Good Reads

Taking a break from young adult literature, I ventured back into the adult realm over the summer and remembered why I teach reading: because I really like reading books. Duh. 

As a reading teacher, it’s easy to get caught up in leveled assessments, vocabulary trackers, test scores and homework (in)completion.  Devouring a lot of amazing, thought-provoking books on my own was a welcome respite (hearkening back to the selfish English major years) and reminder that it’s important to take a step back from all that and teach kids why we really read: because reading is fucking awesome. Only with fewer expletives. 

With that mind, here’s some of the good stuff I read this summer:

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan: This genre-defying work spans the lives of an interconnected cast of characters brought together by themes of music and time (“time is just a goon”).  The book includes a 60-page PowerPoint presentation created by a young girl living in the California desert, a sexy African safari, a sci-fi look at New York City in a decade and a public-relations-motivated journey to an anonymous former Soviet country.  Egan is known for creating subtle characters that leave a major impression, and she lives up to that reputation in her latest book.  She takes a risk and allows those characters—typically quarantined in San Francisco—to travel the word and meet up with each other in ways that are smart and never contrived. 

Solar by Ian McKewan:  In his most recent novel, McKewan accomplishes something rare: a comedy about climate change.  Though an inherently serious topic, McKewan tackles global warming through the eyes of his pathetically hilarious protagonist—a pudgy Nobel-Prize winning physicist who’s been married five times over and has a serious weakness for potato chips.  The novel is meticulously researched—but never pretentious—and confronts something we’re all thinking about through a witty character study.  In my mind, nothing can live up to Atonement, but this book is a unique take on something important that also happens to be pretty damn funny.   

Other People We Married, by Emma Straub: I met Emma Straub in the Brooklyn Bookcourt in July and she gave me some pretty great advice about writing.  In return, I bought and read her elegant collection of short stories. Now, I stalk her at Trader Joe’s—just kidding. The stories are character and relationship-driven and involve people who are all a little bit unsure of what it is, exactly, that they’re looking for.  The stories involve missing cats, attractive graduate students and dissimilar sisters.  Like many of the greats, Straub makes ordinary things unordinary things with precise, graceful prose.

How Did You Get This Number? by Sloane Crosley: For a while now, Sloane Crosley has been my hero.  There are many women in their twenties who live in New York City and write cynically about their existence, but very few do it well; Crosley nails it. Her writing has a simple lyricism that pervades her self-deprecating, cynical outlook and makes her stand out in a saturated genre as someone you seriously might want to get to know.  Crosley finds truth and humor in the everyday and reminds readers that we’re all in this crazy city together, just trying to date normal people, live with normal roommates and take normal vacations.  Somehow, I relate.

Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich:  Louise Erdrich is my favorite writer and, like my friend Jason told me a few months ago, you get double lit points for reading a Native American Woman (doubly disadvantaged and not afraid to write about it).  The novel follows the passionate romance of an artistic couple trying to raise children in Minnesota post 9-11.  Though the book does not take place on an Indian reservation like most of her work, Erdrich infuses her most contemporary novel with her signature mysticism.  Shadow Tag is relentlessly dark and really pretty twisted, but if you’re in the mood, by all means…

Lit, by Mary Karr:  If good memoir depends on good pain, Mary Karr is absolutely deserving of the three memoirs she’s written.  Lit is the follow up to her first memoir (The Liar’s Club) and chronicles her mostly unhappy life from college to the present day.  She confronts herself through the diverse roles she plays: writer, reader, mother, lover, alcoholic and finally spiritualist. To take the easy way out is to simply promise that Karr’s writing is evocative in a way that defies description and just asks to be read (in fact, most sentences deserve to be read twice).  Her memoir is about how we deal with the undealable, how we confront the unconfrontable.  Karr tackles her pain and shares her story with the unique grace of a literary Texan.  Seriously, read this book. 

While I would lose my job if I recommended any of these books to my students, the point is that I love reading and happen to have 75 incoming kids who will be forced to stare at my face and listen to me speak for an hour every day come September. Power trip. There are many things I need to accomplish next year, but if I keep sight of reading-lust, I have a feeling things might work out pretty well.