I envision that perfect summer days would look like this: I would rise, fully-refreshed, at 6 in the morning, and then head downstairs to put on a pot of coffee. I'd then take a "Friends"-sized mug o' joe out onto my back porch with one of the books listed below, where I'd stay until approximately 9 a.m. or so, at which time I'd retreat into the house to begin the day's activities of cleaning and, inevitably chauffeuring my children around to Camp I-Can't-Believe-This-Costs-$350...It's-Glorified-Recess. I'd take mid-day breaks from the monotony for 90-minute workouts at the health club in preparation for the unveiling of my newly-taught, age defying body at my 40th birthday party, then prepare a Weight Watchers-friendly meal on the bug-free and impeccably-gardened back patio before retreating to the living room or local multiplex for a TV show binge or film of the day before retreating to bed.
Ha ha ha ha...
Some of my fantasy can and will come true. I will be shuttling my kids to all sorts of camps, and I can have a book under my arm for those moments sitting in the car waiting for them. And you can bet your ass there will be coffee involved. But the rest? Well, if the first week of summer is any indication, it's not gonna happen. So I'll control what I can control, which is to attempt to sprinkle in some summer reading in between required preparation for the coming school year (see my last list). If time can even remotely permit, here's what I want to be reading for my own enjoyment...
1) "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson. I bought this book about a month ago when Atkinson came to Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville. I had not read any of her stuff before, though I'd heard of her and her strong fan base. Known for her unusual plotting, this book features a main character who dies in the first chapter at birth and then, in the second chapter, is born again under slightly altered circumstances and lives just a little longer, and so on. Recommended by Stephen King, I was sucked in to this book as I began reading it while waiting for Atkinson to make her book store appearance, then charmed by her visit. After being sidelined from reading by the end of the school year, this is the first book I want to read for my own enjoyment.
2) "VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave" by Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter and Martha Quinn. No joke... I have spent every Saturday for the past few months tuning into the Big 80s countdown on Sirius-XM's 80s on 8 channel. I swear that listening to this has had youth-restoring powers for me, and I'm so obsessed that I once forced my wife to remain in a parked car before entering a restaurant so that I could find out what was number one back in 1984 for that mid-May week. Though my incessant listening to the music of my youth, I learned of this work, a collection of memories by the original MTV veejays (rest in piece, J.J. Jackson), and promptly ordered my copy on Amazon. Can't wait to read it! This will be a fun, mindless escape for me in a summer filled with heavy stuff.
3) "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers. This book hit my radar months ago as I read reviews that called it the first great novel written about the war in Iraq. I tend to be a sucker for first time novelists, as I aspire to one day be one myself, and I have been excited to read this. Since that time, it's been added to our 11th grade English curriculum. And though I don't teach that class, I am eager to read this book.
4) "The Cineaste: Poems" by A. Van Jordan. Poetry about "Do the Right Thing," "Oldboy" and "Blazing Saddles"? Are you shitting me? This actually exists? Say no more...I'm in.
5) "Middle Men: Stories" by Jim Gavin. About "a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets" who "make valiant forays into middle-class respectability." The description on Amazon says that the characters in this book are "caught half way between their dreams and the often crushing reality of their lives." My favorite subject. This should satisfy my fix for Tom Perrotta-like suburban male fodder, my guilty pleasure. Or, perhaps, my underlying need, as I continue to gravitate toward works like this as I fight with my never-ending daddy issues.
6) "& Sons" by David Gilbert. This book comes out a few days before my birthday and when I read about it in a magazine (probably Entertainment Weekly), I immediately pre-ordered it so that it would just appear on my doorstep as a present to myself. John Irving, my favorite modern American author, is raving about this book, the story of a reclusive novelist who returns home to eulogize an old friend and sets out to repair his own relationships. I've seen it compared to Franzen and Irving, and I don't need any more information than that to know that it's a must-read for me!
7) "Superman: Red Son" by Mark Millar. Henry Cavill said that this was one of three graphic novels he used as inspiration for his character for "Man of Steel." What if Superman had landed on Earth in Cold War-era Russia instead of farmland middle America? The premise is too good to pass up, and I'll need something to temper my Superman fever this summer. I've just recently finished reading J. Michael Straczynski's "Superman: Earth One" and "Earth One: Volume 2."
8) "Life Itself: A Memoir" by Roger Ebert. Maybe, just maybe, I'm approaching a place where I can pick this book up again without sobbing after every fifth page in mourning for the loss of one of my heroes.
