Over the course of this two-day weekend, my eighth-grade son read Conrad Richter's A Light in the Forest, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Lewis Robinson's "Puckheads," and a chunk of Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica. He's always been an enthusiastic reader, but except for our Shakespeare projects, he hasn't challenged himself beyond youth literature. All of a sudden that seems to have changed: he just could not stop reading this weekend, and the Hemingway in particular amazed him. He kept wandering out of his room to read sentences aloud to me.

My older son is a perfectly competent reader, but he has never been a reader. It is strange how small our club is.

For my part, I will be undertaking Aristotle today, although I am still recovering from Plato. "Poetry is an outrage on the understanding," declares Socrates, and I think he may be right.