Yes! Time to start planning summer reading!!

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

Though it's Memorial Day, summer officially doesn't start for me until Monday, June 28th at 3 pm. Until then, I will still have papers to grade and lessons to plan, therefore unable to completely devote my time to the greatness that is summer, obviously including summer reading.  And even though I will be avidly reading up until then, there is something I love about planning my summer reading. Each year, though, I seem to make big plans and then books fall in my lap and the plans change--which is probably good for me, even though I have this grand vision that my summer can look like a literature class. I found an old post about my summer reading self--and it was interesting to get a glimpse into myself as a reader from a few years ago...I may have to re-imagine it at the end of this summer and see how I've changed.

This is random, but did you used to do the summer reading programs with your local library? I just had a major flashback to the Candy Land-style boards that the Centerville Library used to provide for children and we'd get a stamp for each book we read, winding our way down the paper path and filled with a sense of accomplishment. My mom would take my brother and I to the library once a week to update our reading piles and our stamps.  I forgot all about that. I think i would like a poster with a stamp per book.

Anyway. Here's my brainstorming session of the books I'm thinking about adding to my list this summer:

The New Literary History of America. This anthology takes the reader through American history via literature.  I am so fascinated by history and the way that it is portrayed through books, that I have been thinking about this book ever since I first stumbled across it in the winter. $50 at most stores, it is an investment, but has such potential.  I could probably carry this one book around with me all summer. Well, I mean that this could be my daytime reading book and then I could read fiction before I go to sleep each night. Downside=I'm travelling for the entire summer, so do I really want to carry around this brick? Should I relegate it to fall reading?

Mystery.  I seriously love mystery stories. Much like R&B, I forgot my love in high school and college.  My love of crime procedurals like The Closer was what motivated me to pick up the literary genre, which was limited to Nancy Drew in elementary and Mary Higgins Clark in middle school. Mystery books might be the most engaging genre, and then when they are well written? Swoon. Recent loves: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.  Summer picks: Continuing with Steign Larsson's trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire.  Also, in true Brooklyn style, one of my neighbors had books for free in our lobby, one of which was The Likeness, the follow up to In The Woods by Tana French, which has been on my list for quite a while.


Other options:

Nonfiction: Sloane Crosby's newest book of essays, How Did You Get This Number.  I laughed out loud so much in her first book, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and this one has come highly recommended as well.  Also, last summer The Shock Doctrine completely rocked my world.  I have another book by Naomi Klein, No Logo, sitting on my night stand (which is really a radiator. whatever.).

Rereads: Sometimes books just call to me and I need to pick them back up.  These two couldn't be more different: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (though I may cave and read this pre-summer) and The Waves by Virginia Woolf.  I read 8 of Woolf's books in a class in college and haven't picked her up since. The Waves completely floored me at the time and I am curious to see what I think of it now.

Fiction. I am pretty obsessed with Roberto Bolano (I fell in love with Amulet a few years ago and my book club read The Savage Detectives last summer).  A lot of his books have been recently translated and I've been looking at a few for months, The Skating Rink and The Last Evenings on Earth, especially.
Randoms include The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and Suite Francaise by Irene Namirovsky, along with 3 different books every time I walk into a bookshop.

So. I'm game for recommendations. I'll keep you posted on how it all goes.

Previous summer reading posts (for those of you who are extremely bored or just looking for ideas) can be found here and here and here.  And also here and here and here. It's interesting to see the books that have shown up multiple times because I want to reread them and the books that show up as perpetual sitters on my stack of books to read next.

3 Books. 1 Train of Thought.

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

I am reading All the Broken Pieces, set in the United States just after the Vietnam War, to my seventh graders.  For context, I've been teaching lessons on the Vietnam War and its causes, the atmosphere in the United States afterwards and asking students to think about war in general. The main character is a Vietnamese boy, Matt Ping, who has been adopted by an American family. The book is in verse and one of the metaphors that Matt uses is that freedom is the color of his toddler brother's red shoes on the swing.  When I asked my students what they thought that meant, I was blown away by their understanding that demonstrated a (newfound) awareness of the world outside the safety of childhood. In response to the metaphor, a student said that freedom is the ability to live without the burden and weight of the knowledge of things like war.

