THE BEST BOOKS FOR BOYS. On Creating Lifelong Readers.

I recently came across a blog post claiming to identify the 40 absolutely “best” books for boys, ages 8 to 16.  The whole point of "best of" lists is, of course, to stir up pseudo-anger and indignance and good-natured apoplexy about snubbed omissions and poorly chosen inclusions.  So here's my pseudo- indignance: This particular list was written by someone who, in the course of her listing, admitted never being able to get into Harry Potter, never having herself read any of the Narnia books, and whose omissions and inclusions showed she had no critical taste or faculty whatsoever in books for young male readers (Riordan's demigod series has a unique voice that transcends its Harry Potter rip-off origins, but still: to list him and not Rowling?  Lewis but not Tolkien?  No Bradbury?  No Ender? A year spent reading A Series of Unfortunate Events, as though the cheesy jokes don't get poke-me-in-the-eye stale in the first half of the first book?). Clearly, such lists should be written by someone who has actually been a boy.  Her omissions, in a list with the word “best” in it, made me sufficiently annoyed that I decided I needed to write my own list instead.

Elementary school teachers routinely admonish their charges’ parents to ensure they are reading for twenty minutes a day.  But I don’t know anyone who became a great reader by simply fulfilling this mandatory checked-off task.  Kids either find an author or a series they love and start passionately reading for pleasure (for many more than 20 minutes a day), and then, having consumed that gateway drug, begin a lifelong quest for more such material, or they don’t.  Those who do soon reap what are for the young reader entirely unintended academic benefits of their purely pleasure-motivated self-indulgence.  Those who don’t often find themselves struggling in ways which go far beyond mere academics.  Because most of those who don’t ever pick up the reading addiction and its benefits are boys, it’s especially important that parents of boys be given suggestions (lots of suggestions; what works for some will not work for others) in the hopes that their sons will latch on to something.  This is especially important in a culture where the illiterate screen is ever beckoning.

Herewith, a list of what are, in my purely subjective opinion (which happens to nevertheless be actually objectively accurate), the truly superlative books for boys.  The qualifications for a book making this list are two-fold.  It is comprised entirely of books that I personally read and loved between the ages of 8 and 18, or that one of my three sons (currently aged 10, 20, and 23) personally read and loved between those ages.  In other words, actual boys who have learned to love reading did so via these books.  Alphabetical by author:

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels.  I never finished the first book, but my son, and lots of other young men with the right sense of humor, have loved them.

Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy; the Robot series.  The kind of mind-blowing stuff that makes sci-fi so popular during that adolescent period of our lives when we get to ask the big questions, and (spoiler alert) if you read far enough in both series they eventually merge. 

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451; Something Wicked This Way Comes; The Illustrated Man; The October Country; The Martian Chronicles; A Medicine for Melancholy; I Sing the Body Electric; and other short story collections.  The Twilight Zone TV Show was, alas, before my time.  But I had the short stories of Ray Bradbury instead.  They had the same spooky tricky endings, with the added bonus of beautiful writing.  

Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything. I'm fairly certain that this book is the reason my second son became a science major in college.  Bryson's engaging writing shows how fascinating scientific literacy should be, if only so many schools didn't do such a good job of taking what should be fascinating and making it interminably boring.  

Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan of the Apes and the sequels / series.  Tarzan was the original superhero.  He had an origin story that explained his superhuman strength, agility, intelligence, and ability to talk to animals, a dual identity (Lord Greystoke and also Tarzan), untold wealth, just like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, plus lots of cool enemies from the hidden temples and lost civilizations of darkest Africa.  What's not to like?   Burroughs never researched anything, and his stories were full of errors about the geographical locations of various species, proving they were written with one goal in mind: entertainment.  

   

Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game and its sequels;  Ender’s Shadow and its sequels.  Ender's Game and its parallel novel Ender's Shadow are both great reads, despite Hollywood's failure to do the first novel full justice.  (For a great adaptation, instead of watching the movie, listen to the audioplay, Ender's Game Alive, available via Audible.com) Adult readers will enjoy the sequels to Ender's Game (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind) and younger readers will enjoy the Shadow Series, although both series dwindle with each volume, rather than building to a satisfactory conclusion, which is typical of Card, who is much better at stand-alone novels than at series.  If that depresses you, then just read Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.  They work on their own without any need to find out what happens next.   

Arthur C. Clarke: 2001 A Space Odyssey; Childhood’s End.  More good mind blowing big idea sci-fi.

