Summer reading and books for girls | Mark’s Remarks – Republic-Times

Sometimes books can be dangerous.

I have a few friends who recommend and lend me books, and one of my friends has always found just the right words with his books that I like.

I usually ask my boyfriend something like, “Is this book going to ruin my life for a while?” By that I mean, will I be able to concentrate on anything until I finish this book?

I can remember sitting on the sofa with my own copies of the Sally, Dick and Jane books that my cousins ​​had given me. I was excited to have the same reading books at home that I had at school, so I tried to read ahead. This made me something of a star in first grade, knowing what was going to happen in the books we still had to read.

Since I was also a big mouth, I liked to show off my knowledge and was probably very annoyed with my classmates.

Sometimes I tried to read ahead. I would spell a word and ask my mom to tell me. I’m sure it got annoying after doing it a dozen times, but she told me anyway. It helped me and my reading and spelling grades were pretty good. I already had an understanding of phonics at that time and I always put a lot of emphasis on children being able to “pronounce” words.

Since then, I have loved reading all my life. It never occurred to me that there might be books that appealed to me more than others. When our teacher started reading Little House on the Prairie to us in second grade, we wanted to read every single one of them. Somehow she managed to get hold of several copies of the books and we even put ourselves on a waiting list to borrow them.

There we were, fairly new readers, reading chapter books in second grade.

One day, I kid you not, a group of boys and girls were on the playground reading from the Little House books. They were kids from all walks of life: the bookworms, the ones who didn’t like to get dirty, and the group I was part of – the dirty boys who liked to make car tracks in the gravel and drive around in Matchbox cars.

And yet we were all here – Laura Ingalls Wilder had brought us together – because our teacher had inspired us with enthusiasm for the stories.

“Those are girls’ books,” said a tall, burly boy from the third grade one day as we all sat on a concrete slab near the water cooler. “Why do you read girls’ books?”

Some boys stopped reading these books that same day. I didn’t. I bet the boys who stopped reading them in public somehow continued reading them in the privacy of their own homes.

I still thought back to those days when I read books like The Notebook or The Help later in life. I wanted to know what all the hype was about.

There have been times when I’ve picked up a book that’s received a lot of praise and then rolled my eyes at some saccharine love story or romantic crap. Still, I’ve given some of them a chance.

Don’t take your eyes off me yet, guys. Eventually I found a good, manly genre to read, and now my go-to book during the summer months is a good, meaty book about American history. I currently have about 12 books stacked up ready for me to crack open. The books I kind of put on hold because I thought I’d have more time “when I retire.”

So here I am.

I also have a whole shelf full of biographies that I want to read.

Despite the stack of 12 books, I recently found a few books in a bookstore that sounded interesting, so I made notes in the notes section of my phone about the titles and authors. These include books about John Quincy Adams and a pretty intriguing book called Presidential Misconduct.

A book that perhaps surpasses one of my “packed” books is called “What If?” In it, the author speculates about what would have happened if certain events in history had never occurred.

Ahhh. Summer.