9) "Night Film" by Marisha Pessl. Because Entertainment Weekly told me to read it. And every summer, I read at least one of their recommendations. I'm not a big mystery reader, but this looks trendy and hip and shocking and cool. It won't arrive until late August, so I'll be following the buzz until it arrives.
10) "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo. I tacked this one on to the end of my list because I'm already about a third of the way through this book but it is so dense that I think I need to start over and try again, as I did earlier this summer with "The Great Gatsby." This book is actually on the approved list for my sophomore class but seems so dense and depressing that I'm not sure I'd be able to use it. One of my friends who read it says that Boo's depiction of Mumbai makes Kotlowitz's Chicago in "There Are No Children Here" look like Dubai. Depressing, but also amazingly researched and written, from what I've experienced so far.
For the record, I reserve the right to replace anything on this list with anything else that strikes my fancy at any moment, including the various books sitting on my Kindle app on the iPad that I keep forgetting about as I continue to purchase physical books with prejudice, and the weekly supply of DC Comics I pick up every Wednesday from the comic book shop down the block. In other words, don't hold me to any of this!
Thursday, June 6, 2013
My summer must-reads (and I mean that in the literal sense)
One exciting aspect of writing a new English department (well, okay, "Communication Arts" department) curriculum has been serving on the committee making the choices of everything from what district assessments will look like to the much more exciting decision of which books will be approved for each grade level to read. The process involved a tragic slashing of the dead white males of the literary canon, thanks to a modern belief that we should be teaching the skills, not particular works. I have strong feelings about that, knowing full well that kids aren't going to pick up Steinbeck just because they have the skills to do so, but I'll keep politics out of this particular post and focus on the task at hand, which is to tell you about what I'll be reading this summer.
The Common Core curriculum, as formed by the PARCC assessment team our district is following, requires that about half of the year-long curriculum be informational/nonfiction texts and the other half be fiction, including world literature. In other words, even in my year-long sophomore journalism class, I'll be teaching a minimum of two extended works of fiction. That will explain why most of what you'll see on this list is actually nonfiction, where I'll be placing greater emphasis and where I'll even be affording my students more choice at various times during the year.
1) "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr. I'm actually excited to read this one, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago and a work that I fear will confirm my suspicions that our kids don't understand research or even the concept of cheating today because of the convenience of Google. If I end up liking this book as much as I like the idea of it, I will probably end up teaching it next year.
2) "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach. Described by many as an odd choice for reading that you'll be surprised you're so engrossed in (and grossed-in) once you decide to pick it up, I've heard great things about this and have even witnessed reading-averse students stay engaged in this one.
3) "Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won" by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. Why do all nonfiction books have subtitles? In any case, this book looks like "Freakonomics" crossed with sports. I'm curious to see how it destroys my love of any games I currently love.
4) "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah. Color me embarrassed, but I never did pick up a copy of this one and read it, even as I brushed past it on countless Starbucks counters. Apparently my jonesin' for a grande skinny iced hazelnut latte won out over my desire to absorb the atrocities of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, but I will correct this amoral decision making in the coming weeks.
5) "Dead Man Walking" by Sister Helen Prejean. Not sure how I can escape memories of the fantastic film when I read this, especially when the cover of my copy has Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn on it, but I'm told that the book is actually quite different from the film, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this is the case.
6) "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich. As with "A Long Way Gone," this is already a staple work of nonfiction in school classrooms and a source of embarrassment for me, not having read it yet. It seems to me that it will occupy similar space in my mind to Alex Kotlowitz' "There Are No Children Here," and I'm already nervous that a lot of what I'll read will feel by now outdated, seeing as how this was written in 2001. But my 10th anniversary edition copy has a new afterword! So we'll see...
7) "The Fiddler in the Subway" by Gene Weingarten. I'm cheating a bit by putting this book on the list in the sense that I was the one who got the title approved for this class and have already read most of it, though not all. Written by one of the most fantastic feature newspaper writers in America, the two-time Pulitzer-winning writer for the Washington Post collects his favorite works here, including the piece after which this book is titled, a must-read for all people who believe in the power and beauty of the arts and the result of a social experiment conducted by Weingarten and violinist Joshua Bell, in which the virtuoso dressed as a peasant and played his Stradavarias outside of a D.C. subway station for handouts to see if people would stop to appreciate beautiful music. But just as good, I think, is his piece called "The Great Zucchini," about a child-party entertainer who takes spoiled kids off the hands of their rich and entitled suburban mothers for hundreds of dollars during the day and returns at night to his unfurnished apartment, his money sent directly to pay off his substantial gambling debts.