Eoin Coifer: Artemis Fowl series.  Never read these myself, but my two oldest boys must have consumed them, as the house was littered with them when they left home.

Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator; James and the Giant Peach.  When I was in the 6th Grade I had to memorize a poem and recite it in front of an audience.  I chose the long humorous poem about the little girl who ate her grandma's laxatives from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator which was a big hit with students and teachers.  It's still the only poem I've ever memorized (literary memorization had clearly become a disfavored educational trend when I was growing up, stupid public education trends--I could use some good memorized poems).  

Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo.  I read this as an adult, but my son read it while he was growing up.  A great story at any age.  

Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels.  Loved this book when I was a kid.  Tried to get my kids into it by playing an audiobook on a road trip.  But alas, the egotistical Ms. Engle had decided to narrate the book herself, long after she was of the proper age to do so, and her elderly and screeching voice, not to mention moist inadvertent lip-smacking, was so annoying to my kids they begged me to turn it off until I finally had to relent because I couldn't take it any more either.  A note to publishers.  Authors write.  Hire an actor to do the reading.  Especially if the author is in her last gasps.  

Walter Farley: The Black Stallion.  Also a very good movie from my youth.

John D. Fitzgerald: The Great Brain series.  Set in turn-of-the-century Southern Utah (and, in the later volumes, SLC, where the children attend the Catholic academy) and narrated by the titular genius's younger brother, these incredibly entertaining books deserve a much wider audience than they have.  Personally, I think they are better than Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, not as literature, but as entertaining reading for boys.  

The Guiness Book of World Records.  Always loved these as a kid.  They are even more popular now that they come in big color annual hardbacks.  Although I'm not sure they have as many cool facts as they used to. 

Frank Herbert: Dune.  One of the great sci-fi novels of all time.  But don't bother with the sequels.

Conn and Hal Iggulden: The Dangerous Book for Boys.  The publishing of this book could not have been more timely.  Just what our world needed. 

Brian Jacques: The Redwall Series.  I haven't read these, but my oldest son devoured them when he was growing up. 

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird.  If you read this for school because you had to and you didn't enjoy it, do yourself a favor and read it again.  There's a reason it's so famous.  The greatest American novel ever written.  And it's great for boys who need actual heroes but are living in a popular culture that increasingly refuses to give them any. 

C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Screwtape Letters.  Every Christian should read the Narnia books when they are still too young to understand and decode the symbolism, so they can internalize the symbols instead. And everyone should read the Screwtape Letters at least once a year.

James Michener: Hawaii, The Source.  Books I started to read in my youth primarily to prove to myself that I could read something really long, but kept reading as they gave me a love of history. 

George Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm.  In addition to reading modern YA dystopian novels where the dystopia is merely the backdrop to an adventure story, make sure your kids have read these books where the story had a prescient point to make.  Great reads and great social commentaries at the same time.  

Gary Paulson: Hatchet.  A book I have not yet read, but included here at the counsel of my youngest son, who I am still working on turning into a life-long reader.

Wilson Rawls: Where the Red Fern Grows; Summer of the Monkeys.  Books to make a Fourth Grader cry.  

Ripley’s Believe It or Not books.  I don't know if they still even publish these, with their drawings instead of photographs, and their weird facts.  But I remember being fascinated by the paperbacks when I was young. 

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter series.  My oldest son and I began reading these when he was 8 and the first three books had been published.  They were instrumental in turning at least three of my children into life-long readers.  I love the Harry Potter movies.  Nevertheless, I consider it to be one of the great tragedies of our age and among the most terrible crimes ever committed against imagination that those movies were made so soon, before the series had even been completely written.  Could not one generation of readers have experienced the Harry Potter universe purely and solely as books?  Oh well, at least some of my children got to experience them when they were wholly new, and we were able to read each book before its respective film was complete.  

Louis Sachar: Holes.  Fun plotting. 

Donald J. Sobol: The Encyclopedia Brown series.  In the part of Las Vegas once known as "Charleston Heights" where a grungy locals casino now unfortunately stands, on Decatur between Charleston and Alta, there was once something so much better: a large red, white and blue slide, the kind you use a blanket to slide down, and behind that: a shopping center, with a local library branch, right across the aisle from where I got my hair cut.  I can still remember the librarian in that location who introduced me to Encyclopedia Brown.  I could rarely figure out the solution to each chapter's mystery without checking the back of the book, but Enclopedia Brown did inspire me to try to read more of our family's set of encyclopedias.  I still think of these books every time I spin an egg to test if it has been hard boiled or not.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings.  The greatest works of fiction ever written. Bar none. 

