Raising reading machines

I turned Son-and-Heir, nearly 14, loose this morning with military sci-fi dean Gordon Dickson’s book “Necromancer,” the “gateway book” into Dickson’s famed Dorsai series. I’ve read each of the books so many times over the years, I can quote passages.

I think his conclusive work, “The Final Encyclopedia,” belongs in the top 10 of any list of the best science fiction ever written, right there alongside Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot,” Ray Bradbury’s “R is for Rocket” collection and Frank Herbert’s “Dune” (though not all the subsequent books in the series.)

As my children have aged, they have turned into little reading machines; skin-covered literary Terminators whose sole purpose seems to be to devour every book ever written. They’re currently reading 3-4 adult novels per week. Son-and-Heir plowed through most of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender” books in about two weeks and the Blog-daughter, recently turned 12, has been ripping through Nora Roberts and Dean Koontz at a furious pace.

I had to laugh the other day when the school sent home a paper for us to sign affirming that we were trying to get the kids to read at least 15 minutes per day…yeah, like THAT’S a problem. It’s more like “it’s midnight…if you don’t turn those light off and go to sleep NOW, there’ll be no more reading for a WEEK!”

It has also been nice that their reading tastes have been maturing of late…they’ve both been reading a lot of my favorite literature and giving me their take on it. I remember long conversations with my mother about the books we’d read and those we hoped the authors would eventually write. We both had a particular liking for the Dorsai books – she for “Soldier, Ask Not” and me for “Tactics Of Mistake.” We fought for reading rights to the household’s sole copy of Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Now I’m fighting with my own kids for some reading time with Koontz’s “Strange Highways.” As a parent, I can think of a lot worse problems.