8) "One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko." One of the true masters of newspaper writing, period. I'll be fishing for pieces from this collection to use at various points during my class as I do currently with pieces by Studs Terkel, who wrote the forward for this collection.
9) "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil. This one is a reread. I originally received it as a gift from a student and was instantly drawn to its careful research and clear organization. I like the book so much that I got it approved for this year and am requiring all of my incoming sophomores to read it over the summer, so I'll be rereading it as well.
10) "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare. How do I teach the Scottish play in a journalism context? That's what I'll be working out in my head as I reread one of my absolute favorite works by Willie. Somehow, the connection between political deception and corrupt power struggles and the modern world seems ripe for the picking.
Now that I've written this, I must end with a question. How in the hell am I going to get all of this read?
The Common Core curriculum, as formed by the PARCC assessment team our district is following, requires that about half of the year-long curriculum be informational/nonfiction texts and the other half be fiction, including world literature. In other words, even in my year-long sophomore journalism class, I'll be teaching a minimum of two extended works of fiction. That will explain why most of what you'll see on this list is actually nonfiction, where I'll be placing greater emphasis and where I'll even be affording my students more choice at various times during the year.
1) "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr. I'm actually excited to read this one, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago and a work that I fear will confirm my suspicions that our kids don't understand research or even the concept of cheating today because of the convenience of Google. If I end up liking this book as much as I like the idea of it, I will probably end up teaching it next year.
2) "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach. Described by many as an odd choice for reading that you'll be surprised you're so engrossed in (and grossed-in) once you decide to pick it up, I've heard great things about this and have even witnessed reading-averse students stay engaged in this one.
3) "Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won" by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. Why do all nonfiction books have subtitles? In any case, this book looks like "Freakonomics" crossed with sports. I'm curious to see how it destroys my love of any games I currently love.
4) "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah. Color me embarrassed, but I never did pick up a copy of this one and read it, even as I brushed past it on countless Starbucks counters. Apparently my jonesin' for a grande skinny iced hazelnut latte won out over my desire to absorb the atrocities of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, but I will correct this amoral decision making in the coming weeks.
5) "Dead Man Walking" by Sister Helen Prejean. Not sure how I can escape memories of the fantastic film when I read this, especially when the cover of my copy has Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn on it, but I'm told that the book is actually quite different from the film, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this is the case.
6) "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich. As with "A Long Way Gone," this is already a staple work of nonfiction in school classrooms and a source of embarrassment for me, not having read it yet. It seems to me that it will occupy similar space in my mind to Alex Kotlowitz' "There Are No Children Here," and I'm already nervous that a lot of what I'll read will feel by now outdated, seeing as how this was written in 2001. But my 10th anniversary edition copy has a new afterword! So we'll see...
7) "The Fiddler in the Subway" by Gene Weingarten. I'm cheating a bit by putting this book on the list in the sense that I was the one who got the title approved for this class and have already read most of it, though not all. Written by one of the most fantastic feature newspaper writers in America, the two-time Pulitzer-winning writer for the Washington Post collects his favorite works here, including the piece after which this book is titled, a must-read for all people who believe in the power and beauty of the arts and the result of a social experiment conducted by Weingarten and violinist Joshua Bell, in which the virtuoso dressed as a peasant and played his Stradavarias outside of a D.C. subway station for handouts to see if people would stop to appreciate beautiful music. But just as good, I think, is his piece called "The Great Zucchini," about a child-party entertainer who takes spoiled kids off the hands of their rich and entitled suburban mothers for hundreds of dollars during the day and returns at night to his unfurnished apartment, his money sent directly to pay off his substantial gambling debts.
8) "One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko." One of the true masters of newspaper writing, period. I'll be fishing for pieces from this collection to use at various points during my class as I do currently with pieces by Studs Terkel, who wrote the forward for this collection.
9) "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil. This one is a reread. I originally received it as a gift from a student and was instantly drawn to its careful research and clear organization. I like the book so much that I got it approved for this year and am requiring all of my incoming sophomores to read it over the summer, so I'll be rereading it as well.
10) "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare. How do I teach the Scottish play in a journalism context? That's what I'll be working out in my head as I reread one of my absolute favorite works by Willie. Somehow, the connection between political deception and corrupt power struggles and the modern world seems ripe for the picking.
Now that I've written this, I must end with a question. How in the hell am I going to get all of this read?
Summer reads make me feel fine...blowing through the jasmine in my mind
I am never one to make my reading ambitions public, largely because I am a slow reader. I love language itself far too much to blast through paper wedges in an otherwise joyless effort to uncover plot details.