Leon Uris: Exodus. A great historical novel about one of the most interesting stories of the 20th Century, the founding of the nation of Israel.

Jules Verne: Around the World in 80 Days; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  The original steampunk sci-fi.  One of my favorite stories from LDS Church History is about John Taylor, the third President of the Church, coming into the parlor one evening and, upon seeing his son reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, advising him he shouldn't be wasting his time on such things as novels.  Son went to bed, and upon waking up the next morning, came down to the parlor to find John Taylor finishing the book, which he had stayed up all night reading.  He told his son he'd changed his mind and that this was a very good book which he should read. 

Bill Watterson: Calvin & Hobbes collections.  I truly believe that Bill Watterson will be remembered as a genius in the same way that other artists who have been the best in their genre, be it painting, jazz, or baseball, have been remembered.  The rules of the comic strip make it a fairly brutal form to do well (here, take four little panels, now draw me a little picture and add some words that will make me laugh; repeat every day).  This is why most comic strips are just lousy, with most of the comic page of the newspaper not worth the ink it is printed on, giving us 20 Marmadukes or Garfields for every one Frank and Ernest or Wizard of Id or Hagar the Horrible.  Watterson nailed it and his comic strip collections are perfect for boys who are Calvin's age or slightly older. 

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine; War of the Worlds; The Island of Dr. Moreau.  I didn't know til I was much older that H.G. Wells was most famous in his own day not for his fiction, but for his social and political commentaries, most of which were nutsoid early versions of the socialist utopian ideas that made the 20th century so dismal for so many.  Oh well, he still wrote good books.  At least as far as I can remember.  It has been a very, very, long time since I read them. 

E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web.  The one book I tried to read to all of my children.  A timeless classic.

T.H. White: The Once and Future King.  The definitive version of the Arthurian legend for the 20th Century.

The sad fate of my two oldest sons, who learned to love reading in their childhood:

Originally posted on January 28, 2015.
Last Update February 11, 2015

What I learned from the Movies Released in 2014

 What I learned from 2014's Movies:

- If you want to keep stolen art, don't teach your children to Sieg Heil. The Monuments Men

- Spies should never keep their movie ticket stubs.  Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

- Krazy glue is evil.  The Lego Movie

- Large government bureaucracies attract parasites whose purposes are directly contrary to those for which the institution was originally established.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier

- The future belongs to simians.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  I didn't actually learn this from the movie, but from the group of teenagers sitting in front of us.

- Let the redhead go to England.  The Amazing Spiderman 2

- The best thing about living in a video game would be the reset button. Edge of Tomorrow

- Wings never die.  Maleficent

- Sometimes, the movie is better than the book.   The Maze Runner

- Diplomacy is not the answer.  War is the answer.  How to Train Your Dragon 2

- Star Wars would have been an even better movie if Chewbacca had been played by a walking tree. Guardians of the Galaxy

- Pediatricians should be chubby.  It's comforting.  Big Hero 6

- A child's room should be full of books.  This is vitally important to the future of humanity. Interstellar

- Never let your wife go into the woods.  Into the Woods

- Always tell your neighbors how long you'll be gone, before leaving on a vacation.  The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies

- Sometimes, having read the book makes the movie better.  Unbroken
- The Men who lived through WWII were bad to the bone.  Unbroken
- There are some things that can make me weep like a baby, and seeing a movie-screen sized Louis Zamperini running with the Olympic Torch in Japan is one of them. Unbroken

James Madison: A Federalist and a Republican (Part 2 of a Review of Lynne Cheney's biography, James Madison, a Life Reconsidered)

{This is PART 2 of a Review of James Madison: A Life Reconsidered, by Lynne Cheney.  For PART 1, See:  http://dadsbookreviews.blogspot.com/2014/10/some-thoughts-on-religious-liberty.html}


Lynne Cheney, in "James Madison: A Life Reconsidered" is not simply writing a biography.  Rather, like McCullough on Adams and Chernow on Hamilton, she is engaging in an act of advocacy. Cheney likes Madison, agrees with his views, and wishes to promote his importance in the American pantheon. Thus, she arbitrates every historical argument in his favor, and places him in the best possible light on every question and in each episode of his life.  I don't have a problem with this.  I actually like to understand how people saw themselves, and a sympathetic biography which argues its subject's side of every story is not a bad place to start.  I'm always in favor of a little hagiography when it comes to the founders.  I do love the Fourth of July.

