What should kids read this summer? Don’t ask the New York Public Library: Its “Summer Reading Challenge 2014” is among the silliest, most politically correct and uninspiring lists around.
Getting kids to read when there are so many distractions can be tough.
One temptation is to simply hand them books about, well, themselves. As a break from gossiping with their friends, they can read about other kids who look and act just like them gossiping about each other.
From the Babysitter’s Club to the Cupcake Club, parents of girls in the middle grades will recognize this fluff and humor it occasionally.
But did we need the NYPL to recommend “Nerd Girls: The Rise of Dorkasaurus,” whose description reads “Down with middle-school mean girls!”? Or “Perfect Chemistry,” a story of how “sparks fly when a cheerleading It girl is paired with a gangbanger bad boy in a chemistry lab”?
Not much of what L.M. Montgomery, author of “Anne of Green Gables,” calls “scope for the imagination” here.
Indeed, the NYPL seems to have so little faith that kids today can imagine anything outside their own experience that it tries to see that every ethnic and racial group in the city gets its own book on the list:
- “A Vietnamese family shapes a new life in 1975 Alabama.”
- “An Indian immigrant girl in NYC and a Kentucky coal miner’s son strike up a friendship across many miles.”
- “When Zitlally’s father is kidnapped in Mexico, she believes a stray dog might be his spirit animal.”
- “Sweet and sour pork and fireworks fit together on America’s birthday.” And so on . . .
At least such offerings are harmless. But the NYPL also recommends “Fire in the Streets,” which explains how “in 1968 Chicago, 14-year-old Maxie longs to join the Black Panthers.” And “Ivy+Bean: What’s the Big Idea?” in which the best girlfriends find that “solving global warming isn’t as easy as it looks.”
Lefty politics always go down easier in fiction, right?
Yes, the list has plenty of perfectly fine books — though you have to wonder how much care went into compiling a document that puts Aesop’s Fables under “nonfiction.”
Yet Aesop is the only “timeless” book on this list — and that’s a serious problem.
Where is “Peter Pan” or “The Hobbit”? What happened to “Charlotte’s Web” or “Treasure Island”? Would it have been impossible to include “James and the Giant Peach” or “The Secret Garden”?
Have the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe all gone out of fashion? Was Terabithia a bridge too far? Is “Little House on the Prairie” too remote? Are kids these days too jaded to follow Alice through the looking glass?
Since the library’s “reading challenge” has big corporate sponsors like HSBC, HBO and the Ralph Lauren Foundation, maybe the librarians felt obliged to show that they put a lot of effort into producing a new exciting list each year. If so, let me offer a suggestion. How about “The Giver”?
Sure, it’s a quarter of a century old, but Lois Lowry’s classic dystopian novel has been made into a movie coming out next month. So that’s sort of new, right?
I screened it last week and it reminded me that — despite an utter lack of “mean girls drama,” politically correct messaging or even racial rainbows in the cast — it is a story, like many of Lowry’s, that’s guaranteed to move young readers.
“Thank you for your childhood.” Among the many creepy lines in “The Giver,” none haunts me more than that one. In a kind of graduation ceremony where each child is assigned a job for life by the community’s elders, the chief elder utters those words over and over.
It’s the kind of sentence that can’t help but penetrate the minds of even the most jaded of tween viewers. How much of myself, how many of my own choices, would I be willing to give up for the good of the whole? Who gets to decide what is best for the community?
The rest of the book and the film pose poignant questions about free will, the importance of understanding history and the value of human life. Can we eliminate all of the hatred and envy and evil in the world, or are parts of human nature immutable?
Is it worth giving up the experience of beauty and joy and love in order to end pain and suffering?
Sounds like a great way to spend a summer afternoon.