Case in point: In April, I decided I would read "The Great Gatsby" again in preparation for seeing the film. Thanks to Baz Luhrmann, my dirty little secret was out - the fact that I've been an English teacher for 13 years but had not read this staple of English curriculum since I myself was a junior in high school. That's right kids...never taught it, never touched it since a year that started with a 19. So I snatched my pristine and unannotated paperback from its spot on my office shelves prior to a flight to San Francisco in late April. "This thing isn't even 200 pages! Surely I will read it this weekend!" I told myself. To ensure that this would happen, I brought only one other book along with me.
The other book was the latest by comic essayist David Sedaris, called "Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls." And certain that it would contain copious amounts of wit and humor, the new hardcover all but vibrated in the bag between my feet as I sat wedged in my seat reading "Gatsby." Not 40 pages in, I turned to my traveling companion, a fellow English teacher in my department and one who does teach the novel on a regular basis, and remarked how I was shocked to discover that not much happened in the novel in the first three chapters. "Chapter four," she assured me. "That's when it all takes off." Distracted now by puffy clouds, snoring co-passengers in our airborne tube, and a nagging fear that I might not find "Gatsby" to be as charmed and wonderful as everyone else whose opinion I treasure, I stuffed the book in my bag and removed the Sedaris. I then proceeded to scarf it down in one sitting, laughing so hard out loud at times that I woke up sleeping passengers and drew attention to myself.
I returned home and shared my "Gatsby" failure with co-workers. The two teachers I work with whom I consider to be the biggest "Gatsby" experts told me to just start over. "It's well-written," I said, "but I don't feel like anything is happening!" Literary mojo, zapped. Web address to Spark Notes, typed in the browser and ready to hit enter.
Cut to the first day of my summer vacation. I get up to an empty house, brew some coffee, and sit down with "Gatsby" once more, removing the bookmark and slapping it on the coffee table. The film has been out for over a month now, and reviews have varied wildly. I'm sure to hate it now, I tell myself, but I'm still not going to see it until I've reread the book. And so it begins that the task of reading has become just that, a task. A job. A requirement. And summer reading should not feel like "a requirement." (If I haven't bored you yet and you keep reading, you'll see that, unfortunately, much of this summer's reading will be the result of "requirements.")
But this time, something magical happened. I took the first chapter as slowly as I've read anything, this time becoming deeply absorbed in the language, stopping only to slap myself for thinking that there was nothing happening in the early pages the last time I tried reading. Of course there was something happening! I just wasn't in the right space to receive it! To make a long story short, I finished "Gatsby" this morning, after taking the book in morning-reading chunks for four days. And best of all, I found it to be quite wonderful. I wanted to rush straight into a summer school classroom to discuss it, regardless of the fact that I would likely be the only one there who would have read it. I feel like a true English teacher again.
And not a moment too soon, because a challenge from my bestie over at Uncomfortably Numb to start hitting the keys for the summer began with her post about summer reading, a topic I met with dread because for the most part, this summer's reading for me will be mostly born of necessity, rather than the traditional summer raison d'etre, pleasure. This is because our school district has decided to wipe out its existing curriculum and start over, leaving me in the stressful-yet-oddly-exciting position of having a stack of books to read or reread in preparation for teaching them in the coming year. To further entice us, our district was nice enough to allow us to choose any ten books from our approved grade band list and provide us with new copies of them. Running into the department breakroom to pick up the books when they came felt like a robbery at Barnes and Nobel. It was a glorious moment, followed by the oh-shit truth of the matter - I have to read all of this!
So I'm providing two lists here, but I'm putting them in separate posts because I write too much! The first is a list of everything I have to read for my job in preparation for the coming year. They are not all books that I will have to teach, but they are all books approved for the new curriculum for sophomore English, and so I will either be teaching them or choosing from among them.
The second list is my "true" summer reading list...the one I have for myself. In between moments of required reading and catching up on movies I've missed, I hope to chip away at this list. Whatever I can't get to is going to stay there into the fall, I can assure you.
My journey as a reader can be summed up nicely by what I've written here. I have to be in a mood. I have to have multiple books going at once. I have to choose the flavor I want that day, or choose not to partake when something else holds more interest for me. I have to start pages over, chapters over, entire books over. All of my literary friends read circles around me. It's frustrating, but I have to accept it. If I didn't, I'd probably have given up on "The Great Gatsby" as a boring book in which nothing happens. And I would have lived secretly with great shame, not to mention some incorrect memories of how the book ends.
