Summer Reading 5.28-5.31

I have been looking for a purpose/theme for the summer for the past few weeks. I know, it says something that I can’t just relax and enjoy it—but hardly any of us get ten weeks a year to play with and I don’t want to waste mine totally on naps and FB. So, besides the gardening and quilting, this summer I want to really focus on my reading… and by focus I don’t mean just spend time on it, but really think about how it is I choose the books I do and what the experience of reading is like for me. (I am also giving myself a daily page “assignment.”)

Why do this? Some of my colleagues and I have spoken this spring about getting our students to read more. And if you’re not a reader to start with by high school there are a couple major hurtles you have to overcome. One, how to do you find books you’re gonna like? Two, what do people actually get out of reading? I mean why do it? Why don’t readers find reading boring?

As much as I read, I’m not really sure how to answer these questions. Thus, this.

Book One: Olive Kitteridge—Elizabeth Strout

I started this book about a week before school let out and did a rather poor job of reading it. I mean, it was a book I read a couple pages here and there before falling asleep -- sometimes after a couple glasses of wine. I opened it on more than one occasion with the bookmark stuck in a completely random spot where it was when I konked out for the night. The only part of the book I read well was the last 100 pages or so—which I mostly read at my desk on the last teacher duty day of the year when I had to come in, but had nothing officially to do.

My description of this book was that it seemed like the sort of book I normally like—simple, country story with down to earth people, in the vein of Wendell Berry or Kent Haruf—but that I wasn’t that in to these characters. In part, that might be not only because of how I read the book, but because of its form. It’s a series of interconnected short stories that circle around the main character, Olive. Sort of like Winesburg, Ohio or Spoon River Anthology. By the end of the book, I liked it a lot better…almost to the point that I feel guilty for not reading the beginning better. [Right now, I’m finding it interesting how many other books I’m connecting to this book in trying to describe it….]

How did I choose this book? I bought it a few months ago at CostCo. I’d heard about it for a while, read reviews, knew it won the Pulitzer, but the form kept me from being interested in it earlier. There are very few short story collections I’ve enjoyed reading, which is weird because I love essay collections. Eventually, I got this book because it seemed like a book I “should” read, plus I am addicted to the book tables at CostCo and wasn’t really finding much else there that day. I chose to read the book this spring because it’s short and at the end of the school year I didn’t want to make a huge commitment.

Book Two: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—Steig Larsson

This book is in high contrast to Olive in a couple ways: one, I read it in essentially three sittings—the first of which got me through 350 pages. (Total decadence!) The second contrast, which is implied already, is that this is a book of 590 pages—a summer read—when I have hours to spare and can mentally tackle “big books.” In fact, I bought this book on Amazon (along with some others) the last Monday of the school year; they were my prize for making it another year and part of my transition into summer. The thought of their impending arrival kept me going in those last long days.

I bought this book, again in a way, because I felt it was a book I “should” read—not because of awards, but because so many readers I know have read it—the AP reader I trained with this winter, women at the English Standing Committee, friends, people I see reading in public…. I wanted to be part of the conversation. The night before I started the book a friend who’d read it told me she wished it had been shorter and that there were parts she skipped through in order to get back to the plot. I had this in my mind as I started the book, but that wasn’t really my experience. In fact, last night I told David that what I really like about this book are the characters—the plot itself is interesting, but like Dan Brown books, you don’t want to analyze the plot too much or you’ll ruin your experience of reading the book. It’s definitely been a fun, start-of-summer read.