Summer Reading

We are a family of book worms. Each of us enjoys reading year-round, however summer allows extra time for catching up on our book lists. The kids and I have already been working our way through our eagerly anticipated summer selections. We completed some books in the first weeks of June, but here’s what we’ve been reading this week:

I’m reading This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness by Sarah Clarkson who very beautifully reveals the answer to the question “If God is good, why is there pain in the world?” I’m finding myself underlining and noting on just about every page in this book! I’m only about halfway through, so I can’t guarantee anything, but, judging by the first half of the book, I feel confident in going ahead and recommending it.

You know you have a “book girl” when she finds a way to read in the pool! My daughter is reading Book Girl, also written by Sarah Clarkson. This book is one my daughter had picked up and read a little here and there throughout the year, but has just started again this summer now that she’s freed up from her required schoolyear reading. In this book, Clarkson inspires young ladies with her top picks that helped shape, challenge, and enlighten her during her own teen and young adult years. She very eloquently explains the necessity of good stories in our lives to motivate us in living out our own God-written stories.

This week, my son read Jesse Owens: Young Record Breaker, by M. M. Eboch, about the childhood of this Olympic Gold Medalist born in our very own state of Alabama. When my girls were young homeschoolers, we took a field trip with my sister and her boys to the Jesse Owens Park and Museum located in Danville, Alabama at Owens’s birthplace. I’m hoping to go back with my son this summer, so I’m having him read up on Jesse Owens life before we go. (He’s also read up on Helen Keller as we’re hoping to make it to her home in Tuscumbia as well—another great field trip my daughters and I enjoyed!)

My son and I always have a read aloud book that we’re working on together. I’d heard that Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls, (author of Where the Red Fern Grows) is a great book for boys of his age, and after reading the first several chapters, I see why it came so highly recommended! Through this adventurous story about a boy on the hunt for some lose circus monkeys, we are laughing our way from page to page. We’ve been taking this one to the barn to read while my daughter rides her horse.

What are you reading lately?