Nevertheless, such advocacy can have its pitfalls, if it causes an author to gloss over tough issues, and thus skip over the most fascinating questions. Hence, the second big problem I had with Cheney's book is that it leaves largely unexamined the great conundrum of Madison's life: how to explain his sudden shift, once the Constitution was created and its Bill of Rights securely in place, from being the nation's leading Federalist, to its second most important Republican.  Indeed, given Cheney's sympathetic tone throughout, the reader can be excused for feeling a bit of whiplash as Cheney warmly admires Madison's achievements on behalf of nationalism in one chapter, only to have his arguments against federal power spoken of with equal fervor and admiration in the next.

Madison left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia terribly concerned that, should the delegates' handiwork be ratified, the resulting U.S. Government would not be nearly as strong as he had hoped. If he was bitterly disappointed that the small states had won the battle for equal representation in the Senate, he was even more completely mortified that the national government would have no veto right over state legislation.  This national veto over state laws had been a key element of Madison's Virginia plan, which, to his horror, had been unceremoniously rejected from the Constitutional text.  How is it possible that a man with such views would, just a few short years later, work with Jefferson to craft the nullification resolutions in Virginia and Kentucky, arguing for exactly the opposite policy: that federal legislation should be subject to state veto?  How exactly does one understand this great irony?

For Cheney, a few brief remarks from Madison suffice:  Madison was interested in equipoise.  Under the unwieldy articles of confederation, the power of the individual states had made it impossible for anything of national importance to be accomplished in a unified fashion.  Once the Constitution had rectified this imbalance, it became equally important to prevent the national government from becoming overly powerful, and prevent the individual states from pursuing their own best interests. But such equipoise would never have been maintained under the Virginia Plan which Madison had brought to Philadelphia, and which he was so disappointed to walk away from Philadelphia without achieving (until he realized his original handiwork could never have been ratified by the States). So other factors were clearly at work in Madison's turnabout.

As it turns out, far more interesting theories than his own self-serving explanations abound.  Cheney's book would have been more interesting if she would have examined them. Instead, the reader is left to other sources.  For a pro-Madison viewpoint, one can review Gordon Woods' book, Revolutionary Characters, in its chapter entitled "Is There a James Madison Problem."  For a more cynical and much more interesting take, Joseph J. Ellis, in his book, American Creation, has examined the question in a chapter entitled "The Conspiracy." Both are great reads, and examine theories such as the following:

Was it Jefferson's influence?  This seems highly likely.  Madison always deferred to Jefferson's wisdom (although he also played an important role in bringing Jefferson's poetic rhetoric down to practical earth: a subject which Cheney does a great job on in some of the most enjoyable passages of her book).  Madison's turn away from Federalism and towards Republicanism accompanied Jefferson's return from France to take up a post in Washington's first Constitutional administration and was developed during a cruise up the Hudson river the two of them took together in 1791.  The fact that, late in his life, Madison would, once again, become an important voice in favor of the Union, during the nullification crisis of the 1830s, after Jefferson had passed away, lends further credence to this idea.

Was it just good politics?  The debate over whether to ratify the constitution had been particularly ugly in Virginia, where it had taken all of Madison's abilities to withstand the arguments of Patrick Henry and his fellow anti-Federalists against ratification, and eke out a narrow victory for the union cause. To the extent that anything the federal government did ever seemed to favor northern over southern interests (an inevitability in future compromises), the narrow support the Constitution had received in Virginia was likely to soon vanish.  Madison could only hope to remain in politics if he was elected to national office from his home state of Virginia.  And since only States-rightists were going to get elected in Virginia, Madison's about-face may be explainable via the most prosaic of all political realities: he simply did what he needed to do to get elected.  The same practical politcal strategy which has been followed by every politician who has ever tacked to the left or right during a primary, and back towards the center in a general election, was, perhaps, invented by Madison, who has been called not only the father of our Constitution, but also of our politics: If you want to serve in elective office, stand with the people whose votes you need.

