read then and what I'm suggesting now.

I'm going to cheat a bit here and talk about my summer reading after my first year of college. Technically I was still a teen, and I think that if I'd had this genre tossed my way earlier I'd have loved it. I'm talking about detective stories, especially those old school hard-boiled types. I'm talking about that triumvirate of explorers from the dark underbelly of the American psyche: Dashiel Hammet, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. Hammet, the former Brinks man invented both Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles and practically the entire genre we now recognize as hard-boiled. Cain's gritty stories traffic in a world of femme fatales and dirty double crosses, a bit on the misogynist side of things but no one comes out smelling like a rose with Cain.

For my money though it's Chandler all the way. Phillip Marlowe is his man, prowling the streets of Los Angeles in the 30's and 40's, pulling the most disparate threads and ties them into tangled nets that eventually solve the crime. Chandler claims to have been influenced by Hammet but it's Chandler who perfected the lyricism of the private detective's inner voice. You might have better luck teaching kids how to write more concisely, and more vividly, by teaching them from Chandler's stories than from Hemingway. Chandler, in describing Marlowe lighting a pipe in the smoking car of a train, taught me a word that I hope one day to use in my own fiction: frowst.

I loved this summary of Phillip Marlowe from Wikipedia:

Philip Marlowe, is not a stereotypical tough guy, but rather a complex and sometimes sentimental figure who has few friends, attended college for a while, speaks a little Spanish, at times admires Mexicans, and is a student of chess and classical music. He will also refuse money from a prospective client if he is not satisfied that the job meets his ethical standards.

And to think they used to call this kind of stuff pulp, after the cheap paper it used to be printed on in magazines. They made plenty of good movies from this stuff as well, inspiring an entire genre of film called noir: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely. All good stuff.

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What these books and many, many more like them have in common is that they were paperbacks, they were cheap and, without exception, they were intended for adult audiences. If there's one thing teens love to do is assume they are ready for "adult" reading material as soon as the bug hits them, and I don't imagine it's been any different throughout history.

But looking back and then turning forward I am struck with how unified and national tastes were once upon a time. Many of these books weren't on the bestseller's lists because they had high orders from bookselling superstores, these were the books everyone read, and knew, and talked about. Maybe the closest thing we have to something similar in recent years is Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and the popularity of that book remains a mystery to me even today as I found it filled me with inertia. But there was a time (I imagine some publishers and editors moon about this late at night at their favorite speakeasy) when the bestseller list was full of books -- for better or worse -- that were actually read by lots and lots of people and everyone would talk about them the way people now stand around and talk about the results of American Idol or the most recent developments on Lost. There are fine books out there, yes, yes, but how many of them are really capturing the national imagination and get read (before being optioned for movie rights) or that aren't being flogged by Oprah?

As I said from the beginning, this was my list and my experience. These were the books I discovered as a teen reader, or wish I'd discovered earlier, that make for good, solid summer reads. I'd love to hear what others discovered in a similar vein, particularly those who can speak to the romance genre that, as a boy, never held any pull with me.

Where to now? Let's see...
First there was Low Humor
Then there was Non-fiction
Next up: Shorts, perfect for summer weather

Summer Reading, Part Two: Non-fiction

Previously I made my case for a summer full of reading that had little-to-no direct educational merit. That is, I'm all against handing out lists at the beginning of the summer with a required title (or titles) with a la carte suggestions for additional reading. I still hold to the belief that play as important as work and that if we expect to have well-rounded, culturally alert, hyper-literate children then we need to honor and encourage the notion that reading for fun and pleasure has a place. Now I'm going to turn around and suggest that there are ways to encourage non-fiction as a summer reading activity that doesn't feel like a learning experience and still be fun.

As a caveat, I don't suggest doing all of these things (save some for future summers!) and would in fact caution against too much non-fiction as kids are pretty quick to figure out when a "lesson" is coming. Just take all this in and when the moment presents itself casually introduce one of these topics into the slipstream of their summer reading.

