What do you most like to
read? (this could be a literary genre, or a type of material, like blogs,
magazines, etc.)
I most often lean toward
fiction set in a historical period and/or incorporates mythology or legend. The
historical period does not matter as much as the pull of the story, so I have
enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl and its
series by Philippa Gregory about England under the Tudors, The King Must Die and other novels of Mary Renault set in Ancient
Greece, The Mists of Avalon and its
series by Marion Zimmer Bradley about the legendary world of King Arthur,
Merlin, and the priestesses of Avalon. The best part of this particular series
is that Marion Zimmer Bradley tells the legends from the point of the view of
the women in King Arthur’s life, all very exciting characters of their own
(Bella Swan was not the first young woman to grapple with her own feminine
power while acting as narrator!)
I do also enjoy non-fiction.
I still feel accomplished if I read The
New York Times “Week in Review” on Sundays (it was a class requirement when
I was in High School; ironically, I sometimes get to read articles by a
classmate and friend who was editor of our H.S. paper and made his dream of
working for the Times come true).
I am often drawn to books
about organizing anything from my time to my brain to my closet, such as Julie
Morgenstern’s Time Management from the
Inside Out or encourage me to look at life’s circumstances from another
point of view, such as Kurtz and Ketcham’s The
Spirituality of Imperfection.
I enjoy biographies of people
who have overcome truly debilitating circumstances, such as the doctor, Jerri
Nielsen, who performed a biopsy on herself at the South Pole and discovered she
had cancer (Icebound) or the widow,
Lisa Beamer, who wrote a celebration of her husband Scott’s life and faith;
Scott was one of the Americans who fought against hijackers on Flight 93 on 9/11
(Let’s Roll).
I enjoy both fiction (such as Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, and
every conceivable Beauty and the Beast story) and non-fiction (scholarship by
Mike Oliver, Tom Shakespeare, Lennard Davis, Sharon Snyder and the like) that
deals with representations of disability in history, literature, art, or
society.
And, last but not least, I read what my
students tell me I “have to.” I figure I tell them what to read all year, they
can return the favor once in a while. I
have read every Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games novel. Although I like to tease, I really did enjoy
them!
Do you have a favorite
book/author/publication?
Different stages of my life
each have been marked by a different, favorite book read over and over
again: Right now, it would have to be
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South,
a story that reads like a cross between the work of Charles Dickens and Jane
Austen. In my college years, it was all about the drama, such as Shakespeare’s Othello and Euripides’ Bacchae (in the original Greek of
course).
In my high school years, it
was The Mists of Avalon (mentioned
above) and The Firebrand (also by
Marion Zimmer Bradley) in which the story of the Trojan War is told by the
princess Cassandra. Cassandra’s curse is that she can foresee the future but no
one will believe her. In middle school, S.E. Hinton’s Outsiders and J.D. Salinger’s The
Catcher in the Rye were like old friends I kept calling to visit. And in elementary school, and probably even
now, my favorite author was the poet Shel Siverstein, the creator of The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and
many other great reads.
What's the last great thing
you read?
I quite enjoyed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.
The narrator is a little boy who demonstrates traits of Asperger’s Syndrome
although he has never bee diagnosed. He is very bright and creative, but has
terrible difficulty with social interactions. He copes with the sudden death of
his father by taking on a mission that will lead him through every borough of
New York City in search of a message he believes his father left for him. It is
deeply moving, surprisingly funny, and utterly epic (and I say this as someone
who has studied Homer and Vergil most of her life). And it reads like a love
letter to the best city on the planet, New York, New York, my hometown.
Where do you most like to
read? Anywhere I can commit to
staying awhile: lying down in bed, belted in on a plane, hunched over a table
in a café or restaurant (especially if outside), plopped down on a blanket at
the beach or in a park.
When you were in high school,
did you like to read? If so, what?
My love affair with books
goes back further than I can remember. I
would covet them and collect them… but not read them. I almost hated the act of
reading in high school. What I know now
is that I was suffering from undiagnosed ADHD.
All I knew then was that I was often distracted when reading and felt
enormous pressure to finish complicated, often depressing, books for class while
keeping up the rest of my honors schedule. Reading for fun felt like a luxury I
had to sacrifice to be a good student. I still need to fight off the feeling I
am a bad teacher if I read for fun rather than grading on a weekend or an
evening, but I am getting better at finding a balance.
What is your most hated book
and why?
I despised Lord of the Flies by William Golding
when I first read it in the seventh grade. Even then, I realized that I was
just too young to appreciate it. After
all, where is the joy in reading about how a bunch of boys my age were left to
survive on their own on an island and start turning on each other. In college,
I picked it for a research paper because I wanted to give it another
chance. My paper (about how pigs and
poop served as symbols of the decline of civilization) was published in a
journal, so now all of my memories are good ones.
And I would like to second
Mrs. Dawson on Hemingway’s The Old Man
and the Sea. It was the shortest reading of the semester and I could not
bring myself to finish it!
