Summer Reading

The list so far...

The Screwtape Letters
The Stranger
A Long Way Gone
Ishmael
The Alchemist
The Whole Five Feet
The Known World
Evil in Modern Thought
The Girl With The Pearl Earring

RescueTime

What a waste. I downloaded the program RescueTime a while ago to monitor where I go when I'm on the computer. I never check it, most frequently because I already know where I go and I'm ashamed of it. Until right around now, I had forgotten about my first year in Gainesville when my internet and television habits were out of control.

I should read more. I think after I finish Ways of Seeing I will need to pick up an easy novel. A novel besides The Sound of Waves? Insanity.

Grad school is starting again next week and I'll have plenty to read there, but it's Diverse Whatever Edu Psycho etc.
If you can't read the title, squint. Yes, it's called Adolescence. I can't wait. I hope it's written in diary entry format.

Ways of Seeing

Good day today. Did some interesting reading while riding the train. I had read an essay from John Berger's Ways of Seeing in college, but now working my way through the whole text.

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relationships between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. (47)


It's interesting to read this in tandem with Annie Leibovitz At Work.

Comparison Shopping Around

Here's what my reading list has shaped up to be so far. Only the first two titles have stayed from the original list. The rest were added along the way. It's a little narrative of my experience in June:

Picasso's War- Russell Martin
Shopping For God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to in Your Face- James B. Twitchell
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin- William Logan
Slaughterhouse Five- Kurt Vonnegut
If On a Winter's Night A Traveller- Italo Calvino
Iron John- Robert Bly

To Read:
The Odyssey- Homer
Grendel- John Gardner and Beowulf- Anonymous
Yes, I am putting this off because I don't necessarily want to think about teaching. But it's the second phase of summer now, so I suppose these will be next.

New Additions to the "To Read" List:
The Alchemist- Paulo Cuehlo
The Bird Catcher- Marie Ponsot
How Fiction Works- James Woods
The Two Kinds of Decay- Sarah Manguso
The Echo Maker- Richard Powers and/or Atmospheric Disturbances- Rivka Galchen
Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists- Susan Neiman

Blog Fodder?

Eric finished his first year of teaching, and I finished my first semester. Insanely, it feels unsettling to me, but I think I was learning a lot and feeling more myself in the classroom when the year abruptly ended.

This is kind of boring, but here's my summer reading list. I figure I need a place to record this so I can actually try to read what's on my list and not forget about it. I get distracted easily by eye-catching covers at the library.

In no particular order:
Picasso's War- Russell Martin

The Odyssey- Homer
My students from this Spring are going to be ashamed of me for not having read this before. But my freshmen in the Fall won't know the difference when I teach it to them. Can you believe I made it through all of my higher education without reading it? Or that I never had enough personal interest to read it myself?

Shopping For God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to in Your Face- James B. Twitchell
Still reconciling my many feelings about Christianity, religion, spirituality. The branding of faith has always made me queasy. I wanted to read this last summer but didn't get around to it.

Grendel- John Gardner and Beowulf- Anonymous
Also for the 9th graders. Also never read them before. I'm ashamed.

The Last Happy Occasion- Alan Shapiro
Hoping that to re-read this will be to stimulate my writing. We'll see.

When Kids Can't Read- Kylene Beers

Any volume of poetry that excites me. It's been too long.

Anyone have something to thrust into my hands as a must-read? I'll add them to the list. And maybe since it's summer I'll blog more. Or maybe I'll have nothing to say.

Update: I forgot America America by Ethan Canin. I loved Of Kings and Planets.

Pedro, Oh Pedro

Pedro Paramo is one of my favorite books of all time. There, I said it. And I'm so pleased to have proof from Jim Lewis at Slate.

Let him convince you to read it the novel because he's quite eloquent about its intensity and depth: "[It] is built on an intricate lattice of time and space, but it doesn't seem planned so much as grown, something natural, inevitable, efficient, and effortless. All its paradoxes are innate. For example: It's the most morbid book I've ever read, since all of the living are dead; but it's also one of the most vivifying, since all of the dead are still living."

I'll have to admit that this book was assigned to me in high school, so I discovered it less at the behest of a friend and more at the requirement of my English syllabus. But let me scream it from the blogosphere that I LOVE THIS BOOK! READ IT! (in case your English teacher never made you). And if you do, I might even let you see my exquisitely dark copy accompanied by a local artist's photographs from a small bookshop in New Orleans.