5^th Grade and Up

(First Published 2017)

Alec can’t put a good book down.

So, when Principal Vance lays down the law–pay attention in class, or else – Alec takes action. He can’t lose all his reading time, so he starts a club. A club he intends to be the only member of. After all, reading isn’t a team sport, and no one would want to join something called the Losers Club, right?

But as more and more kids find their way to Alec’s club–including his ex-friend turned bully and the girl Alec is maybe starting to like–Alec notices something. Real life might be messier than his favorite books, but it’s just as interesting.

Let me start out by saying I think it’s weird for a kid to get in trouble for reading. Alec was reading during class time but still it sounds like an oxymoron. An oxymoron is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear together. Examples: dry ice, cold sweat, jumbo shrimp, getting in trouble for reading, etc. It reminded me of this Frazz comic.

I relate to Alec’s character in the beginning of the story, I too spent most of my school days reading instead of interacting with other people.

A few of the books features in this story I read as a class read during school. I don’t know whether it was the pressure of having to pick apart the point of the story or the anxiety I got from interacting with my noisy peers, but I couldn’t appreciate what the story was about and what it was teaching me. Honestly, I think people learn more from a story when the information isn’t being forced down your throat. See Frazz comic example below:

I liked how the characters in the story talked about their favorite books without giving away any spoilers.

There are a few lessons in this story like ‘you aren’t defined by one thing’ and ‘real life isn’t like a story in a book’, but I focused more on the message that ‘reading is fun and for everyone’.

This weeks’ Weird but True Fact about Books

There are more book titles on Earth than there are different species of living things.