summer reading

I stopped work a few weeks ago, but before that, my prized student (this kid is a real prodigy) asked me to lend him a novel that he could read in English. He’s 15, so of course he asked for Stephen King or something similar. I’m not 15, so, despite my double- and triple-stacked shelves of books, I couldn’t find much of anything I thought he would like. Finally, I managed to glean a selection of “mystery” novels whose covers didn’t seem too overwhelmingly feminine. He chose a book called The Houdini Girl, which, as I told him, I remember reading with page-turning enthusaism a few years ago, but I couldn’t remember much about the plot, except that it was about a magician who weaves descriptions of his tricks into the story in an interesting way.

The kid loved the book. Every lesson he would ask me some unknown words he had encountered and tell me what was happening in the story. At some point, I started wondering how appropriate this book I had given him really was. (He was asking words like intimate and palpable -- very nice words, but I noticed some hedging on his part when I’d ask about their context.)

That’s okay, I decided. A little sex, some filthy trash (as one Amazon reviewer calls the book’s indiscriminate use of the f word) -- these are hardly disincentives for a 15-year-old boy doing extracurricular reading in a foreign language, in the summer, and on his own initiative. He even underlined key words as he read, as in the following passage:

Kim and I are in the foreground, the dreaming spires behind us; also behind us Rosa -- bending over, skirt raised and knickers lowered, to expose the dark cleft and twin white domes of her arse.

He finished the book, we finished our lessons, I got bored, and I decided to read it again myself. All I can say now, after rereading the book (which is actually quite good) and the kid’s annotations, is that I’m glad the book is safely back in my hands, and not his mother’s.