Summer Challenge

My 14 year old son and I were talking about summer reading. He's become quite a reader but we both have a huge collection of books we have never read. We love the library and often read books from the library before we read our own. We talked about challenging ourselves to read only the books we own. Then we thought of a theme - books that have been made into movies. So we went through our YA books so that we could have books we could easily read through the summer and would interest us both.
The books we came up with were:
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
The Marvelous Land of Oz by L Frank Baum
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Outsiders by SE Hinton
Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key
The City of Ember by Jeanne Du Prau
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by EB White
Stuart Little by EB White
The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brahares
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe
Curious George by HA Ray
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
Harry Potter by JK Rowling
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett
The Princess Bride by William Goldman

That was a longer list than we expected. There were a few rules - the movie must be based on the book not the book on the movie and we needed to be able to access the movie easily. We did talk about books that have more than one movie such as Escape to Witch Mountain but decided that we would cross that bridge when it came to it.

The challenge is to read one book each week and watch the movie. You will notice that the books vary in length and difficulty. I had my son pick out what he wanted to read most and cross off the ones he absolutely had no desire to read until we had 12 books for the 12 weeks of summer. We've determined our 12 books but not the order in which we will read them. We both have to read the book so some weeks we may have to patiently wait for the other person to finish the book. We'll figure out how we will fix that later.
Our 12 books are:
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
The Marvelous Land of Oz by L Frank Baum
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Outsiders by SE Hinton
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by EB White
Stuart Little by EB White
The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander
Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I hope you join us with your own 12 books. If you don't have 12 books in your personal library that have had movies made from them, try the local library. There are sooooo many books that have been turned into movies. If you have time, you can try some harder books but definitely take the time to see the movies as well. Our goal is to see what we like better. Some books/movies like The Princess Bride are so good that I can't choose one over the other.