Joke and Riddle books

I have a larger thesis (much larger than can be presented here) about using jokes as a way of teaching kids how storytelling works. Basically, the idea is this: Jokes are some of our shortest stories and once you understand how they work you can apply that knowledge to telling a story. A joke has a setting, characters, dialog, and usually a twist ending. I find it amusing when I hear adults say they cannot tell a joke who then turn around a relate a personal narrative with the same elements. Set the story, introduce the characters, keep the pertinent details, timing is pacing, aim for the climax/punchline and when you hit it the story ends.

Riddles, on the other hand, have the actual advantage of developing lateral thinking. Where a joke's aim is a punchline, often surreal or just plain silly, a riddle demands a closer examination of language and context. Also, where jokes tend to run in fads and cycles (when was the last time someone told you an elephant joke?) there are riddles from hundreds of years ago that can still stump the sharpest young minds today.

Jokes and riddles are always great ways to pass the time, especially if siblings have their own books to pull on each other. If a child responds to joke and riddle books do your best to put up with the corniest of jokes, then encourage them to seek out more. This, by the way, was how I learned about the Dewey decimal system and discovered many great riddles and lateral thinking puzzle books in the adult section of my libraries. I remember once looking like a Master of All Knowledge with my girls when I was looking for a particular book and walked over to the 800's, bypassing the online card catalog. "Do you know where all the books in the library are?" my youngest asked. "No, but I know the numbers for the books I like." If they learn to do it themselves it won't look like you're forcing them to learn anything.

Martin Gardner, the great polymath of all things logical and illogical, had a book that I must have checked out more than any other kid at my library: Perplexing Puzzlers and Tantalizing Teasers. From this one book I learned puns, anagrams, palindromes and the kind of logic puzzles (classic matchstick puzzles) that can bend minds if not keep them limber. Just following Gardner around the library led me to his annotated versions of Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark, into examinations of logic and philosophy Aha! Gotcha and Aha! Insight and finally into Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing. It might not be an exaggeration that Martin Gardner was my first dip into library spelunking. It also makes for a nice segue into

Code and Cipher books

Why do kids love codes? Maybe it has something to do with the deliciousness of secrets, the ability to create something that has a certain power. Codes and ciphers scrape along the surface of our desire to create symbols of meaning, communicating with a select group, a way of reclaiming the mystery and power of language. The history of codes is full of political intrigue and human struggle. The armies of the ancient Greeks and Romans employed codes, just as 20th century railroad hobos did to communicate among themselves. Ciphers have been used by spies for hundreds of years and they vary in sophistication and style in a way that make them appealing to all ages.

Gardner's book makes for an excellent introduction for kids, as does Top Secret: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing by Paul B. Janeczko. Older kids who might want a bit more history with their cryptography will probably want to check out The Code Book by Simon Singh (note, there are two books by Singh with the same title, the teen friendly one has the subtitle How to Make It, Break It, Hack It, Crack It and covers everything from Mary Queen of Scots and ends with Internet security encryption).

If you end up buying a code book I'd suggest getting two copies and keeping one for yourself. Once they have done a little reading you can write them a coded message (perhaps the secret location of a special treat) and send it to them in the mail. This isn't the first time I've suggested mailing things to kids in the summer and I can't promise it won't be the last. I have yet to see a kid act blase about an unexpected piece of mail, and once you send the first coded message you might be surprised at just how much and how quickly they'll want you to send another. I like to find unusual postcards for this and so far Homeland Security hasn't hauled me in for questioning. Maybe I've stumped them.

Activity books... and game instructions?

Get them out of the house! No one said all this summer reading meant staying indoors and there are ways to combine reading and activities. I'd also like to suggest that learning how to follow directions, instructions and rules surrounding various activities -- a lot of the same things we expect kids to get out of sports activities -- get reinforced this way.

Last fall a book came out that I would have drooled over when I was a boy: Steven Caney's Ultimate Building Book. Over a dozen years of research and development went into this book and it shows. Page after page of ideas for all kinds of project, both indoor and out of doors. Building an igloo with cubes of jello? Why not? How about using graham crackers as bricks and canned frosting as mortar for building edible structures? Sure! Bird feeder space station platform from drinking straws and disposable drinking cups? Check. Rich in explanation about how structures work and the different kinds of structural elements featured there's bound to be something that sparks an interest. Don't be surprised to see some projects consuming the better part of a day. Or week.

