Summer Reading Part 1

This is what I think of the books I've read over the last 2 months. What are you reading? How do you like it? I want to know!


I enjoyed the second half of this book much more than the first, and I like the book more now than I did while I was reading it. Yeah, it’s a little tiring to read about high class Americans who simply eat, drink and socialize at Parisian and Pamplonan cafes for a couple hundred pages, but that’s the reality of a hedonistic life. Lonely, pointless, unfulfilling. Though this theme is central to the novel, I did begin to actually care about the self-absorbed characters and Hemingway ultimately developed a strong story to keep me turning the latter pages. My favorite section was when a couple of the guys left that fickle Miss Brett in the city and went fishing out in the woods for a few days.


I hadn’t read To Kill A Mockingbird since freshmen year of high school but remembered liking it very much. I wasn’t mistaken. It’s one of the strongest novels I’ve ever read and look forward to teaching it in the future. I’m amazed by Harper Lee’s ability to convey the characters’ maturation so believably in so few pages. The themes and symbols never seem forced, yet they’re as clear as the points in a Sunday sermon. I’d love to see aspects of Atticus in my fatherly roles.


Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of 24 short stories by Haruki Murakami. So far I’ve read about half of them and I’m a fan of about half of those. Really hit or miss. Some of it might be lost in the culture gap, but some of it might just not be very good. I do like Murakami’s style though, and he’s often hilarious. My reigning favorite is “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes” but I have a feeling there’s a bigger gem I haven’t gotten to yet. It’s like playing the lottery, except you get to bet 15 minutes instead of 15 dollars.


Before I had decided which novel to assign my second session summer school (alliteration!) class, one of my students asked if we could read The Outsiders. The school had a class set, so I took a survey which revealed that only 3 kids in the class had previously read the book, so that’s the one I chose. I didn’t know anything about the author when I started reading it, but about 20 pages in I thought, “This sort of sounds like a girl writing from a guy’s perspective.” Then I realized the author is indeed a female, and that she wrote the novel when she was 15. Ah-ha. So, it’s really impressive writing for a 15 year old. If one of my students turned in a bit of fiction like that, I’d piss my pants (after I thoroughly checked for plagiarism). Anyway, I enjoyed it, the lessons were worthwhile (though heavy-handed), and the kids were crazy about it. However, it should be read in 7th grade rather than 10th. I let them watch the movie on the last day of class and was pretty disappointed. Lots of people seem to love it, but the book is better without the visual influence.


Freakonomics was all the rage a few years ago, but I wasn’t interested. My brightest summer school student just finished reading it, however, and told me I should read it too. He leant me his copy, so I did. It’s definitely entertaining and some of the parallels Levitt draws are pretty interesting, but some are crap. For example, his data shows that there is a correlation between decreased crime and abortion. He proposes that this correlation may exist because unwanted or inadequately supported kids are more likely to become criminals. If these kids are aborted, they won’t become criminals and thus the rate of crime decreases. Last I checked, murder was crime, so whatever. My favorite chapter was about an ivy-league student who starts hanging out with a major drug-dealing inner city gang in order to study them. The stuff he finds out is fascinating.


This book is crazy powerful. It basically explores the human condition in a world where everyone stops caring about the Redeemer. Very quickly, the world essentially becomes hell. I don’t know what else to say about it except that it’s worth reading. Also, don’t watch the 1990 film version. It’s nothing like the book and awful, awful, awful.


This is the one I’m currently reading. I’m about 1/3 of the way through and it’s fascinating. If you’re not familiar, Oliver Sacks is a neurologist who writes about how the mind works by weaving in true stories of patients he has studied. This book is all about how music influences, and is influenced by, the brain. So far I’ve read about a non-musical guy who got struck by lightning and suddenly wanted to play the piano all the time (and was good), people who go into seizures when they hear certain music, people who are genuinely terrified of certain music, people who have musical hallucinations (where they regularly “hear” music playing when none is on), people who only hear terrible noise (like banging pots and pans) when others hear music, and people who have absolute pitch. Apparently 1 in 10,000 have absolute pitch, which means they naturally know exactly what note is played without even thinking about it. One guy talks about how when he was a kid he recognized without even trying that his dad blew his nose in G. People who have it say that it’s as easy for them to identify a musical note as it is for most people to identify a color. Anyway, I could go on and on about what I’ve read so far, but I can’t wait to finish it.