The Joys of Summer Reading

Let me upend an established fallacy right now: as an English teacher, I have very little time to read. Popular opinion seems to rest in the camp that feels as an English teacher, I must be so thoroughly devoted to reading that I have the time and inclination to read not only the classics, but also all of the current entries on the NY Times Bestseller List. So let me again put his notion down. I have very little time to read. In fact, during the school year, the only reading texts I can claim for my own are the loads of student essays that are generated out of my AP and English 12 classes. Well, that's not entirely true. I do get my weekly New Yorker, but, I confess with a certain amount of shame, the book and media reviews come right after the cartoons on my mental reading list. I usually can get those pieces of the magazine done by, say, Wednesday of a typical week, which leaves me a scant few days to sink into the more meaty offerings. But a novel? For pleasure? I think not.

That said, I enjoy summer simply for the fact that I can devour leisure reading books without the requisite guilt that is attached to in-semester reading, and this summer was exceptional for the quantity and quality of the books I managed to read. Aside from a joyous (well, perhaps an exaggeration) re-reading of Wuthering Heights, a text I use with my AP English Literature class, I also read Wicked, Lost, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, all by Greg Maguire. I have to confess that these, too, were part of an AP summer assignment where my students had to pick one Maguire text, and, being the teacher, I tried to devour them all (I came up two short: Son of a Witch and Mirror, Mirror), but the effort was well worth it.

But beyond school summer assignments, I also read John Grogan's Marley and Me, a must for all dog owners, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust, a Booker Prize winner set in colonial India. Both are quick reads, with Marley being a light memoir that makes you smile as you quickly flip through those pages, and Heat being a bit more meaty, with its dual narratives of love and adultery each wrapped in the exotic Indian countryside. Both are good reads, and Jhabvala's book qualifies as a modern classic, for all those looking to assuage their snobbish sides while beach reading.

But the big find of the summer for me was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, short listed in 2004 for the Booker Prize. This text, six inter-connected stories that comprise a novel, all resonate with the themes of loss, connection, death, and hope. They are put together like a set of nested dolls, with the first half of the first story abruptly stopping to make way for the first half of the second story, and so on. The sixth story, a post-apocalyptic tale which creates a world both strikingly familiar and weirdly strange, is told in its entirety, and, when it finishes, the last half of the fifth story picks up in medea res. As each story ends, and you make your way to the last, which is really the first, story, your understanding of the world Mitchell envisions becomes ever clearer. Suffice it to say, this guy can write! His grasp of story and language is so acute that his leaps from genre to genre, and he does leap from 18th century journal to 19th century epistolary text all the way to the above mentioned post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure text, are seamless. He does it all without blinking an eye. It's a wonder he's not better known in America, but I think he probably will be soon. His latest book, Black Swan Green, is on the list for this year's Booker Prize, as well!

It has been a great reading summer. The combination of quality and quantity has really been a plus for me, and I've discovered books and writers that I really enjoy. That's what summer reading is all about, right?

Now just don't ask me how the writing has been going.