I’ve been thinking about addiction lately. A relative of mine is struggling mightily with this problem, prompting a great deal of concern among those of us who love him.

I’ve probably known more than an average number of addicts. My first job out of college was at a pysch hospital and various people I worked with were in recovery. I always seemed to get along well with them. Most of us go around trying to put on a good face for people, but recovering addicts tell it like it is. Honesty is what keeps them sober. And they always had interesting stories to tell.

I’m sure it was experiences past and present that drew me to David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy. It’s a father’s account of his promising young son’s descent into meth addition (I got it at the library in the “playaway” audio version, which is book and mini player in one and is the latest reason why I think we have the coolest library ever). The tale is heart-wrenching as Sheff watches his “beautiful boy” become a stranger.

“Yet he is a stranger whose every part I know intimately. I recall his soft eyes when they were elated and when they were disappointed, his face when he was pallid from illness and when he was burned red by the sun, his mouth and even each tooth from visits to dentists and the orthodontist, his knees from when he skinned them and I put on Band-Aids, his shoulders from putting on sun block, he feet from taking out splinters — every part of him.”

This passage gave voice to a nagging disquietude I’ve had about parenthood. There’s this being that you love more than anything in this world and know like the back of your hand but yet is completely separate from you. It’s like having an organ outside your body, exposed. When they’re young, like mine are, it’s easy to feel protecting them is within your power. But as they grow older, and more independent, we have to watch as they make their way in the world. Inevitably, some will wander into the insidious snare of addiction.

The hopeful message in Sheff’s account is that love can be the thread that draws addicts back from the brink (Nic Sheff wrote his own account of the experience in a book called Tweak. See them talking about their companion memoirs in this You Tube clip). The way back is fraught with uncertainty, and Sheff offers no simple solutions. The cure for addiction is as amorphous as the disease. But from what I have seen and read, it’s clear that for addicts — and troubled youth of all stripes – as long as they are alive, there is hope.

I’ve been reading The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator’s Deadly Return to Suburban America by David Baron. My husband asked how it is and I said, “If we lived in Boston, I’d say interesting, since we live in Durango, I’ll say terrifying.” 

The book documents the evolution in the state’s cougar population from the early 20th century, when they were practically wiped out of the state, to the present, when conservation has helped their numbers rebound and urban interface has caused them to be habituated to humans — and occasionally view them as prey.

The book recounts a chilling attack in which a young girl was snatch from her mother’s side in California. The attack was so quick and stealthy that it almost seemed the girl had vanished into thin air. They were able to find and rescue her, but she was severely injured.

That such a danger exists here is undeniable. Just last week a mountain lion was killed in the courtyard at Park Elementary after being spotted by a passer-by. And last year two other lions were killed in town. On Aug. 22 the Center for Southwest Studies is opening an exhibit called Mountain Lion! to raise awareness about the growing issue of human encounters with mountain lions.

Knowing that children, by virtue of their size and frenetic behavior, can trigger the predatory instinct of lions has certainly given me pause when recreating with my kids in wild, wooded areas. I feel very conflicted about the balance between caution and enjoying the place we live. Fatal attacks are exceedingly rare, and some simple precautions – such as traveling in a group, keeping kids close and avoiding times when lions are most active (dawn and dusk) — can help minimize the threat. In the end, though, the danger is just part of living “where the wild things are.”

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How many times as a parent do we think, “if I could only read my baby’s mind”? I know I certainly have during our long, sleepless night as of late. A new book, The Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik, probes this question to its deepest depths, according to a review on the online magazine Slate.

It’s generally believed that babies, because they have no preconceived cognitive structure to filter their perceptions, experience the world as raw sensation.

“The baby just is,” states reviewer Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale.

And because young children don’t know the way the world should be, it frees them to imagine an infinite number of ways the world could be.

Gopnik argues, “Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They [children] think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good one and make them real.”

I haven’t read the book but it suggests to me an interesting correlation to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (which I read during the endless, blissful nursing sessions of my first baby’s first weeks). It explores the dual operating systems that control our behavior, one intentional and rational, the other unconscious and spontaneous. Interestingly, he notes that sometimes we erroneously allow the former to interfere with the latter when we let misguided reason override our gut. The book also shows, however, how we come up with rational explanations to justify actions that are essentially controlled by our primitive, intuitive brains. (He describes some fascinating research on married couples in which a researcher, based on brief observations, was able to predict with 95 percent accuracy which couples would still be together after 15 years. And it often wasn’t the couples you would think).

Personally, I find watching my children’s unchained imaginations wander in the world is one of the most wonderous parts of being a parent. It reminds me what an amazing world we live in and inspires me to plumb my own creative capacity, so easily neglected in the rat race that is adulthood.

