Summer Reading, 2011

First day of Summer and my 25th wedding anniversary!
     Our family will be going out to Provincetown in July and up to the Berkshires in August for our Summer vacations this year, so it is that time of year where I start to plan for my own Summer Reading:

     First off I plan to read Malcolm Gladwell's books The Tipping Point and Blink. I recently completed Gladwell's Outliers, which I could not put down. Outliers is, essentially, a debunking of the prodigy myth. According to Gladwell, there are no prodigies or outliers beyond the norm--anyone and everyone can become an outlier as long as a few circumstances fall into place. Perhaps the simplest example of this is his '10,000 hour rule.' Anyone can be an expert or a Mozart or The Beatles if you practice what you do for a total of 10,000 hours.
     Gladwell is my favorite New Yorker writer. He is articulate, interesting, copiously read, and he writes in a direct, breezy style that is at once informative and fun to read. I highly recommend anything by him--even the things I haven't read. The following is his website: http://www.gladwell.com/index.html . Trust me on this guy.
     A few must-reads are some books for my AE-9 class: How I Live Now (Meg Rosoff), The Killer Angels (Michael Shaara), and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie). I know nothing about these books, but I will get them read as part of the job. I have read all the books for my AE-12 and WL-12 classes, and can highly recommend at least three:  

• Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger is a story about a season of the Permian High School football team in Odessa, TX. It's a good read, though he bogs down quite often in detail and minutiae. 
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is an absolute must-read--don't settle for the movie; the book is much better--about an Afghan boy's searching for his place in the world during and after the Taliban's taking over in Afghanistan. Some of the scenes are brutal and graphic, but it's great everything: literature, history, story, characters . . . everything. Read it. Today.
• The Tiger by John Valliant is a fascinating story revolving around a man-eating tiger hunt in Siberia. I'll let the author tell you about his own book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE-w1K4LCyw . Again, I couldn't put this down. You will know more about tigers than you thought was possible to know, and you will come away awed by the power and influence of the world's apex predator. A potentially great beach read.

     I tend to like non-fiction rather than fiction, and I thoroughly enjoy going through a New Yorker front to back, but I reckon in preparation for my classes I'll revist a few of the following classics at least in part: Beowulf, Romeo & Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird; and a few shorter works to get the 9th graders thinking about symbolism: "To Build a Fire" and The Pearl.
     So please read some of these books--let me know what you think, and maybe let me know what I should add to my list; but don't tell me to drop Beowulf--the book rocks . . . enjoy the Summer and enjoy reading.