Ten years ago, I started a Siblings’ Book Club, where we’ve tried to read 10 have-wanted-to-read books together annually. The group is now 13 members strong, as we’ve invited friends and others to join. This year I wanted to include the kids, but they don’t have the same interest as us adults, so I restarted the process with what I’m now calling the Cousins’ Book Club (though it’s just my kids this first year).

This being the first book of the club, I’ll describe briefly the process. My kids and I each selected ten books, and then from that list of 30, we voted for our favorites. The final top-ten are now on our reading list for the year, and we’re excited for where it takes us!

My son (13) recommended Minecraft: The Island by Max Brooks and began reading the moment I finalized our reading list, so we didn’t have much discussion about where to begin! Nevertheless, we all participated, reading the book on our Kindles at our own pace, and (perhaps not surprisingly) I was the last to finish.

The Island and the Minecraft World

Overall, I was impressed by Brooks’ method of introducing us readers to the Minecraft video game world as if we’d never played it before—and I’ve never played it before. I’ve watched my kids play plenty of times, and I did my due-diligence of researching it before buying it for them for Christmas last year, but I did not know the lingo or the methods of crafting inside this digital world. For that reason alone, I’m glad to have read it, to have a much better understanding of why my kids love the game without having to invest hours into playing it myself.

The storyline was also fairly intriguing to me, as I have a penchant for survival stories and since Brooks thanks both his mom and Robinson Crusoe as inspiration. It’s simply a character unwittingly thrown into the Minecraft world where he knows neither the rules nor his reason for being there. He spends the entire book figuring out this world and learning life lessons along the way. It’s really quite entertaining.

“What I’ve Learned from the World of Minecraft”

Throughout the story, I was highlighting bits and pieces of advice and lessons the character learned as he faced starvation, disappointment, fires, and zombies. Unbeknownst to me, though, Brooks ended his book with a list of 36 such lessons in a section titles “What I’ve Learned from the World of Minecraft.” It’s a writing method I don’t recall ever seeing before, and parents and teachers can be thrilled at this addition. This really is a book that teaches some solid life lessons through dogged determination. Sure, many of the lessons are self-focused, but come on—the dude was stranded alone on a desert island. Self is all he had. Well, Self and his cow-friend, Moo.

I’ll not steal Brooks’ thunder by listing the 36 lessons, but instead I’ll just note a few of the ones I highlighted so you can get a taste of what I mean. 

Without realizing it, I’d just learned something. Call it a mantra or a life lesson or whatever, but they were words to live by, and they’d be the first of many on this strange and wonderful journey: Never give up. (16)

The zombie growled back, saying what I’m sure anyone would have said to me at that moment, “Life’s not fair, and whining won’t make it fair.” (37)

Courage is a full-time job. (131)

the Five P’s: Planning, Preparing, Prioritizing, Practice, and Patience. And now”—I held up a theatrical fist—“Perseverance, which is just a fancy way of repeating my first lesson of not giving up!” (156)

Books make the world bigger. (176)

Discussion Questions (PDF Available)

Because we’re reading these book together and my kids won’t naturally engage in deep discussions about them, I created a short list of questions to e-mail them. Parents and teachers could use these questions too as they (hopefully) dig a bit deeper into the plot of the book.

Insights I got from my own kids’ response to these questions were the following:

• My daughter (12) felt her experience learning the video game was “different, because what we play is just a game. Like, if the character in our game is starving, we don’t feel it ourselves. And also, we could always get out of the game if we needed to or wanted to. Oh! And we could search things up on the computer to answer any questions, but he can’t.”
  
• My son would likely have named the things he saw in the game just like the character did (except he’d have called “black stone” for what it is, obsidian), though my daughter would have called mining “digging” and creepers “living bombs.” I prefer her descriptions.
  
• My daughter liked the book, but she added: “I didn’t like how he made it such a problem about eating chickens,” a sentiment with which I totally concur!

Conclusion

All in all, this was a fun, education read filled with life lessons and adventure. The inclusion of war against zombies, witches, creepers, and spiders might turn off some parents, but don’t let it. It’s very cartoony danger that makes “survival” more than just a need for food and shelter—it requires crafting weapons and armor and learning strategy and perseverance.

After my review of Contamination, you might think I’ve now a penchant for zombie literature, but that definitely ain’t the case—though I will admit that Max Brooks’ World War Z does look mildly interesting. That and The Walking Dead. But really, I don’t think I’m a fan of zombies. Or am I?

Next up in our Cousins’ Book Club is something a touch more innocent than anything zombie-related, The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright. My daughter I loved her enjoyable Thimble Summer, so we’re really looking forward to it!

©2025 E.T.