Christopher Street

Summer Readin'...had me a blast...

I have embarked on a summer reading project.

First, some background. I taught myself to read, somewhere around the age of 4. One of my greatest early frustrations was that no one believed me. No one believed that I could read--they all thought that I was memorizing the books. I don't know how well I would have done, at 4, with unfamiliar material--after all, I didn't know many words and most of them I learned from the books that I was accused of memorizing--but I can assure you that I wasn't just recalling from memory these words that meant so much to me. I was reading them. I had made the logical leap. I knew that the words on the page meant something. Better still, I knew what they meant.

I arrived in the first grade, therefore, pretty accomplished. I was insulted by the Dick and Jane books and soon moved on from those to bigger and better things. Real Books. As a child, as an adolescent, as a young adult, I would have categorized myself as an avid reader. I read all the time, in the car, at the baseball game, in the park, in hotels, in motels, in bed, in front of the TV, at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner. I marched in the band, and in those big, goofy, furry hats that we all wore back then, I usually had a paperback stuffed. Made it hard to balance sometimes, but guaranteed that I wouldn't be stuck with nothing to read.

Nothing to read. Until the age of 25 or so, there were no worse words. I would wager that I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 books between the ages of 5 and 25, maybe more. It feels like it should be more, anyway.

And then I stopped. I got lazy. Books seemed like work, suddenly. I had a life to lead, I had a husband to marry, I had grad school to attend, I had a few barrels of liquor with my name on them. I read the occasional mystery (usually around the holidays) and I would go through spurts where I would read for a couple weeks and then I would stop--for months. My book output dropped from 100 books a year to about, well...25? Granted, grown-up books are harder to read and take longer to finish than the Paul Zindel's that I used to rip through in a study hall. But still...I doubt that I averaged a book every two weeks, let alone 2 a week. I did watch a lot of TV, though, and I surfed a lot of Internet.

But it's summer and there's nothing on TV and I finished the Internet and I don't want to sit and just watch..dreck...just to watch it. So, I have embarked on a summer reading project. I have a reading list that I am working from, carefully compiled by pouring through 6 years of "Booklist's 'Best Of'" end-of-year lists. I have quite a bit of fiction, a couple of biographies, some mysteries (two new authors!), and a political book or 2 (actually, more like 6 but I don't know if I'll get through them all).The list is quite long, too long for a summer, and I don't know if I will read them all, ever, as some of them might turn out to be..you know, boring or poorly written. But, I am enthusiastic about the list, I see much promise in the list, the list is comforting to me.

I have read 6 books since Memorial Day, most of them from the list. I have read a couple of memoirs, and several Novels, one of some girth (Empire Falls, by Richard Russo). I am reading now Mallory's Oracle, by Carol O'Connell, a mystery, and am alternating that with a couple of NF books, one about race (Losing the Race, by John McWhorter and Stealing Jesusby Bruce Bawer). Next comes the second "Mallory" mystery, The Man Who Cast Two Shadows and maybe The Correctionsby Jonathan Franzen, if the half.com order arrives on time!

Just to close the loop,

Just to close the loop, my Grandfather died on June 3rd. It was peaceful; he went in his sleep and was never in much pain or suffered much indignity. I miss him dreadfully, but also think that it's probably for the best.