Summer Reading 2017

Younger me would never have stooped to reading anything but fiction or literature over the summer. As a student, of course, I spent much of the year reading what people told me to (with the caveat that I had some control over the classes I took). Summer was a time to read exactly what I wanted, which was a steady diet of classics and pulp like a literary salad.  No biography—who needed real people when imagined ones were so much more interesting, and no non-fiction—does that even count as reading? 

Now in my mid-40s, the reading lists are changing.  There’s plenty of fiction, but more of it is modern (gasp—even contemporary—by LIVING authors), and I spend my days making connections from them to the past texts they make use of. And I am gratified that we keep re-using the same tropes and heroes.  There’s a Young Adult Odyssey, for instance, called Love in the Time of Global Warming (a double homage—playing on Garcia-Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera as well) by Francesca Lia Block, as well as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Carsten Jensen’s We, The Drowned, which also feels reminiscent of the Odyssey.  We really can’t go forward without looking back, and all those years reading old stuff is paying off for me in spades.

What’s more interesting, perhaps because I didn’t see it coming, is the non-fiction.  How much, after 22 years of teaching college English, I appreciate a well-wrought essay.  How endlessly interesting the world is, right here and now, without going to Narnia or Middle Earth or the forest of my beloved fairy tales.  How compelling research about the brain is, both for how I can teach better, and how I can learn better.  It’s a big world, and I’m grateful for the time to give more of it my attention.

This summer’s reading list is a hodge-podge, then: 

1.       Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors because I haven’t read enough of his short fiction.

2.       Al Franken’s Al Franken, Giant of the Senate because I’m more political than ever, and        that means I really need a laugh.

3.      Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever because I’m determined to keep learning languages, and     I can’t afford to move to Europe for five years.

4.      Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad because just because I talked about it doesn’t mean I’ve       read it.

5.       George Orwell’s A Collection of Essays because damn, that guy could write.

6.       Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain because apparently I now enjoy nature writing.           Who knew?

7.       Georges Perec’s A Void because any novel written without a single ‘e’ must be quite            something.

8.       Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower because John Green recommended it some time       ago and I’ve never gotten around to it.

9.       Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies because they are the basis for so much, and because his    imperfect knowledge of Latin gives me hope.  Best find at Kalamazoo this year!

10.    Italo Calvino’s Palomar in Italian, because that is the point of learning Italian.

More will trickle in (certainly some murder mysteries, which are my pulp of choice), and some may well fall out.  But that is the way of summer, as I experience it.  What’s on your reading agenda?

“I’m going on an adventure!”

This spring I’m on sabbatical. It’s my second, and I continue to have mixed feelings about it.  Especially during finals week, when my charming students are their most charming, fussing mildly about whether or not I’ll be at graduation.  This sort of thing compounds my regret.  That, and I really miss teaching. 

But I’m going on an adventure.  It’s not a literal journey--that was last weekend, when I dragged everyone out of bed at 5:00 on a Saturday to drive three hours in to the desert to see the Superbloom at Anza-Borrego State Park. I’m often kicking my family into that sort of adventure.  Let’s drive a thousand miles to Yellowstone! Let’s take a train to Seattle! They’re lucky this weekend was only a day trip.  But it was beautiful. We took lots of pictures, and we took a long look at what happens when the best circumstances happen in the least likely of places.

My sabbatical will not be that kind of adventure, though.  I’m not going to London to work in the British Library or to Paris to look at Unicorn tapestries, or even on a journey to the Lonely Mountain, like Bilbo Baggins, whose quote I stole for my title.  I’m going on an entirely mental adventure; the farthest I’m planning on is a café with wifi and good tea, and maybe a library or two.

I’m starting by giving myself the gift of reading some books I’ve been putting off.  It is the eternal plight of the English major never to have enough time to read what we want to.  I do have the enviable position of assigning books I want to read for class, but that does take away a little bit of the self-indulgent delight of reading something just because it’s cool. On my bookshelf next to the comfy chair, there is a modest pile that will prime the pump, as it were, and put me in the mood for writing my own fiction. 

Then the real adventure begins.  I have great plans.  Finish one book, write supplementary teaching materials and a book proposal, and start the reading and drafting for the next one. It’s a good time to start a new project, what with the world waking up and showing its most brilliant colors and tempting us to believe things can be more beautiful than ever we thought.  I hope it inspires you to do something brave too!  Happy Spring!