This came after I realized that my reading life has been inundated lately with the question of how we are meant to live in light of what we know to be true and good. This question is never far from my mind, but I've found easy to hide from.

I am finally reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which is the story of Chris McCandless: his disdain for modern American culture and his journey across the country and eventually to his death in the Alaskan wilderness, a place where he sought out true existence off of land, inspired by the trancendentalists and Tolstoy and Jack London, completely away from all that society has become and all the ways it burdened him.

Krakauer writes of Chris' love of London: "He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness."  I guess this is the struggle that exists between idealism and realism, which is incredibly frustrating.  The question always becomes how are we supposed to live in a world that is so broken and seems to worship all the things that don't have true value?

Krakauer includes the following quote before a chapter describing Chris' reasons for deserting the lifestyle he was raised in: "To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and rxiles. Here the leaders of the great religious have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality." (Paul Shepard) McCandless was seeking the same kind of exile.  A fiction character who embarked on a completely different kind of exile is John Andrew Corrigan of Let the Great World Spin: 

"Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where he was supposed to go. He stayed where he was needed. He took little or nothing along. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery...What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties."  Corrigan was a secret man of faith--who left Ireland to live in the Bronx, bought coffee for the prostitutes he befriended and owned next to nothing. Like McCandless, he gave away almost everything he acquired. But unlike McCandless, he sought out beauty in the people the world forgets rather than in solitude and nature.

So. What all this translates into in my mind is how are we choosing to live?  It is far too easy to slip into patterns that try mimic glossy advertisements and mistake things for reasons for being.  When I read of people like McCandless and Corrigan (though fictional) I always wonder how they live out of such unselfish ideals.  Though, my favorite part of the book is how Corrigan poetically and painfullly grapples with his and humanity's fallenness...and I suppose that it will always be just that: each day making choices for the things that really matter.  Stepping out of the conditioned false securities that we cling to.  Having the courage to be a bit unconventional. 

All that said, I highly recommend all of these books.  

on finding kindred books and getting lost in them.

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

"I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot." 

For this post, I opted not to go into coming of age, falling in love, the making of villains or a well developed mystery.  I opted not to study characters. Rather, this post is more of a space to catalogue some of my favorite parts of a recent favorite book. 

For quite a few months, I looked at The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon every time I went into a bookstore. The back blurb promises a historical setting and a mystery (a literary genre I have recently remembered that I love, though my ability to log incredible hours with CSI, The Closer, Law and Order, Lie to Me and Bones should have been the first clue) among other things you'll read about below.   But since I currently have no less than 20 in my apartment that I haven't read, I obviously have no business buying new books.  My lucky day occurred when two of my high level readers actually requested that I buy it for my classroom library. Done. And read it immediately.  Sorry kiddos.

Some books are a commitment: you go into reading knowing it's going to be work, but worth it.

Other books are entertaining. Others offer new perspectives. And some are kindred. 

Usually I reserve the work kindred who the few souls in the world who love the same things I love, whose hearts break over the same things in the world, who derive joy from the same pastimes. But while reading The Shadow of the Wind, I realized that books can be kindred, too: stories that hold so many loves of my life within its pages that it is impossible to put down and tragic when it ends.  

Why this book is kindred:

1. It takes places in Barcelona.  Sigh. That city stole my heart last August and I loved that I could picture all of the streets, that I understood references to Las Ramblas, Els Quatre Gats and Tibidabo (sigh).  I love that the characters lived in the neighborhood where I stayed.  ("This city is a sorceress, you know, Daniel? It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing it," page 480.)

2. This is the first line: "I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time."

3. It is a book about people who love books: "Bea says that the art of reading slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day." 

"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."

4. It is a book about a book that changes people: "Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return."

So. I hope that you find a book so worthy of getting lost in.  And if your name is Alison Covey, you should probably visit your local library right away and borrow this particular book right away.  

