Despite the fact that I spend much of the school year fantasizing about the reading I'll do when I'm not forced to focus on the books I'm teaching that term, I sometimes get to the end of a semester and realize that there might not be a book in the world I can bear to read. I'll haul some tempting volume off my shelf, skim the blurbs on the back cover, open the book to page one...and that's as far as I get before the nauseated revulsion sets in.
Yep, once again, I've got it: reader's block. I simply can't bear to look at a page of print. It happens to me sometimes, particularly after a semester when I've assigned too many books, nearly fallen behind in my reading, had to struggle to make it through the many, many pages I've assigned my students.
The good news is that it will wear off before too long. And when it does, I've got plenty to keep me busy. In fact, here is my summer reading list, broken down by why I have to/want to read the works on it.
These are the books I must read for the first time this summer because I'm going to teach them this fall:
Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud
Judith Kitchen, ed. Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Calvin Trillin, Travels with Alice
Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
These are the books I must reread this summer because I'm going to teach them this fall:
Anne Carson, Plainwater (Carson is my favorite Canadian writer)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
Richard Wright, Black Boy
These are the books I must read because they're research for papers I'm writing:
Tony Kushner, Angels in America Part I and II (I know, I could watch the movie with Meryl Streep, but reading the plays won't take as long, and won't be as annoying)
Colleen McDanell, Religion and Popular Culture in America
R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion and the Marketplace of Culture
Carol Lynn Pearson, Good-bye, I Love You
These are the books I should read this summer so I can decide if I want to teach them next spring:
Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land
Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter
Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires
Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
These are the books I want to read this summer because someone I like gave them to me:
Da Chen, Colors of the Mountain
Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics
Scott Russell Sanders, Secrets of the Universe
These are books I bought recently and want to read while they're still exciting and new to me, instead of familiar volumes that have long sat, reproachful and resentful, on my shelves:
Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth
Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia
Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
I was going to list some of the familiar volumes I hope to read so they'll stop reproaching me, but that was WAY too depressing--there are just too many of them, and they don't come first.
Anyway, I think I can keep myself busy this summer.
HOLLY, I HAVE READERS BLOCK, TOO!!! I've had it for a while, but I don't have "book buyer's block," so my TBR list is mounting. I don't know what's up, but I CANNOT get into a any book whatsoever. I've been like this for about 4 months. I got Zadie Smith's "On Beauty," because I thought that book would cure me good. Guess what, I'm on page 40-something and the book's been sitting there for, like, 2 months.
Oh, actually, I picked up "100 Strokes of the Brush before bed" and - surprise, surprise, I'm enjoying this book a lot and it may very well be the one to break the spell.
btw, you have an awesome job. Every now and then I dream about going back to school and becoming and English professor. Take care, pal!
Ah, yes, I suffer “reader’s block,” too. I’ll lose patience too quickly with a book because my mind is searching and craving something else entirely…
“familiar volumes that have long sat, reproachful and resentful, on my shelves”
Love this line! But I think books are very forgiving and patient, as if they know we cannot read them until we are ready for them.
Man, I consider myself an avid reader, and there's just no way in hell I could even come close to matching your summer reading list, even if I really tried. It takes me 2-3 months to chip away at a book, although I do usually have 2-3 going at a time. I probably read only half your total list in an entire year, counting audiobooks too. But if you counted magazines, that would add up to a lot, although magazine reading involves a lot more skimming, and I never skim books, only read them thoroughly.
I won't hold my breath on you reading that novel ms. I e-mailed you... (I have several unpublished mss. I've agreed to read but never have too, since there's so much published stuff I want to read.)
Read short stories. Ones you've already read are very good. Read inattentively and solely for entertainment. READ FOR PLEASURE. Stay away from popular magazines and TV, which are depressants.
I've been there too, in the days when I had to read stuff and correct papers, so that reading became a chore instead of the great joy it usually is.
Well, that's all the prescriptive wisdom I have today.
My never-fail reader's block buster: take the book with you to the bathtub, run some nice warm water, and don't put any other reading material within reach. Get something nice to drink, put on soft, pleasant music, and tell yourself you only need to get through the first chapter. Get into the tub and start the book.
I found that starting was the hardest part.
Once I remarked to a colleague that I was taking [insert name of author here] into the bathtub with me, with a glass of wine, and her eyebrows shot through the stratosphere. "I didn't know [author] was in town!"
You could start some good rumors this way.
Reese writes, you have an awesome job.
I do. I'm pretty lucky. It's very cool to get paid to read books. It's not so cool, however, to have to read the papers students sometimes write about those books.
Frankengirl writes: I think books are very forgiving and patient, as if they know we cannot read them until we are ready for them.
I think you're right about that, FG--which is one more reason I love them.
Chris B writes, I probably read only half your total list in an entire year, counting audiobooks too. But if you counted magazines, that would add up to a lot, although magazine reading involves a lot more skimming, and I never skim books, only read them thoroughly.
Back before I was old enough to have a job during the summer, I would read two or three books a day during the summer--decently long books, too. I read pretty fast, and I like books, not magazines--I have a HUGE backlog of magazines I may never get to, and I have let lapse my subscriptions to pretty much everything. And I also never skim a book--in fact, if I'm reading them for school, I always underline or something, so I can find passages when I want to discuss them.
Hattie writes, READ FOR PLEASURE.
Good advice, Hattie. I had considered letting myself try to conquer this by rereading Pride and Prejudice.... Which reminds me: I promised myself I'd read Villette by Charlotte Bronte this summer!
