Another marking period past, and this one had its share of great reads: 13 books! Unlike last marking period, fiction takes the prize this time with eight titles, and nonfiction at five. I think poetry’s in order for fourth marking period, and perhaps a play, too. Here’s my list, in order of most to least challenging:
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg
Lit by Mary Karr
American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales
The Road to Character by David Brooks
Overloaded and Underprepared by Denise Pope, Maureen Brown and Sarah Miles
Morning Star by Pierce Brown
The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak
Between Us and the Moon by Rebecca Maizel
Reflections on My Reading Life:
It’s okay to LOVE a character and only LIKE the novel. The narrative arcs of Between Us and the Moon and Career of Evil weren’t my favorite, but I really loved the two main female characters, and that kept me reading. I found the development of their characters far more satisfying than the denouements of both novels. City on Fire was one of my favorite books for its entire cast of characters, but it didn’t particularly “end” well. All of the characters’ lives fit together; they connected, but everything didn’t pull all together nicely in the end. That’s a tradeoff I can live with, though.
It’s okay to love the craft of the writer even if you don’t love other aspects of the writing. Science fiction? Not my genre, but finishing the third novel in the Red Rising series gave me an appreciation for Pierce Brown’s incredible talent for plot construction and character development. Was I able to keep track of every character’s family tree, the planets, the galaxies, the castes? Um, no. But I really didn’t care about that. Other readers totally would.
Character counts! My nonfiction reads this marking period were centered around the problems I see my students navigating on a regular basis. Stress, sleep deprivation, college admissions mania, social media addiction, digital distraction and much more. I’m a stakeholder in their character development, and books like Overloaded and Underprepared, American Girls, and The Road to Character all help to inform the instructional (and parental) choices I make.
Finishing a challenging book feels better than finishing an easier one. It’s taken me all year to finish How to Read a Book. I would put it aside after some eye rolling, then delve back into it, then get exasperated at the pomposity of its tone and put it aside again. But in the end, once I had finished annotating hundreds of pages, it felt good to have finished it and to have made the book my own (and said goodbye to the pontification).
Being a connected reader makes a difference! Reaching out to authors on Twitter and Instagram isn’t just nice to do -- it’s need to do. Shortly after reading American Girls, I read an argument written by one of my female students about the impact of social media on girls. I shared her blog post with the author, Nancy Jo Sales, asking if Sales might also comment on the blog, and she did! She provided the student with practical strategies and resources, and it was a great example for all other students reading that blog post.
I like big (audio) books and I cannot lie. My official page count for this marking period is 5418, but the pages read sitting down would be 1206. I don’t often think about the page count so much as I consider the hour count. City on Fire was 911 pages and 38 hours. Those hours passed much more quickly than the pages might have if I were reading it as a hard copy book. I’m much more likely to select a lengthy audiobook and listen to it immediately than I am to stare longingly at the hard copy on my nightstand. That's just torture!
As I round the home stretch, I’m looking forward to lots of reading time over the summer! Any and all suggestions welcome as usual.
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