More on why I love poetry, and/or: I told my students I'd write a poem.

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

ELA State Test=done. Winter=over.

It. is. time. to. teach. [and live in] poetry.

I realized that I haven't written poetry on this blog in a long time.  (It typically comes up a lot, mine or someone else's.) I think that poetry's disappearance aligns with winter and state tests and the process of moving or any of the other crazy things that have stolen my time.  If you've been reading lately, I'm finally beginning to notice beauty and the small details again, which is perfect for teaching this unit and what drives my own poetic voice: I just want to uncover what we miss way too often, and I love how poetry can capture teeny, fleeting moments that would otherwise disappear. I love how the choice and arrangement of words can so much more than lengthy prose can sometimes.

Roberto Bolano has become one of my favorite authors. He considered himself a poet before a novelist and I love the way he describes what can be attained in the shortest kind of literature: "The novel is an imperfect art. It may be the most imperfect of all literary arts. And the more pages you write, the more possibility there is of revealing imperfections...It isn't the same to build a house as it is to build a skyscraper..." Bolano knew the precision and control that could go into a poem; but, as with any piece of art, the control only exists until you hand it over to a reader.

Anyway. I'll probably be writing much more on poetry in the weeks to come. And please, don't judge too hard: it is almost my bedtime and this one hasn't been through a proper round of revision...and oh, how I believe in revision (and writing first drafts in near-prose and whittling away).

smashed in the swinging bathroom door,
one could feel my pulse
in the square centimeter of
my middle finger's nail.

sometimes I wish the rest of the hurt
could feel so pronounced and even
so nearly vomit inducing
because

after some ice from the school nurse
and just an hour or so
it all went away and i forgot
it ever happened.

the small details which are actually huge.

I'm beginning to re-remember that the best things in the world are not something I can grasp onto with my hands: though the handful of pink spring petals I swiped from a windswept pile on the sidewalk the other day comes pretty close.  I was on the verge of finishing The Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins as I was watching them all float out of my hand and had a realization that they were evidence of things unseen; the ache of beauty and springtime right in front of me.


 It is a book intricate in its details and rich in the scientific and literary research that must have been compiled for the layers of meaning inside.  It was a book that rambled through its words so slowly and deliberately that at times and I wanted to put it down, despite my love of poetic language. But as I reached the end, I found myself wishing I had a professor telling me to go back and trace the repeated references and symbols, to stop and look at each of the characters and what they represent in its historical setting of the New Deal, the Atomic age and the Tennessee Valley Authority. And, to trace the evidence of things unseen, which is translated differently throughout the book.  Sometimes it is the mystery of science: atoms and light, and sometimes it is the mystery of life itself: love.

I loved how tiny, seemingly insignificant details, like springtime details in Brooklyn, provoked such deep emotion within the characters: "...in a narrow cubicle behind a curtain were her things, all neatly folded. When he bent to lift her shoes he was so unaccountably overcome with grief he had to lean against the wall to compose himself.  Her shoes, he realized, triggered the emotion.  The fact that they were empty, that he so rarely touched an article of clothing of hers she wasn't wearing. And her shoes triggered the memory, sudden, clear as daylight, of the first time he had seen her, the first time he had seen her footprints in the sandy track that led to Conway's furnace and the house she'd lived in."

It just breaks my heart to read that and realize that such tiny details can reveal the depth of the human heart. I need to keep watching for them.

a story about time, and. unapologetically, a story about love.

March was filled with two weekends of packing and moving, a favorite friend in town, the annual trek to Washington, DC with students and no internet at home for the past week. But. I am now moved in and attempting to have a normal-looking life again.

That being said, I've finished some books since I last typed on here: Lost Illusions by Balzac, Special by Bella Bathurst, Until You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  I have dreams to backtrack and write about them all in the coming weeks since I've skipped out on my Saturday morning ritual for almost two months.  Hate that. We shall see. I most recently finished The Time Traveler's Wife, so I will start there.

