Pre-summer Reading Post: Why?

If I weren't annotating, how long would it actually take me to blast through this?

Just Finished: The View from Lazy Point, Carl Safina (5/5 Stars)

Currently Reading: Education for Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire

On Deck: American Pastoral, Philip Roth

So far, I have had three “last days of school,” and I have one more to get through. My classes ended on June 9th. My school’s classes ended on June 12th. Scheduled exams ended on June 16th. The official last day of school is June 20th, and summer officially starts (astronomically and academically) June 21st. We’re getting about two full months off before faculty and staff return in August, and kids return the day after Labor Day. I’m working almost all summer, with two weeks off before camp starts and one week after camp ends. It’s not so bad; summer is my favorite season, even working.

During the second semester of the school year, I finished 50 books. I had a competition going with one of my students, who managed to read almost 40, and that was motivation enough during the year, but I run into a major issue during the summer in that my reading, maybe ironically, tends to drop off dramatically. I didn’t have this problem as a kid, where I often ended up reading more than most other kids in the summer reading programs. The only year it was a genuine problem for me was going into freshman year of high school. That year it was Robinson Crusoe, the Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and probably something else. Books that probably belonged in the main curriculum, but which for whatever reason were passed over for Great Expectations (ninth grade English selected almost only the worst representations of the literary canon). 10th grade was better, with The Once and Future King, Animal Farm, 1984, and yet another book that I can’t remember. 11th grade was only Outliers, and I know that I was supposed to read The Poisonwood Bible going into senior year, but was too busy reading literally anything else. Now, as an adult, as an English teacher, as a Humanities Department Chair, I can say, it would have probably been pretty interesting to put a text like Robinson Crusoe (astoundingly racist, exemplar of imperialist 18thc. British literature) alongside or against The Poisonwood Bible, but that didn’t happen then.

But now, I’m an adult who gets to choose her own books to read.

Last summer, I mostly wrote about movies. This year, I have a pretty ambitious reading goal: I’m hoping to have read at least 100 books, if not more, by December 31st, since, while the bulk of my reading has increased steadily every year, I don’t think I’ve done numbers quite like that since, frankly, middle school, when books are way shorter and you’re usually reading fast-paced fantasy or easily consumed young adult fiction. A problem I’ve identified is that it’s hard for me to read on vacations—I’m doing stuff or else trying to lay in the sun and not do anything—and that, as an adult, summer has meant, for me, getting home from work, taking extremely long walks around my area to maximize the vitamin D batteries in my body in preparation for the pain and silence of winter, and then going out with my friends to enjoy adult beverages and play basketball until very late at night (you might even call it morning) before rolling back home, crashing into my bed, and then waking up at 5AM to go for a morning run and do it all over again. Movies are easier to write about, especially if you’ve already seen them and are “speedrunning” them just so that you’re hitting the points you want to make correctly, since your brain doesn’t have to translate letters on top of symbols, just the symbols in the film itself.

As a comparison point for reading volume: before April vacation this year, I was on track to read over 120 books by December (math provided by my good friend, Jimmy D.). After April vacation, I slowed down significantly, and have only hit my book half-way point twelve days after the half-way point of 2023. Bad trends. Failure to make significant reading gains over the summer could really set me back, and might actually prevent me from reaching my goal, especially since during the school year, I’m anticipating being pretty busy! Writing about books and tracking my progress this way might actually give me the same competitive motivation as challenging my students to beat me did. (That being said, the competition was for them, too—I had an aggressively competitive group of kids this year, and being in competition with me did spur some of them on to reading more than they would have otherwise. They also made their own book club, so frankly, I’d call it a success.)

Why does it matter if I read 100 books? To be honest, it doesn’t. It’s an arbitrary goal, kind of like how my lifting goals are largely arbitrary (though if I’m able to squat double my weight by December, I’m going to be stoked). Some of it’s making up for lost time: there’s a lot out in the world that I missed, and while I’m never going to be able to read everything ever written, to have a bank of knowledge and to be able to pull from it matters to me, personally. I write. If I’m not reading, I’m writing in a vacuum. Susan Sontag, in the essay “Writing as Reading” (which can be read in Where the Stress Falls), makes the observation that “You write in order to read what you’ve written,” and that “Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by writing. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.” She goes on to be surprised when her friend, V.S. Naipul, says that he’s a writer, not a reader. There are a lot of points that I’ve come to disagree with Sontag’s arguments on (which I think she even came to disagree with herself over, too), but this is a point that I don’t. To be fair, I’m not reading as many novels as I am reading essays and nature writing these days, and Sontag is very clearly talking about the reading of novels in this essay, but I agree with her here anyway: to read is to want to write, and to write is to want to read. I like the generative nature of reading, and I like the ways in which to read is to be able to enter a conversation. The more I’ve read, the better I am at understanding what that conversation means.

So what is this blog, anyway?

• I’m planning to read at least eight books a month, and to talk about them. I haven’t decided if I’m writing, like, short analysis papers, like I would have to if I were reading these for a grad class, but that seems like a pretty real possibility.
  

• Record keeping/note taking: I want to remember what I read and what I felt about it, and how it applies to my own writing.
  

• Reflections on reading, in general. There are a few books that I’ll be reading specifically as part of curriculum development and implementation, and this might give me a way to work through my own thought processes in selecting those texts, especially so my students don’t end up reading something as shitty as Robinson Crusoe. I’m never getting over that—I don’t know that any other book I had to read struck me as being as powerfully wrong even without a foundational understanding of post-colonial studies (I was like, 14) as that book did. I cannot do that to kids.
  

• Practice: I have to keep my ability to write about and reflect on what I’m reading sharp.
  

• Motivation: I’m giving myself a fake reason to have to read the books, like giving myself an assignment over the summer. I tell my students I would never make them do something I wouldn’t do myself, and if I’m expecting them all to write about what we read, I had better be doing it, too.

Books will be linked to through my Bookshop affiliate profile, if anyone is interested in purchasing through it, even though I really only buy on Thriftbooks these days; their teacher discount is probably the best one out there. I’m still planning on writing about other things over the summer, too—and that might even still include movies—but this blog is aimed specifically at literature, books, and reading.