Guys Read: Birch Rock Camp Edition.

As anyone who reads my blog regularly knows, I've spent all of my weekends running (and cataloging) the library at Birch Rock Camp this summer. It's a summer camp for guys aged 7 to 15, and reading is hugely important and very much encouraged here, so its library is well-used and much-loved.

So without further ado, here are a few of the titles that BRC guys are reading at the moment!There are, of course, at least three counselors who are currently making their way through Dance with Dragons, the most recent in George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series. Our own Brian Jung wrote about the series here, and said:

You've read Tolkien and you've read C.S. Lewis and maybe even all those Eragon books about dragons by Christopher Paolini. Maybe you're thinking, this is great stuff: dragons and swords and magic and all that. Can't get enough of it. But maybe you're also thinking, isn't something missing?

Well, yes. I'll tell you what it is: sex.

Appropriately, the counselor who is running the Maine Wilderness Adventure brought Gary Paulsen's Hatchet with him. The group is due back next week, and I'm curious to hear what it was like to read a survival story while on a grueling (but, from what I've heard, exhilarating!) camping expedition.

I've got a camper who's a few hundred pages into Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief, which hasn't been written about here at GLW (how is that possible?), but which is totally a Must Read: It's a WWII novel, set in Germany and narrated by Death itself. It's beautiful and devastating and heartbreaking and hopeful, the writing is gorgeous and Death's voice is inhuman yet sympathetic to humanity.

Another camper is re-reading the Hunger Games trilogy AND reading John Grisham's The Broker, yet another just finished up The Lovely Bones and is about to start The Odyssey, and another is reading Stephen Pressfield's Tides of War on his own and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 for school. David Lubar's Weenies books are hugely popular in the library, as is Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series, the Fablehaven and Ranger's Apprentice books, and guys are constantly throwing themselves into chairs to pages through the Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe it or Not!, and Calvin and Hobbes.

The summer is winding down, but I'm already looking forward to next year!