Juti writes, take the book with you to the bathtub, run some nice warm water, and don't put any other reading material within reach.
Hmm.... I have completely given up the habit of reading in the bathtub, probably because it's too hard to underline a book in the bathtub. But if I'm reading for pleasure, I can skip that step, so this suggestion might work.
Take your blog to the tub and read this, no underlining required.
Blizzard
Oh, and I loved the post. And the title.
It's not so cool, however, to have to read the papers students sometimes write about those books.
A Separate Peace And Grapes Of Wrath: A Comparison
by A. Student
Since the dawn of time, people have wondered why the struggle for life, as exemplified in the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles and the novel The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck, is so hard. It is fitting, then, that the difficulty of the struggle for life is the theme of the novels A Separate Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
Both novels concern people, and what is more both novels concern people who are asking why the struggle for life is so hard. Steinbeck's novel concerns people who are traversing from a Dust Bowl mortgage farm into California, and Knowles's novel concerns people who are traversing from boyhood into young adulthood in a New Hampshire preparatory school. The Joads, in The Grapes of Wrath, are very poor, whereas Finny and Gene, the main protagonist characters that populat A Separate Peace, are not as poor, having had the good fortune to be able to afford the tuition for a New Hampshire preparaory school. Additionallly, A Separate Peace takes place in the 1940s, whereas The Grapes Of Wrath takes place ten years earlier, in the decade before the 1940s, namely the 1930s.
The Joads wonder why the struggle for life is so hard in that they have been evicted from their Dust Bowl farm in Oklahoma and had to travel with all their worldly possessions in an old truck across the dreaded Mojave Desert. In A Separate Peace, The character Gene wonders why the struggle for life is so hard in that he is jealous and in fact envious of Phineas's natural athletic and academic talents. It is obvious that this parallel plays up the common elements between the two novels, in that both sets of characters are struggling for life, and yet wonder why that struggle is hard.
What is more, the parallels show up in the differences between the two novels as well, in that despite the differences between the characters in the two novels, there are certain obvious human commonalities among them. Scholars refer to this phenomenon as "the human condition."
Although certain elements of the books were confusing to me, such as Phineas' speech before dying of his second broken leg about wanting to be wherever police are beating up hungry people, both books provide key insights into that human condition, whose key characteristic is that, to coin a phase, it is difficult in this life to strive for life. Both the Joads and Gene and Phineas do strive in like manner, and if they will ever succeed we may never know.
I don't know where you found that, Chris C, but that's pretty much what I mean. I wish I could laugh at it, but it hits a little too close to home: today I received a paper (I'm not making this up) comparing Night by Elie Wiesel to Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy by David Sedaris. The paper claims that the two works are similar in that they are both "honest" (which memoirs are pretty much supposed to be), but they are dissimilar in that one is funny and the other is about the Holocaust.
And this from a guy who is very upset that he's not earning an A.
Dale, I nearly froze to death in that blizzard you sent me. It's really, really COLD out there.
I don't know where you found that, Chris C
Oh, just whipped it up in a moment of what for lack of a better word I will call inspiration.
Oh, just whipped it up in a moment of what for lack of a better word I will call inspiration.
Well, I'm impressed. You could do a very good job of doing very poorly in any of my classes.
Been there, done that! Having a mediocre blog is much more my speed these days.
Sorry, but the blog is far too thoughtful and interesting to be in the same league as your faux literary criticism.
I used to worry that I spent more money than time on books. But I built a wonderful library, and even had the recent pleasure of culling from it the books for which I had no affection or honorable intentions. I used to joke that the same way dishwashers are machines we use to wash dishes for us, VCRs are machines we use to watch television for us. Luckily, I am not aware of a machine that can read for me.
I still own far too many books but very few sit on the shelves mocking me. I don't always feel the need to go cover to cover -- familiar books allow me short visits to choice pages. I've never had a reader's block (though my writer's blocks are prodigious, legendary even). If a book only allows me to get a couple of pages in before it tries to bore me, I allow it to do so. I may come back later, when the book is more forgiving of my short attention span. If it persists, then I figure it's the book's fault.
If a book only allows me to get a couple of pages in before it tries to bore me, I allow it to do so. I may come back later, when the book is more forgiving of my short attention span. If it persists, then I figure it's the book's fault.
Well, then, Spike, I can't tell you how flattered I am that you're a fan of my work. :-)
Oh, Chris. I have seen so many essays like this classic tripe in my years of teaching composition. It's so "good" that I thought it was on the level at first.
It has exactly five paragraphs. It's like an embryo with the germ plasm extracted. But it's not all bad. The flurry of confusion at the end indicates a stirring of life in the writer. There's some pretty colorful adjective use, too. "The Dreaded Mohave Desert," that just gives me goose bumps.
In my classes I would have given it a D- for the writer having done something, no matter how dim.
I'm retired after 30+ years of teaching. (Yes!) I'm sending this gem to my successor to peruse. She is always serious and dedicated, so she suffers greatly. A little satire might cheer her up.
Here's some doggerel:
Now I can laugh, I'm out of the fray.
Why, sometimes I sit around laughing all day.
Holly, this a wonderful blog. Don't go dissing it.
The blizzard was meant to make you laugh thereby keeping you warm. Silly me!
The blizzard was meant to make you laugh thereby keeping you warm. Silly me!
I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it.... Of course I laughed! But you gotta admit, there's something pretty chilling about Judith Krantz, even in a review that mocks her in all the ways she deserves.