I started out reading this because I wanted a quick, engaging read for spring break.  Many evenings were spent reading well into the morning. Henry is a time traveler who is not able to control when or where he goes.  In his twenties, after he meets Clare, his wife, he begins to travel back to her childhood.  Therefore, Clare always has memories of Henry, but Henry does not have memories of her until after they have met in real time, but is able to go back to other times of their lives with the perspective from the future (and yes, despite my Lost-watching, time travel is a difficult concept to wrap my mind around.)  Time and love are the two major themes I considered while reading.

Time is a funny thing that I can't stop thinking about lately, especially the relationship between time and self. When Henry visits from the future, young Clare isn't the same as the Clare in his present. When he meets 18-year-old Clare, he misses the depth that is the 33-year-old Clare. It is interesting to think about how time changes us and how it happens without us necessarily realizing it until we step out of it.  The core of me is the same, but I have changed so much in the nearly seven years I've lived in New York.  Though I can't plot out the exact moments that changed me, it is interesting to track our own stories of becoming...and to realize that I don't want to go back to my 23 year old self, as uneasy as I am to turn 30 this year.

I find myself always skeptical and sometimes cynical of saccharin literary love stories.  Because of the popularity of this book, I carried this attitude into my reading, but as it turns out, Henry and Clare's love story was beautiful in its complexity and imperfections and passion.

Time travel worked as a metaphor: in the present time Clare and Henry face incredible loss and it wears on their marriage.  Henry though, is able to revisit the times in their relationship when poetry was personified and was able to remember why love is worth fighting for.  I think that this concept is often lost on many of my own generation: things get difficult and the overriding belief is that it's easier to quit than to work through it--be it a relationship, a job, a dream. Remembering the good and true can completely change one's perspective.

What impressed me the most--or maybe what I connected to the most--about Niffenegger's book was her incorporation of poetry into the most emotionally charged moments.  I am a firm believer that poetry can encapsulate any moment better than prose or conversation or dialogue.  I am most often drawn to modern  and post modern poetry, but I was completely wrapped up in the verses from Homer's "The Odyssey" that Niffeneger leaves the reader with:

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea. 
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
(translated by Robert Fitzgerald)


I could write about this excerpt from the Odyssey and draw comparison's about travel, difficult journey's and hardship, but I will spare you (unless you want to come over to the new apartment for a book talk, please do). But in a rare moment in which I will not apologize for waxing romantic, or in the back of my mind judge myself for being saccharin (because its not a good idea to mock the Beautiful) I will say this:  the idea of having a person as a metaphor for home, the idea that through all of the hardships there is someone who will fight for you and wait for you, someone who cares about where you are and who you are and whose eyes will light up the minute that they see you, that is a beautiful thing.

Finally beginning to feel at home.

Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
-Pablo Neruda, from "Forget About Me"


It's funny how life changes affect your ordinary rhythms of life. I started selling my furniture on craigslist in mid February, and since then I have felt like a bit of a nomad. As much as I think I would sometimes like to be a wandering traveler, the truth is that the concept of home is one of my anchors in life: whether it is the house I grew up in and its Bradford Pear trees and hill in the front, or my family's weekend rituals Saturday eggs and toast and newspaper reading, or my need to have a space carved out in my apartment that reminds me of the things I love and who I am.

It took me a full two years of living in New York City to feel ready to commit to it as home; to stop thinking about where I was going to be the next year and to let some of my newer roots reach out and grasp onto life here.  The trouble is that I'm living in my 5th apartment in New York, my second in Brooklyn.  Each time I've moved, I have attempted to make my new space feel like home as quickly as possible, my current studio is no different. Today is the first weekend morning where I have sat down to engage in my old rhythms that make me feel at home: making tea, listening to good music, reading and writing.  It's funny how it makes me feel like a person again and how these small little things finally make me feel at home.

I wrote about this nearly a month ago: looking forward to when I would be able to start the rhythms that keep me sane anew.  This week I made it to Prospect Park a few times in the evening to "look for the secret things in the world," as Neruda would say, to find the things that move my heart.   Because sometimes it feels like a storm has passed and nothing of beauty avails, but. When I open my eyes and breathe and look for the secret things, I find them. And breathe deeply.