The Next Book

I found the book. Our family does read-alouds. We’ve done them since the kids were old enough to sit up straight. Matt sat in a highchair for most of the Lord of the Rings triology. Cookies and hot chocolate were enough to draw them to the table, and the voices I made for each of the characters was enough to keep them, that and the stories were really good. We read all of the Percy Jackson books, the Chronicles of Narnia, some Septimus Heap, the Artemis Fowl series, etc. We even did the last of the Harry Potter books—you have never seen people do chores so quickly! “Children, when chores are done, we’ll start the book.”

And, yes, we still do it even though the kids are now 19, 18, 15, and 13. They still love it, and it gives us wonderful literary commonalities. “Hey, that’s a P2C2E!” (For the uninitiated, it’s a Process too Complicated to Explain from Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. Yes, yes, that Rushdie.)

Anyway, I was looking for a book to start as soon as finals for Luke and Ariel are over. Then I ran across the book, The Son of Hamas. It’s on the New York Times best seller list. It’s the memoir of Mosab Hassan Yousef. Here’s a blurb from a book review in World magazine. “Take a Palestinian with Hamas in his bloodline, turn him into an Israeli spy, pack him off to a Bible study that leads to a conversion to Christianity, and exile him to America where he tells all—daring both Islamic militants and an Israeli hit squad to come after him!”

Truth is much stranger than fiction, and that is so the next book we’re going to read. I’m off to order it from Amazon.