Last week I drove past a suburban elementary school with a sign posted in front: “Have a Great Summer and Don’t Forget to Read, Read, Read!”

It reminded me of what an experienced teacher had told a group of parents, myself included, who had gathered in June to learn about the upcoming transition to first grade. “This summer, the best thing you can do to prepare your children for school is to snuggle up with them and read,” she said.

The message is loud and clear: Your children should learn to love to read.

But my third grader had a different message this summer that was also loud and clear. “I don’t like to read,” he said casually.

Snuggle up and be read to — now that he loves. But losing himself in a little chapter book is different. “No thanks,” he said when I suggested he choose a book from his summer reading list.

This too shall pass, I told myself nervously. So we snuggled up and read. We read several of the Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner. We read “George’s Marvelous Medicine” and almost all the other Roald Dahl creepy classics. We read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden.”

But as much as he was captivated by these books — especially the Roald Dahls — nothing hooked him. When I had to stop reading aloud, he was happy to grab a ball and throw it against the wall.

That is, until I came home from Borders one day a few weeks ago with “Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants”(Scholastic). It follows two mischievous class clowns, George Beard and Harold Hutchins, who have inadvertently turned their grumpy principal, Mr. Krupp, into a tighty-whitey-wearing, cape-bearing superhero. With help from the boys, he defends the world from evil characters such as the above-mentioned Professor Poopypants, as well as, in other installments, Dr. Diaper, the Naughty Cafeteria Ladies, and the Wicked Wedgie Woman.

The boys are constantly pulling off silly pranks, such as turning a sign that says,”Please Wash Your Hands After Using the Toilet” into one that reads “Please Wash Your Hands in the Toilet.”

When the boys have time to spare they make comic books about the adventures of Captain Underpants — comics in which “normal” is spelled “normel,” “principal” is “principel,” and “escaped” is “exscaped.” And words such as barf, butt, burp, and peepee are littered throughout the pages.

I had only read a few of the book’s short chapters to my son when my baby woke up from her nap. Jacob was horrified. I had to keep reading to him, he begged. Sorry, I told him, read it yourself.

And he did. Along with several other of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series, which have sold more than 25 million copies. I have, in fact, already ordered online the latest exciting adventure, “Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People,” which, after being released last week, quickly became the second-best selling book in the country on USA Today’s list.

The Captain Underpants series does have critics, however.

The American Library Association put the series at no. 8 on it’s list of “most challenged” books last year; the list includes books that received the most formal complaints filed with libraries or schools requesting that the books be removed because of inappropriateness. According to the ALA, the complaints filed against the Captain Underpants books cited the series’s “anti-family content,” unsuitability for the age group, and violent content.

The Riverside Unified School District in California and the school superintendent of the Maple Hill School in Naugatuck, Conn., for example, both tried to ban the series from the school library. Critics like these point out that the books are littered with (intentional) poor spelling, poor grammar, and inappropriate slang, and that they encourage practical jokes.

To those well-intentioned parents who have challenged their school districts to institute a ban on the Captain Underpants series, and to all those teachers and librarians who advise their student to stay clear of the flying wedgy wonder, I say: Lighten up.

When it comes to upholding literary standards, there are much bigger problems to worry about than Captain Underpants. Far more troubling is the fact that “Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People” is no. 2 on that best-seller list: It means adults aren’t reading enough, either. Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is no. 23, Elie Wiesel’s “Night” (Hill and Wang) is no. 27, and “Freakonomics” is no. 44. The fact that more Americans overall are reading about Captain Underpants than history or economics is far more ominous than the news that 8-year-old boys like to read about bodily functions.