64: How to Trick Your Kids (or Self) Into Loving Literature This Summer

as well as the weekly recommendations

In this week’s edition, I’ve got the weekly recommendations as well as a guide to giving your kids something to read this summer, BUT FIRST…

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🎉 The Recommendations 🎉

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📚 Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

WHERE: Amazon / Audible

Full disclosure, Kevin Wilson is a season pass for me. Anything he writes, I’m reading, no questions asked. Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not The Time To Panic have been previous recommendations and greenlights, and now Run For The Hills joins that VAUNTED pantheon (lol) of books I read and loved.

Here’s the premise:

Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. But when a man shows up saying he’s her half-brother, and that their dad left him too, a plan is hatched to not only confront their mutually absent father, but also to go meet their other half-siblings sprinkled throughout the country.

It’s a fantastic read about siblings, found family, heartbreak, redemption, and all told in Wilson’s signature voice and deadpan.

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🥾 Ariat Boots

WHERE: Amazon

🚨FATHER’S DAY GIFT POSSIBILITY ALERTTTTTTTT🚨

Maybe it’s being on a farm, maybe it’s that I no longer feel like I can pull off wearing Jordans or other on-trend shoes, or maybe I’m just falling for a new trend but if you’re in the market for boots that can handle actual work and make you look like the kind of person who has opinions about barbed wire fencing and bourbon, the Ariat Low Boy Western Boots are it.

The leather is sturdy but not stiff, and the design is just enough Western without tipping into “gimmick rodeo dad” territory.

In short: If full-size cowboy boots feel like a bit much but sneakers feel like a cop-out, the Low Boys are your Goldilocks solution.

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✍️ Essay: Save Summer (and Your Kids’ Brains) With This Reading List

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Every summer begins the same way: with an exhalation of air, grateful to have simply survived the tumult and anarchy of May-cember. But as June settles in, I’m reminded of the trade-off: the intense, hyperscheduled chaos of May gives way to the loose, formless vapidity of June, a month where schedules melt and daylight stretches on until something absurd like 10:45 p.m.

For the past two summers, my project has been to educate my children on the important matters of cinema (link to movie spreadsheet here) and the results have been…mixed. There were some triumphs like the collective fascination and joy with the Rocky franchise, but there were also some failures like the moment when one of my progeny called Jaws “mid.”

This summer, though, we’re pivoting, which means that I’m forcing my kids to read and interpret poetry and short stories.

There are two reasons for this:

First, if the whole podcasting thing hadn’t panned out, my back-up plan was to teach English and coach baseball. Since none of my kids took to baseball or softball, I’m projecting my unrealized English teacher dreams onto them.

Second, and maybe more urgently, if you’ve spent five minutes with anyone under 21, you’ve probably wondered if leisure reading is going the way of Blockbuster. For a variety of reasons, I’d prefer it didn’t.

On a more intentional parenting note, this is also partially because I have a hunch that the ability to read, interpret, write, and communicate clearly will soon be rarer than a Tom Cruise movie without him sprinting. And the fewer people who can do it, the more valuable it will be as a serious competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Could I be incredibly wrong about this? Absolutely. Are we doing it anyway? Also yes.

Which is why we’re starting with short stories and poems. This is about small wins here, people. No one wins a literacy war by hurling their child straight into Moby Dick on day one. The name of the game is brief, nimble, and thought-provoking.

If you’ll allow a slightly reckless analogy: short stories and poems are the gateway drugs. We’re hoping for a mild, manageable addiction that eventually escalates into full-blown novels. I would apologize for that comparison, but I would be proud to be a narco of literary enthusiasm.

A Few Notes:

• This is not an exhaustive, definitive master list of short stories and poems. These are pieces that have resonated with me and ones I remember enjoying, so your mileage may vary. Add or subtract as needed.

• Print them out. Seriously. Make it a sensory experience. Hand your kid a pen and encourage them to mark up the text with questions, reactions, or even stray doodles. Anything that gets them engaging with the text.

• Related to that: yeah, you will have to discuss the readings with them. I know. Another parenting task. But trust me, it’s way less exhausting than trying to understand what a “skibidi toilet” is and how to use it in an actual sentence.

• Since the childrens come in a dazzling variety of ages and maturity levels, read the stories and poems first before handing them over. A subtextual implication of sexuality may be a good talking point for your 16-year-old, but not so much for your 10-year-old, so just check it out first.

• On the other tabs of the spreadsheet, you’ll find some alternate options if you want to swap out a story or poem here and there.

• Finally, this list isn’t just for kids. These are excellent pieces of writing and a good excuse for anyone to put the phone down and reacquaint themselves with the wild, ancient magic of words on a page.

LINK TO SPREADSHEET

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What short stories or poems are missing from my list?