It has been a long time! The school year started and I entered the cycle of planning and grading that never seems to stop. It is important to step out from this ever-turning wheel and look around at the big picture from time to time and ask the important questions: Are my students developing as readers and writers? Am I challenging them? I try to do this by introducing them to new genres of literature and giving them a variety of writing assignments. We've also worked to develop our speaking and listening skills through Socratic Seminars. I won't go into all we've done this school year, but I've been wanting to document the rest of my summer reading after my previous post (from three months ago!):
Tenth of December by George Saunders.
George Saunders is one of my favorite writers. This collection of short stories is less bleak and dystopian than his previous collections. The opening and closing stories both feature two alternating narrators who have rich inner monologue and fantasies taking place in the midst of the real world action. It reminds of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the short story with the narrator who continually lapses into a daydream. Saunders has a strong sense of each character's voice; it is easy to tell all the different speakers apart. He writes with a healthy dose of suspense: in "The Semplica Girl Diaries," the reader doesn't realize what the Semplica girls are until well into the story. I suppose Saunders uses stream-of-consciousness narration to immerse the reader into the character's world with very little explanation. An extremely short two-page story describes a seasonal scarecrow a father habitually decorates throughout the years as a type of outsider art piece. His art eventually mirrors his own mental unraveling and despair.
Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
I wanted to think there were ten short stories in this collection but there are only nine. All of the protagonists are Native American and they all defy stereotypes, living in the modern world. The characters are lawyers, poets, basketball players, public speakers, drunks, and teenagers. I taught "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" to my juniors this year and they enjoyed it. I discovered some new insights to the story with the help of one of my classes during one of the above-mentioned Socratic Seminars. We tried to apply John Locke and Chief Seattle's theories of ownership to the story as well. All of the characters in these stories are searching for lost pieces of themselves. Alexie uses humor as medicine for sadness.
Love Medicine by Louis Erdrcih
So yes, I am trying to build up my knowledge of Native writers in order to properly represent Native people in the American Literature class. This novel follows a group of characters from several interrelated families between the 1910's and the 1980's. Readers see how the love interest from a character's teen years plays out decades, and even a lifetime, later. Readers also get to see radically different parts of a character's life: school, marriage, parenthood. Lastly, readers can see the same event through different eyes as Erdrich switches perspectives and narrators. This novel features Lipsha Morrissey from the short story "The Bingo Van." I think Lipshaw is my favorite narrator and he gives us a stunning passage when his grandmother dies unexpectedly and his whole world seems lose its center of gravity. This novel also features cars going into rivers and houses going up in flames, along with lots of secret love.
Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
This is a book my Mom wanted my Dad to read. She read it when she was dying from ovarian cancer. In it, a widower hires a housekeeper who is a beautiful young woman who brings her brother with her. The story takes place in Montana and the narrator is a school superintendent presiding over the closure of the one-room schoolhouses he once attended as a child. The narrator tells us about his childhood with his two brothers and father, who eventually marries the housekeeper, who turns out to be not quite who she seems by the end of the book. Her brother also has a secret past but is well-loved in the small rural community as the new teacher of the one-room school house, serving students in grades one through eight. He makes Haley's comet the center of their curriculum for quite some time. I think my Mom wanted my Dad to read this because she wanted him to move on with his life after she was gone. This book also has some spectacular passages that I would like to go into detail about later in this blog.
I also read Book Love by Penny Kittle, For Colored Girls Considering Suicide by Ntotzake Shange, and I re-read Fences by August Wilson and Twelfth Night by Shakespeare in preparation for teaching this year. I've been taking my time through The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin and I'm currently reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I hope I can finish it before she speaks at UCSB at the end of this month.