Was it about slavery?  Any purely political reasons for Madison's turnabout raise the question of why Virginia politics required successful politicians to be wary of federal power in the first place. One obvious answer is the "peculiar institution" of slavery, which sourtherners feared a northern dominated federal government might one day abolish, as indeed ultimately occurred. The niceties and political hypocrisies of the day prevented any open reference to this subject by Jefferson or Madison as a motivating cause of southern political preferences.  (It was apparently somewhat annoying, when waxing eloquent on the thesis that the greatest capacity for republican virtue lay among southern agrarian planters, to be reminded that those same planters were engaged in the most obviously immoral, unvirtuous, and tyrannical activity ever known to man.)  Nevertheless, as argued by Ellis, the very silence of the southern founders on the question of slavery may be the best proof of its elephant-in-the-room status, and later Virginia politicians would be more forthright: "Tell me if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they cannot free all the slaves in the United States."  Nathaniel Macon, as quoted by Joseph J. Ellis in American Creation, (Vintage 2007) at p. 175.  Slavery certainly played a role, and Americans who, today, find themselves overly enamored with Jeffersonian rhetoric about about republican virtue, would do well to temper their enthusiasm with a little salt.  In the ultimate test of regional virtue, the Civil War and the fight to abolish slavery, the Republican Jeffersonians were not only on the losing side of history, but the morally wrong side as well.   As Lincoln said, if slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong.  It took a strong federal government to end slavery, and then to end Jim Crow, and it took a union much stronger than anything Jefferson envisaged to fight the 20th Century's various forms of anti-republican totalitarianism.

Was it about economic ignorance?  Madison's shift from federalism occurred when he opposed the financial programs and policies initiated by his former friend (and collaborator on the Federalist Papers) Alexander Hamilton, during Washington's presidential tenure.  Hamilton's financial program was modelled after British institutions and policies which had allowed that nation to become among the most prosperous on earth.  Hamilton had spent years of private study learning about those institutions, and the implementation of Hamilton's proposed legislation during his tenure as America's first Secretary of the Treasury make him the most successful and important person to ever hold that office.  The Hamiltonian program allowed the new nation to finally gain a secure financial footing, which it had sorely lacked from the date it declared its independence, and laid the foundations for subsequent free market capitialism which would make Americans among the most socially mobile people on the planet.  Nevertheless, that program's implementation was fought by Jefferson and Madison every step of the way, and with an increasingly paranoid righteous fervor, which, as Ellis points out, can only be completely understood in light of the fact that Madison and Jefferson didn't understand the first thing about economics, and couldn't begin to comprehend many of the principles which Hamilton was talking about.  For all their political genius, Jefferson and Madison were no economic Einsteins: both men would die broke and deeply in debt.

Whatever the cause of Madison's dramatic turnabout, Cheney need not have shied away from this fascinating question, which ultimately strengthens her hero's claim to preeminent importance in American history.  Because Madison's reversal may be the most important thing he ever did for the Constitution.

In a sort of "only-Nixon-could-go-to-China" moment, by joining the ranks of the anti-Federalists, Madison turned them into something other than anti-Federalists.  He tranformed the anti-Federalist movement into Jeffersonian-Republicanism, whose new agenda no longer included overturning the Constitution, but, instead, simply seeking to interpret the Constitution narrowly, and in such a way as to limit federal power.  There is probably nothing Madison could have done to more powerfully secure the ongoing existence of the Constitution, then to thus end any debate over it's continued existence.  By converting the political movement known as anti-Federalism into small federal government republicanism, Madison ensured that the Constitution would survive.  When Jefferson came to office, he did simplify and shrink the size of the Federal Government.  But he didn't overthrow it.  Much of the Federalist program which had been developed over the past 12 years remained in place.  And Jefferson was canny enough to ignore his own limited-government principles when they might stand in the way of important national interests, such as the Louisiana Purchase.

In the meantime, Madison became the father of America's first opposition political party, and introduced party politics into American life.  As much as Americans may claim to hate partisanship, political parties played an important role in the ongoing existence of the union, and continue to stabilize the country today. After the Republicans replaced the Federalists in office, it was no longer possible for any future government to treat its mainstream political enemies as insurrectionist threats to the legitimate government, as the Federalists had done when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.  Rather, political parties, and the eventual tradition of those parties finding themselves peacefully rotating in and out of power, gave us a nation which had to tolerate and give credence to the idea of a loyal opposition.  This helped America avoid the fate of other post-revolutionary societies, where the guillotine or the coup d'etat was the only way for transitions of power to occur.

All hail to James Madison, one of the most important fathers of our freedoms.  Someday someone will write a book about him which does him greater justice.  But for now, Cheney's extremely readable and engaging tome will have to do.