Summer Reading 6.1-6.16

Officially in the midst of summer. So far, I’m still pretty darn close to the 100 pages a day constraint I’ve given myself. I don’t know if I’m learning anything yet about how to get kids more involved with reading, but I am starting to discover some things about how I get to the books I do…

Book Three: The Invisible Bridge—Julie Orringer

In my post about Olive Kitteridge, I said part of what hung me up on this book at first was that it’s structured like a series of short stories. To totally contradict myself, the reason I chose Invisible Bridge is because I read Orringer’s book of short stories several years ago and there is one that has really stuck with me, so when I read in the NY Times book review that she was coming out with a novel, I bought it as part of my summer reading pile.

The first part of this book I found really intriguing. It’s 1938 Hungary and the protagonist, one of three brothers, gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to study architecture. This plot line continues for about the first half of the 600-plus pages. As a reader, you know what is about to happen, but the character is so wound up in his own worries and triumphs, that he is mostly ignoring the collapse of Europe that is happening around him. I think of how this is true for me. I am doing my best—though for different reasons—to ignore the BP fiasco in the gulf. Sometimes the scope of a disaster is so immense and horrifying that you feel powerless in the face of it, so mentally crawl into a hole. It’s not exactly right, and certainly not useful, but part of human nature, I think, all the same.

Obviously, the second part of the book deals with the horrors of the Nazis in Europe, specifically Hungary. It is hard to describe the experience of reading holocaust stories –Orringer bases this novel on the experiences of her grandfather and great-uncle. Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and that certainly applies here. Still, there is something so eerily similar in all holocaust stories to me. I almost dread reading them for that reason—and maybe that’s the way it should be.

Book Four: The Girl Who Played with Fire –Steig Larsson

Yep, this one’s good too. A bit slower in the middle than the first one, but still excellent. It’s so interesting to me to read 1,200 pages of crime/thriller books in the past couple weeks, since I don’t know anything about this genre. I wonder if I will read others now, and how I would find them. I guess this is getting to part of the reason for the blog—when you don’t normally read this type of book, how do you find others that are just as good?

I finished it on the plan to WI and as we were landing I realized the woman across the aisle was reading the final book in the trilogy and when I asked her if was as good as the others, she said she hadn’t been able to put it down. There is something to be said for 600-plus page books that average readers can plow through in 2-3 days.

Book Five: The Elegance of the Hedgehog—Muriel Barbery

OK, this was the wackiest little book I’ve read in a long time. It alternates between two voices, distinguished by font. One is the too-educated concierge of a hotel and the other a rich, precocious, depressed twelve-and-half year old who’s planning her suicide. (Her voice is a lot like the protagonist of Sophie’s World.) I picked this book up after a friend said she was supposed to be reading it for her book group. We were in Standing Committee at the ESC, and I was planning on stopping at Barnes and Noble on the way home anyway to use up a gift certificate, so that’s how this book ended up on my bookshelf.

It is a book built for English teachers. Both characters are obsessed with literature and punctuation (one of them nearly has a breakdown due to a misplaced comma) and grammar. There is a whole section about the importance/power/beauty of excellent grammar that I think is going to be making an appearance in AP Language next year. I wouldn’t submit most students to this, but the AP Langers discover this sentiment as we go and it’s amazing to find such a lovely articulation of it.

Next on deck: The Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks. I don’t know how it is that most of the books I bought for my summer reading list are over 600 pages, but, here we go!