What My Teenaged Grandchildren Are Reading

Foggy mornings are great for reading.

Over July 4 week we were fortunate to have a bunch o’ family with us, including three of the grandkids. They thanked me profusely for recent book gifts, and all three were partway through those books–but only one actually had the book with him. All three were in the midst of reading other books. That’s okay; they had all at least started, swore they were enjoying, and would finish them. I take them at their word!

Here’s what they were actively reading:

Tim at 18 (to whom we gave The Book Thief by Markus Zusak): As he heads into college at U. Mass. Amherst, he is reading the college’s 2012 Common Reading book, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. A lead-in page bound into the paperback printed for this purpose explains that all incoming new students need to have read it by orientation time, and it will be “used in a variety of ways” during their first semester. The author will be the keynote speaker at the New Student Convocation.

Lauren at 16 (to whom we gave Misery by Stephen King): She is rereading The Christopher Killer by Alane Ferguson. She is rereading it because she wants to read the next of Ferguson’s books (The Angel of Death, I think) but wants to refresh her memory first. Her reading choice reassures me I wasn’t wrong to give her Stephen King’s Misery.

Jeremy at 14 (to whom we gave Damned by Check Palahniuk): He brought with him a book he was given by another set of grandparents, which is Little, Brown and Company’s binding of David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (Wallace’s only speech ever to a graduating class, this one in 2005 at Kenyon College). It’s about making conscious choices, and Jeremy has grocked it.

Before their week with us, I knew the kids could claim such mega-bestsellers as Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, and Wimpy Kid. But after their week with us, I’m reassured they’re reading a lot of other books too.

If you have teenaged grandchildren, what are they reading?

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Meredith Ann Rutter - Yours In Books

My name is Meredith Rutter (sometimes Meredith Ann Rutter). My entire working life has been devoted to creating books, in part or in whole. I worked from the ground up. Fresh out of Tufts University with a B.S. in zoology, I took a secretarial position in the high-school science department at an educational (textbook) publishing house in Boston, Mass. With its filing and recording tasks, the job was an ideal way to get a hands-on overview of what each level job involved. From the start, I memorized Chicago Press’s A Manual of Style and took to proofreading like a hippie to dope. As a writer, I’m working on memoir material and suspense fiction. My first publication is titled The Cleveland Rutters. You can learn more about it on my website http://yoursinbooks.com. I still have much to learn as a writer, especially when it comes to fiction. I’m working at it, though, and loving it just as much as every other aspect of books I’ve been involved in.

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