How about a quick course in Pioneering, the art of binding ropes and poles to create impromptu fire towers and bridges across small rivers? Or a solid study in the art of Orienteering, the use of map and compass? Small boat sailing? Cinematography? Basketry? Auto Mechanics? Five words: Boy Scout Merit Badge Pamphlets. Despite the dated, sometimes hokey post-war earnestness each of the pamphlets available for various merit badges provides a solid foundation in each of its subjects. No kid is going to naturally be attracted to a pamphlet on first aid or lifesaving (unless they want to work toward becoming a lifeguard) but many of the booklets deal with outdoor activities, crafts or hobbies. I still haven't managed to build the junk wood punt from The American Boy's Handy Book but when it's done you can be assured that before I let the girls set foot in it they'll read all the merit badge pamphlets on boating.

Similar but a little less rigid are a series of books called the Brown Paper School series published by Little Brown back in the late 1980's. The Backyard History Book presents the idea of local history as a series of discoveries. Delving into the origins of street names, mapping neighborhoods and collecting oral histories gives the curious and the extrovert a channel for those energies. The Book of Where focuses more on geography, starting from diagramming your own home and building to mapping the world. I wish I'd had their Making Cents: Every kid's guide to money, how to make it, what to do with it back when I could have used it: about ten years before I went off to college. These and other books in the series (Math for Smarty Pants is fun but probably not as much for summer) are still out there among the remainder bins and, naturally, in finer select libraries.

On the occasional rainy day, or for a lazy afternoon, an indoor board game can be fun. Why not suggest playing a familiar game by new rules? The part of this exercise that requires reading is New Rules for Classic Games by R. Wayne Schmiteberger, former editor of Games magazine. Popular board games like Monopoly, Scrabble and Risk get new instructions, as do variants of Chess, Checkers and Go. Part of the fun in playing these games sometimes is the newness, the foreignness of their strategies. It hardly seems like legitimate reading, and that's my point. Reading, interpreting, understanding and following rules and instructions can be more of an intellectual workout that a flaccid textbook and some ditto sheets.

Other great possibilities for games, if you know kids who aren't afraid of the word brains: The Big Book of Brain Games, The Brainiest, Insaniest Ultimate Puzzle Book, The Games Magazine Junior Big Book of Games (there are two volumes out there), and for a really nice coffee table style book that covers the history, origins, rules and even instructions for making games you really can't go wrong with Games of the World.

Magic tricks, slight of hand and illusion

This requires a bit of work on the part of an adult initially but the payoff can be great.

Hit the library or bookstore and find a book of magic well suited for the children in your charge. Flip through and find a trick or illusion that looks good, and by good I mean has good presentation that doesn't lend itself to being easily figured out. Now, learn the trick and practice it until you can do it comfortably and without hesitation. Got it? Good. Showtime.

Find a casual, low key moment and say "Hey, want to see what I learned recently? Watch." Then perform the illusion. If the child/ren in question are suitably impressed they will ask you to do it again, and then beg you to show them how it is done. The rule of a good magician is that you never repeat a trick for the same audience (unless you can do it with a twist of equal awe) and to never give away the secret. "But," you can explain "I can tell you the name of the book where I learned the trick."

Yes, it is tricking them into reading, but I doubt they'll mind if they really want to learn the trick. Let them try the one you performed, being ready to help understand the steps if they get confused. After that they'll usually pick up a couple more tricks easy and will surprise you with their showmanship, dexterity and focus.

In sorting through books on magic you'll want to focus on those that deal with simple playing card -- sometimes called self-working illusions because the trick takes place in the manipulation of the cards. These tend to be variations of the "pick a card" fortune telling variety and are both simple to perform and impressive. Some books may include other tricks and illusions that include simple household items and these are fine as well, what you want to avoid is starting out with magic that requires the making (or purchasing) of special apparatuses.

I still have a handful of card tricks I learned as a boy that I remember. My girls have since learned all my tricks -- and taught me a few. My guess is they will one day pass along some magic to their own kids.