Case in point: In April, I decided I would read "The Great Gatsby" again in preparation for seeing the film. Thanks to Baz Luhrmann, my dirty little secret was out - the fact that I've been an English teacher for 13 years but had not read this staple of English curriculum since I myself was a junior in high school. That's right kids...never taught it, never touched it since a year that started with a 19. So I snatched my pristine and unannotated paperback from its spot on my office shelves prior to a flight to San Francisco in late April. "This thing isn't even 200 pages! Surely I will read it this weekend!" I told myself. To ensure that this would happen, I brought only one other book along with me.
The other book was the latest by comic essayist David Sedaris, called "Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls." And certain that it would contain copious amounts of wit and humor, the new hardcover all but vibrated in the bag between my feet as I sat wedged in my seat reading "Gatsby." Not 40 pages in, I turned to my traveling companion, a fellow English teacher in my department and one who does teach the novel on a regular basis, and remarked how I was shocked to discover that not much happened in the novel in the first three chapters. "Chapter four," she assured me. "That's when it all takes off." Distracted now by puffy clouds, snoring co-passengers in our airborne tube, and a nagging fear that I might not find "Gatsby" to be as charmed and wonderful as everyone else whose opinion I treasure, I stuffed the book in my bag and removed the Sedaris. I then proceeded to scarf it down in one sitting, laughing so hard out loud at times that I woke up sleeping passengers and drew attention to myself.
I returned home and shared my "Gatsby" failure with co-workers. The two teachers I work with whom I consider to be the biggest "Gatsby" experts told me to just start over. "It's well-written," I said, "but I don't feel like anything is happening!" Literary mojo, zapped. Web address to Spark Notes, typed in the browser and ready to hit enter.
Cut to the first day of my summer vacation. I get up to an empty house, brew some coffee, and sit down with "Gatsby" once more, removing the bookmark and slapping it on the coffee table. The film has been out for over a month now, and reviews have varied wildly. I'm sure to hate it now, I tell myself, but I'm still not going to see it until I've reread the book. And so it begins that the task of reading has become just that, a task. A job. A requirement. And summer reading should not feel like "a requirement." (If I haven't bored you yet and you keep reading, you'll see that, unfortunately, much of this summer's reading will be the result of "requirements.")
But this time, something magical happened. I took the first chapter as slowly as I've read anything, this time becoming deeply absorbed in the language, stopping only to slap myself for thinking that there was nothing happening in the early pages the last time I tried reading. Of course there was something happening! I just wasn't in the right space to receive it! To make a long story short, I finished "Gatsby" this morning, after taking the book in morning-reading chunks for four days. And best of all, I found it to be quite wonderful. I wanted to rush straight into a summer school classroom to discuss it, regardless of the fact that I would likely be the only one there who would have read it. I feel like a true English teacher again.
And not a moment too soon, because a challenge from my bestie over at Uncomfortably Numb to start hitting the keys for the summer began with her post about summer reading, a topic I met with dread because for the most part, this summer's reading for me will be mostly born of necessity, rather than the traditional summer raison d'etre, pleasure. This is because our school district has decided to wipe out its existing curriculum and start over, leaving me in the stressful-yet-oddly-exciting position of having a stack of books to read or reread in preparation for teaching them in the coming year. To further entice us, our district was nice enough to allow us to choose any ten books from our approved grade band list and provide us with new copies of them. Running into the department breakroom to pick up the books when they came felt like a robbery at Barnes and Nobel. It was a glorious moment, followed by the oh-shit truth of the matter - I have to read all of this!
So I'm providing two lists here, but I'm putting them in separate posts because I write too much! The first is a list of everything I have to read for my job in preparation for the coming year. They are not all books that I will have to teach, but they are all books approved for the new curriculum for sophomore English, and so I will either be teaching them or choosing from among them.
The second list is my "true" summer reading list...the one I have for myself. In between moments of required reading and catching up on movies I've missed, I hope to chip away at this list. Whatever I can't get to is going to stay there into the fall, I can assure you.
My journey as a reader can be summed up nicely by what I've written here. I have to be in a mood. I have to have multiple books going at once. I have to choose the flavor I want that day, or choose not to partake when something else holds more interest for me. I have to start pages over, chapters over, entire books over. All of my literary friends read circles around me. It's frustrating, but I have to accept it. If I didn't, I'd probably have given up on "The Great Gatsby" as a boring book in which nothing happens. And I would have lived secretly with great shame, not to mention some incorrect memories of how the book ends.
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