Summer Reading

Let’s try to get some funner stuff out now.

I’ve started to keep a little reading log in my notebook; I’ll figure out soon enough whether that gets tedious or if it has any value. In the five days since I finished grading and all that fun stuff, I’ve really eased into my summer reading. By this time last year, I think I’d already finished two books.

Part of what has held me back, I think, is avoidance behavior: before school ended, I started One Hundred Years of Solitude, then put it on hiatus as June ended up providing much more work than it should have. In addition, on my initial summer reading foray into Barnes & Noble, I picked up War and Peace, and two shorter books, Love and Obstacles, a collection of short stories by Aleksandr Hemon, and Si, Puede, by Jorge Posada (yes, that Jorge; I’m trying to learn Spanish, and figure I may as well start with something a little easier than Almodovar).

To date, I’ve read a few of the Hemon stories, but I’m finding that reading them at once is not a great idea. I realize that there is a connectedness to the stories, from the crush Azra in the first to the Azra whom I might have known before in the last. But the stories of futility and awkwardness in the quest for love (and maybe or maybe not, sex, have given me a sense of same shit, different day. Even though the stories ring true, I’m not interested in going back to my own successfully repressed teenage years, even though Hemon’s narrator is a guy whose pursuit of women makes my seventeen year old self look suave by contrast.

I’ve also opted for poetry, starting with the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, which is designed to explore the connectedness of themes across time and place. Its introduction cites Ecclesiastes and it’s poem about time as the basis for so many echoing poems across so many different continents and generations. It’s a pretty cool concept when you’re interested in seeing how literature reflects a sense of our human nature.

It was fun coming across Cavafy’s “Ithaka” the day after Aubreigh Guynn used that poem as a guide for her senior reflection at graduation. As I listened to her speak, I felt myself getting more interested in the poem, and I think that Ithaka and I will share a relationship with future students going forward.

I thought that Garcia Lorca would be more instructive to me in my quest to learn Spanish, but what it did most markedly was point out to me the difference between the Spanish I was exposed to in college and the Spanish I’m learning now. So I stuck with his Brooklyn Bridge poem in English. It connects in a way with this nebulous goal I have of doing a Whitman thing to our pool, Westwood, whose middle class-ness strikes me as a thing too easily overlooked, and in need of celebration. There is a wonderful diversity to the middle class, while at the same time an adherence to core values. It’s a satisfying thing to behold But more of that later. Today’s resolution: back to Marquez, and no fooling around until I’m finished.