I’m going for something on the lighter side today — some quotes from Erma Bombeck. As a child I remember perusing a copy of her best-selling book ”If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?” I’m not sure I entirely got it, but I thought she was funny even back then. Finding these quotes on the Internet, I find her especially so now that I most certainly do get it. Enjoy.

- “Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids.”

- “My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first one being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.”

- “There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.”

- “The only reason I would take up jogging is so I could hear heavy breathing again.”

- “Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.”

- “Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.”

- “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’”

- “In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn’t danced on TV.”

- “Seize the moment. Think of all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.”

- “Never loan your car to anyone to whom you’ve given birth.”

- “The grass is always greener over the septic tank.”

- “A child needs your love more when he deserves it least.”

I hate to say, I’ve tried to pretend it isn’t so, but I have a severe case of summer-itis. I’m longing for the unscheduled summers of my youth. In particular, I’m remembering the summer after we moved from Loveland, Colorado, to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. In a new neighbor with few other kids, I turned to books for entertainment and companionship. The most memorable book I read that summer was Island of the Blue Dolphins, about a native girl who is left behind on an island by her tribe. I envisioned myself in her role and suddenly my solitary summer seemed noble and heroic. Out of boredom was born a life long passion for reading. In this vein, what follows is a list of “Best Children’s Books — Ever!” by New Yorks Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Besides being entertaining, books, he notes, are like vitamins for the brain, helping kids retain learning during the acedemic lull. Hooray for books!

By Nicholas D. Kristof

So how will your kids spend this summer? Building sand castles at the beach? Swimming at summer camp? Shedding IQ points?

This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students.

A mountain of research points to a central lesson: Pry your kids away from the keyboard and the television this summer, and get them reading. Let me help by offering my list of the Best Children’s Books — Ever!

So here they are, in ascending order of difficulty, and I can vouch that these also are great to read aloud.

1. Charlotte’s Web. The story of the spider who saves her friend, the pig, is the kindest representation of an arthropod in literary history.

2. The Hardy Boys series. Yes, I hear the snickers. But I devoured them myself and have known so many kids for whom these were the books that got them excited about reading. The first in the series is weak, but House on the Cliff is a good opener. (As for Nancy Drew, I yawned over her, but she seems to turn girls into Supreme Court justices. Among her fans as kids were Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.)

3. Wind in the Willows. My mother read this 101-year-old English classic to me, and I’m still in love with the characters. Most memorable of all is Toad — rich, vain, childish and prone to wrecking cars.

4. The Freddy the Pig series. Published between 1927 and 1958, these 26 books are funny, beautifully written gems. They concern a talking pig, Freddy, who is lazy, messy and sometimes fearful, yet a loyal friend, a first-rate detective and an impressive poet. These were my very favorite books when I was in elementary school. A good one to start with is Freddy the Detective or Freddy Plays Football. (Avoid the first and weakest, Freddy Goes to Florida.)

5. The Alex Rider series. These are modern British spy thrillers in which things keep exploding in a very satisfying way. Alex amounts to a teenage James Bond for the 21st century.

6. The Harry Potter series. Look, the chance to read these books aloud by itself is a great reason to have kids.

7. Gentle Ben. The coming-of-age story of a sickly, introspective Alaskan boy who makes friends with an Alaskan brown bear, to the horror of his tough, domineering father.

8. Anne of Green Gables. At a time when young ladies were supposed to be demure and decorative, Anne emerged to become one of the strongest and most memorable girls in literature.

9. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. This is a hilarious, poignant and exceptionally well-written memoir of childhood on the Canadian prairies. (Note: If you prefer sweet to funny, try Rascal instead.)

10. Little Lord Fauntleroy. This classic spawned the Fauntleroy suit and named a duck (Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy). An American boy from a struggling family turns out to be heir to an irritable and fabulously wealthy old English lord, whom the boy proceeds to tame and civilize.

11. On to Oregon. This outdoor saga, written almost 90 years ago, is loosely based on the true story of the Sager family journeying by covered wagon in 1848, in the early days of the Oregon Trail. The parents die en route, and the seven children — the youngest just an infant — continue on their own. They are led by 13-year-old John: spoiled, surly, often mean, yet determined and even heroic in keeping his siblings alive.

12. The Prince and the Pauper. Most kids encounter Mark Twain through Tom Sawyer, but this work is at least as funny and offers unforgettable images of English history.

13. Lad, a Dog simply is the best book ever about a pet, a collie. This is to Lassie what Shakespeare is to CliffsNotes. The book was published 90 years ago, and readers still are visiting Lad’s real grave in New Jersey – plus, this is a book so full of SAT words it could put Stanley Kaplan out of business.

You can post your own suggestions for best children’s books on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. My own kids have the temerity to think they know better than I which books they’ve enjoyed, so I’ve deigned to post their recommendations there. But listening to one’s children is dangerous: I advocate reading to them instead.

Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times. Reach him c/o The New York Times, Editorial Department, 620 8th Ave., New York, 10018.