Still reading together

SportsBoy still loves for me to read to him at night. As he’s gotten older, the books have become more complex of course. He is still not as into reading on his own as we would like, but he is definitely interested in books. This year, we’ve read two of Mike Lupica’s books. “Heat” and “Miracle on 49th Street” Both books are sports oriented, with the main characters being 12 year old kids. Like Disney tales, these kids are without one or both parents which creates challenges for the kids. “Heat” is about a 12 year old boy in a Little League team playing in the shadows of Yankee stadium. The boy is a Cuban immigrant who lives alone with his not quite yet 18 year old brother. Their mother died when they were little and their dad brought them to New York, the dies from a heart attack. The story picks up at that point with the question being whether the boys can stay together until the older one turns 18, and then whether they can find his true birth certificate so he can continue playing with his team. We finished reading that one right after he returned from Sweden. The books are so well written that I hated putting it down 3/4 of the way through when he left! But, I also didn’t want to read ahead without him 🙂

Tonight we finished the second one. About a girl who’s mom dies from cancer, but tells her at the end who her real father is – a famous basketball player for the Boston Celtics. So the story is how the two of them discover each other and come together. Oh man, it was good. Hooked you in the very first chapter. Tonight, I read through the final 7 chapters at once (usually we read two per night) because neither of us wanted to stop until the end. And, at the end, I was crying. It’s *hard* to read a book out loud when it hooks you so deep emotionally!! SportsBoy was teary eyed too and said “Man, he writes so that things just build up and build up until at the end you cannot put it down and it ends on a high that makes you cry!” I told him that is when you know you have found a writer that you like because you cannot put the book down.

I suppose it would like he is too old for me to be reading to him still, but I love it. Especially with these books as he gets older that are geared toward ‘tweens’ with more mature/real life topics. They have launched some great talks. There is one more Lupica book – “Travel Team” which I will try to get this week. After that, I told him we should try launching into Harry Potter. You know, because we are the ONLY family anywhere who has not yet read ONE HP book!!! Well, that and we love the movies and I would love for us to read the books together. His dad will try to get the Swedish version and read it over at his place on his weeks so that we actually end up all reading the book together.