Summer Driving, Summer Reading

One of Hayley's and my concerns about parenting has been screen time. I try to not judge, as someone who has only been a parent for nine months; you can entertain our kid just by dumping him on the floor with some plastic cups. I am sure this gets harder as your kid gets older. But I do judge. Recently we ate out and the two eight-year-olds at the table next to us needed tablets the whole time to make it through the meal. Is that a grim vision of my own future? Or can I forestall that if we follow the WHO guidelines? I would say we've been pretty good about it so far. Sometimes he wakes up when we're watching tv, and so ends up seeing a little bit of it, and sometimes he's been so upset in the middle of the night that Hayley has shown him a couple episodes of My Little Pony when we've been at wit's end.

But you have to occupy the kiddo somehow, right? Especially in situations where your kids are doing boring things for long stretches. Back in the day my parents needed to do this because of the Mollmann propensity for long road trips. We didn't stop places overnight, but trucked on through, my parents just switching off. Infamously, we once drove from Cincinnati, Ohio to Pike's Peak, Colorado, only stopping for gas and bathroom breaks; it took twenty-four hours. It takes a lot of keep a bunch of kids occupied for twenty-four hours, and there were no tablets to be had.

From coast to coast (well, not really) in this!

For the Mollmanns, the answer was books. In fact, books were what kept us occupied all summer. There was a summer reading program at the library, sure, but my mom ran her own. For every ten (I think) books you read, she would buy you one for the trip. We kept track with lists on the fridge. (Maybe this is the seed of my own exhaustive reading tracking? I never thought about that before.) Things got even better, though-- if you were willing to get your books at a used bookstore, since they were half-price, you got twice as many! So I would read library books furiously to get as many books as possible.

I still have plenty of books that must have come from those shopping sprees, because I have plenty of Asimov and Star Trek books with the stamp of the Book Rack on Colerain Ave. in them. The reading of the books was as exciting as the getting of the books.

I didn't have summer reading for a long time after growing up, but I actually have it again now, thanks to my commitment to voting in the Hugos. As the summer kicks off, I know I have six novels, six novellas, six novelettes, six short stories, six graphic novels, six nonfiction books, and six young adult books to read. Plus my new yearly goal of reading a Charles Dickens novel!

I look to see if our local public library had a summer reading program, but apparently you have to be 5 years old! So it will be some time before our little one can participate.

#583: What's on your summer reading list?