I haven't read the book The Hobbit in ages (the prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Nobody reads those books anymore; they simply watch the movies. Admittedly, the movies aren't bad, but if you haven't read the books you really haven't a clue what's going on when you watch them anyway). And, after that extensive parenthetical, I honestly don't remember what I was going to say in the first place... I suppose it doesn't really matter.
The summer reading for incoming ninth graders (such as myself) included Of Mice and Men and Nectar in a Sieve. The latter wasn't bad, but it was quite predictable and repetitive. The former...well, I've made clear my feelings about Steinbeck. (See previous post.) Madeleine compared it to removing a Band-Aid: painful, but at least it was short. I quite agree.
I've been reading other (more enjoyable) literature this summer: The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn Green, for example, which I found quite good, even humorous. Fahrenheit 451, The Invisible Man (by H. G. Wells--different from Invisible Man), and The Three Musketeers were all good. Pertaining to the latter, I think there must be some archaic French insult with no real English translation, due to the fact that they kept calling each other ninnies. (Then again, the novel does take place in 1627.) I liked Jurassic Park, though it was a bit different from the movie. A few characters were left out in the film, and Ian Malcolm died in the book, which was a pity because he was one of my favorite characters ("I believe my live has value," he says on page 74, "and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports perhaps,"). Also, the ages of the kids were switched.
I read The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, during which I discovered that not only does the author have an exceptional vocabulary (in about two pages, he uses the words 'trammels,' 'fecundity,' and one other word that I had to look up but escapes my mind at this moment), but also has the somewhat irritating tendency to capitalize words that should not be. These include most especially Man and Thing, and also Being and High Origins. (In that respect his novels are quite similar to the United States Constitution.) In the beginning of The Time Machine, the man referred to simply as the Time Traveler is explaining how he managed to accomplish the achievement that gave him his name and describes that time is simply another direction in which to travel, saying, "Until the invention of the balloon, man was limited vertically, save for spasmodic jumping and the irregularities of the surface," which inevitably gave rise to an amusing image of a man in eighteenth-century attire repeatedly leaping up and down.
I think it's clear that I read a lot.