Books That Change Us

February is Reading Rally month at our school. This means that my bookworms morph into competitive bookworms, each determined to help their class read the most minutes in the whole school. 

Sally thinks this is her year to shine: as a second grader, she’s in the oldest class for whom reading aloud to an adult counts as double minutes. Then again, Huckle’s bedtime is an hour later than Sally’s, so he’s got an extra seven hours on her each week… 

This jockeying for minutes is serious business. Who knew reading could be a competitive sport?

When Sally and Huckle were new readers, the best outcome of Reading Rally month wasn’t their total reading minutes: it was their amazing leap in reading proficiency between February 1 and March 1. All that reading was hard work on their part (and sometimes agonizing for the parent forced to hear early-reader books sounded out SOOOOOO SLOOOOOOOOOWLYYYYYYYYY), but it definitely paid off. 

Now that Huckle and Sally are older, we no longer see growth in their reading ability; but this year – even this early in February – I’m seeing an even more exciting growth. I’m seeing their eyes opened in ways that change them and grow them as individuals.  

Sallyanna.
Sally and I are taking turns reading aloud to each other from Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter. This 100-year-old classic in children’s literature is a sugary sweet story of a little orphan girl who comes to live with her stern aunt and teaches the whole town how to play her “glad game” in which she manages to find something to be glad about in any situation. It’s a little icky to us moderns (Really? Pollyanna could convince a miser to be generous, a bed-ridden invalid to be content, and a near-divorce couple to stay together ALL by teaching them to play the glad game?) Still, there’s something in it. Even science has shown us the value of a positive attitude. 

This was not a random book choice. You see, Sally has developed a pessimistic, whiny streak in recent years that even she doesn’t like. Last summer, Huckle defined “optimist” and a “pessimist” for her and – in true big-brother fashion – used it to taunt. (“Nah nah! You are a pessimist.”)

Sally took it to heart and came to me in tears: “Mom, I'm a pessimist.” And so we’ve been working on that. At bedtime, I sometimes ask her: “what would a pessimist say about today?” and then “what would an optimist say about today?” Sally thinks it’s funny to consider how a pessimist would summarize her day: “A pessimist would say it was a terrible day because I fell and skinned my knee at recess.” Then she considers carefully and seriously what an optimist would say: “An optimist would say that it was a good day because I passed my math drill.” Then Sally goes to bed with a smile, remembering that accomplishment.

Partway through Pollyanna, Sally looked up at me and asked, “Mom, can we play the glad game?” And so we did. And we do. And my pessimist is finding plenty in her life to be glad about, which makes me glad. I thank this book for giving us another tool to help her see the possibilities of joy and restore her happy heart.

The Boy Who Harnessed His Sense of Justice.
Huckle, of course, wants nothing to do with a “girl book” like Pollyanna. This marks the first instance in which he has chosen to read on his own rather than join our family read-aloud time. It makes me sad, and yet I knew Sally needed this book. But Huckle is taking his own book journey with its own potential to change his outlook. 

Whereas Sally’s book was pre-screened and prescribed, I can no longer keep up with Huckle’s reading and so was forced by check out a stack of books on the school reading list without prior knowledge of their content. In the stack was The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, the true story of a boy in Malawi who builds a windmill from spare parts to help his village during a terrible drought. It sounded uplifting and heroic. “Look!” I said, showing him the cover, “It’s about a boy in Africa who likes to build things, just like you!” Huckle read the back, shrugged, and said, “Mom, why can’t I build a windmill in the backyard? It’s not fair.” 

Huckle is all about fairness. Right now he’s “collecting data” to show his teachers how many minutes of recess are lost per week when teachers go over the allotted teaching time. Yesterday, history class went two minutes over, which – Huckle tells me – is a minor infraction compared to most days. Huckle plans to graph these data to convince his teachers to give back the missing recess time. My inner scientist is thrilled – she also can’t resist a good graph. But another part of me cringes – does my son suffer from a very American sense of entitlement?

Several chapters into The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Huckle came to me, looking troubled. “Mom, I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight. The famine is so bad that they are going to kill the boy’s pet dog and eat it. And people keep dying.” I wondered if I had made a mistake in giving Huckle a book that I hadn’t pre-screened and that wasn’t even from the juvenile section of the library. “You can put it down and read something else,” I told him, nervous of what else he might find in there. 

But he couldn’t put the book down. His sense of empathy had been awakened and he needed to know that William would be okay. Huckle peeked ahead. “In twenty more pages, things start going well. I can make it twenty pages.” And he did.

And, though he hasn’t finished the book yet and I haven’t even started it, I wonder now if this was just the right book for him, with a message he needed to hear right now. When I think about my son's over-developed sense of justice, my hope isn’t that he stops standing up to injustice but that this trait is transformed outwardly. I desire that he lose interest in battling his own little personal injustices like lost playground time and someday battles the real injustices of this world: poverty, famine, disease, human trafficking – so many horrors that are difficult to even read about. But awareness is the first step, and so I am grateful that this book fell into my son’s hands despite my desire to protect him from too much knowledge of the world’s atrocities.

Books. They can change you. What are you reading?