which_chick | (no subject)

I've been reading the Percy Jackson & the Olympians books (no, not a band), which are ya novels for ya people. I am not a YA person, but I am still reading the books.

Percy (real name Perseus, which I figured out about .3 seconds into the boy's explanation of the books) is a half-blood -- half human, half Poseidon. He figures this out sometime in middle school, goes on to have all sorts of adventures with assorted other demigod types. The adventures are based more or less firmly on the foundations of literature that have amused generations and generations of people, to wit, greek and roman mythology. So, y'know, Percy & co get the golden fleece and they wander around in the labyrinth and they fight the Hydra and they sail along between Scylla and Charybdis (sea of monsters now located in the Caribbean) and so forth. The ancient pantheon is real, more or less, in these our modern times, at least for reasonable non-zero values of real and these are fairly engaging books. There's a website and apparently a movie is coming out February 12.

Now, I don't go trolling for YA literature. I don't. I found out about all of this because Cass's brother Waylon got the books for xmas, the first four. (There are five books.) He, who had previously expressed no interest in anything that lacked an internal combustion engine, spent a good forty-five minutes last week trying very earnestly to tell me everything contained in the three and a half books he'd read at that point. Twice. I can see Waylon about every day -- he's at the house when I go to feed the Ungrateful Babies -- but usually he's not on my radar. I do not much go on about him b/c he does four wheelers and not horses. We don't have a lot of interest overlap, but he (now) reads and I read and there it is. Since my initial baptism in the flood of Waylon's tumbled verbiage regarding the books, he's texted me to tell me that there's a website. (He's young yet, doesn't understand that I am the sort of person to google shit right off the bat.) He's loaned me the first four books (which I have since read -- they go quickly) so that he will have someone to talk to about them. He is bubbling over like an artesian well about these damn books and how awesomely cool they are. He has asked at least three times if I would be willing to buy him a birthday present because he needs the final book and doesn't have it yet. (His birthday is not yet but he is the sort of boy who will push for an advance present because it's really, really important and he needs it really a whole lot right now.)

I asked La why she didn't buy the last book. She didn't buy it because she didn't figure he would be done reading the first four yet... or even started reading the first four. He, literate but not a reader, got the damn books at xmas. Since then, he's read them all more than once and is now spending every available minute of his life telling people about them, reading them again, thinking about them, checking out the website... Nobody would have laid money on any of that before xmas.

I, er, bought the last book last night (there's a Barnes & Noble near dressage lessons), will be reading it tonight, will be delivering it to the boy tomorrow AM so that he can read it over the weekend. Yes, I am a softie. Also, my goal is to get him the book so that he will have read all of them *before* the movie. Movies are not replacements for books. Movies are frequently not-as-good as the movie you can make in your head when you read the book. He's at a good age to learn this and I am a huge fan of strike while the iron is hot. Find the teachable moment, and use it.