Reference material

I've mentioned the paperback spinner rack at my library, the place where I could find the Mad paperbacks and other collected comic strip books. But there was a second spinner nearby that contained mass market fiction for adults that held a secret gem: The Guinness Book of World Records, now know as the Guinness World Records Book. Back then it was an inch thick with tiny type and filled with some of the most fascinating stuff, including pictures of the unimaginable. Perfect for casual (ahem, bathroom) reading, car trips and just looking for info to impress friends with. Updated annually by the Brother McWhirter back in my day it's now a brand owned by some entertainment company more interested in selling it's pages off for product placement. Avoid it at all costs.

No, instead hunt down many of the fine books of randomly collected facts out there that have popped up to fill the quality void left when Guinness went south. Dorling Kindersly, DK in the trade, has two very visual offerings: Pick Me Up which covers a lot of useful (and useless) information on a variety of subjects, and Cool Stuff and How It Works which traffics in technology and uses the x-ray-like color illustrations and cut-aways to show the various layers involved. Seeing the inside of an iPod wasn't anywhere near as interesting as seeing what is in the souls of athletic shoes that makes them so springy.

Another pair of books that fills the random information bug is Children's Miscellany and Children's Miscellany II put out by Chronicle Books. Filled with the usual lists, facts and odd little bits of instruction (how to milk a cow?) these digest-sized books are almost perfect -- putting them out in paperback and lowering their price would move them up to perfect status. There are easily a dozen other book-of-facts and almanac-type paperback available waiting to be left around the house where they will be picked up, read randomly, and left somewhere else. And, again, none of it feels like reading, yet kids will read these books for hours on end.

Single topic books

This is my catch-all section for all the possibilities out there. Many kids know about the sumptuously produced Ology books out there (Piratology, Egyptology, &c.) nut many of these and other topics are better explored (and better organized) in more traditional books that aren't looking to use their flash to hide their thinness in content.

For the study of pirates, Lost Treasures of the Pirates of the Caribbean lays out maps and legends surrounding the actual pirating that once went on and where its believed they left their booty. For older readers who can't get enough of the Disney movie franchise the Dover book Pirates and Piracy gives a nice overview of the factual elements blown way out of proportion in popular culture while the recently re-released The Barbary Pirates by C.S. Forester makes for a cracking good read as well.

On the Egyptian front, smaller in size and crammed full of goodness is the DK Backpack Book 1001 Facts About Ancient Egypt. I'm a fan of these 4 by 4 inch square paperbacks on many subjects because they merge the very visual photos and illustrations that DK is known for with tons (or is it tonnes?) of facts. Sharks, space, the human body, dinosaurs... the Backpack Books never seemed to take off but can still be found and are worth the effort.

I don't want to ignore the arts but I could take days making suggestions. First, let me suggest origami. I realize that the instructions are almost 100% visual but it is a form of reading and thinking and worthy of some reinforcement. Similarly, Ed Emberly's drawing books should be required reading for younger grades. Using basic shapes and easy, wordless step-by-step instructions kids can learn how to draw anything from monsters to rocket ships. I think even adults who claim they can't draw would benefit from a course in Emberly's books.

Finally, a story about the summer I decided I was going to learn something new. I decided in June that I would spend the summer learning how to juggle. I imagined it taking quite a bit of time to master the hand-eye coordination necessary to keep three things in the air at once. So on the first day of summer vacation with my Juggling for the Complete Klutz in hand (the book that built an empire, or at least a publishing house) I set out to learn the fine art of keeping things in the air.

Twenty minutes later I had accomplished what I thought would taken me days if not weeks. The disappointment at learning how easy it really was made me feel foolish and I didn't spend the rest of the summer practicing or learning harder tricks. I went back to my usual summer of reading the Guinness Book and other omnibuses of facts and ephemera. Mine is a cautionary tale; it takes more than one activity, or one book for that matter, to fill a summer.

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This week's entry took a lot longer to coordinate than I envisioned, and I left off a lot of books and ideas I had jotted down. More for next year, I guess. The point is that there's a lot out there that's non-fiction in book form. In fact, if you go to a book store or library and scan the store with an eye toward separating the fiction from non-fiction you might be surprised to see just how much there is out there.

Next week I'm either donning Shorts or taking out the Trash. We'll see where the whim strikes first.

Last Week: Low Humor
Next Week: Shorts... or Trash?