Ina Hughs: Library association books aren't the dickens to read

Ina Hughs

The summer I entered ninth grade, my college-age sister dated a fellow who worked for Vick Chemical Company. Instead of flowers, he brought cough drops.

I’d waited until the last week to do my required reading for school, the last of which was “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens. At that tender age, “David Copperfield” isn’t exactly in the stuff of speed-reading, and my mind kept wandering. I could hear friends playing outside while I was doomed to sweat my way through gloomy Victorian England. There’d be a test on it in three days. Nobody even tried to pull the wool over Miss Moon’s eyes. She was monstrously feared, but everyone’s favorite English teacher.

What kept me going were Vicks cough drops, though they fed the page-turning blues rather than a ticklish throat. I wolfed those triangles like they were some literary drug of enlightenment.

Last week I took my granddaughters to camp on the coast of North Carolina: one a rising eighth grader, the other in fifth. As I helped make up beds and arrange things on their allotted shelves, I noticed what books they had brought to read.

Their books looked much more inviting than the ones I remember from the dark ages.

Each year a committee of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) publishes a list of notable books for teachers and parents. “Notable” means books of award-winning quality with “venturesome creativity” that encourage youngsters to explore important themes and various subjects in a way that makes them lifelong readers.

I looked up the ALSC list and found that of all the books on their 2013 Best Books, I had read exactly none. Not one.

So I decided to pick three from the list to add to my “required” summer reading, and I can tell you: had anything like these been on my list way back when, I wouldn’t have put off reading to the last minute.

My favorite is “The National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry: 200 Poems with Photographs that Squeak, Soar, and Roar!” recommended for all ages. I’m giving each of my kids a copy for Christmas.

The others were a book about Helen Keller by Doreen Rappaport, for elementary-aged readers and, for middle readers, “My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece,” a poignant story about a family dealing with loss as well as bias against Muslims, told with sensitivity and humor. Kind of a live-and-learn adventure that takes young people behind current headlines.

Despite my struggles with “David Copperfield,” Dickens is one of my storyteller heroes, thanks to Miss Moon, who made the characters come alive in class discussions.

Yet even today he triggers the sweet taste of a cherry cough drop in the back of my throat.

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