Why is summer reading important? What author would you recommend this summer?
I write novels of family life. I write novels for upper grades and middle schoolers. I’d like to have high school students reading, but I’m not sure high school students are doing much reading now, or that their teachers looking for our titles?
But I read very widely in my field. I have to—to stay in it. I need to know what I am inspired by—what other people are writing. Nobody but a reader ever became a writer, so I read one book a week by one of my colleagues. They’re often books I wouldn’t have written, and so I admire them. And they are sometimes books I wish I had written, and they spur me on. We are in a golden age of children’s literature. Never in human history has so much talent shared its gifts with the young. And so I have just finished reading what I think is the big book of the year.
It’s Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls. It’s not a book I could of written, so I’m glad she did. It is a book that should be a community read in every community in this country because it’s about an epidemic raging through the young: anorexia.
But it won’t be a community read everywhere because it skates too near the truth. There is a girl in every school dying of anorexia, and as often as not, her parents believe she is going through a phase. But this is a wonderful, undeniable book. It can save some lives, I think. And it’s beautifully, lyrically told. I wish I’d written it, but it sends me back to the desk for what I can write.
I wish young people would dream of being writers—and a lot of them do. I get letters from them every week. I wish they [young readers in general] understood that you have to be a reader first. And summer is a good time to start.
Transcribed from the audio 6.29.08
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