Monthly Archives: July 2008

Business or Pleasure?

Posted by Jackie in media mentions, teaching

Still in that pleasure-reading drought, because I have been trying to plow through more lesson/course planning for my English courses this year. I’ve been plugging away almost all day today, reading a variety of poems and short stories and trying to figure out which will be the best to teach, and then making sure I have all the proper background and context information for those authors, highlighting all the literary terms I’ll need to explain for the students, and trying to schedule readings in a cohesive and illuminating order. In other words, I’ve finished rereading Their Eyes Were Watching God and have mapped out that unit pretty well so far, and chosen Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral as a short story to complement August Wilson’s Fences, our summer reading book. I’ve also mapped out my major assessments for the year and chosen which poems I’ll be teaching by Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. I need to brush up on the Petrarchean sonnet, revamp my Bible unit to allow for changing texts, draw up my course bulletin for the fall semester (the one with actual dates), work on in-class essay topics, and then go through my website and make sure it’s up to date for both documents and calendars. And that’s only for ninth grade!

Anyone still convinced teachers don’t work over the summer?

One of my regular sites to visit is Jezebel, an often irreverent, always honest take on current feminism, especially with a young slant and an eye on popular culture. On Fridays, they run a feature called Fine Lines, where Lizzie Skurnick and a small stable of guest bloggers revisit old young adult novels like Go Ask Alice (not the sexy kind, though, because those will be covered in their new feature Shelf Pleasuring). I’m always excited to see posts on books I read as a young girl, although I’ve never been interested in YA lit as a scholar– it’s purely fond nostalgia for me!

Recently, I was thrilled to read a guest post from Laura Lippman, a Baltimore author of some really great mysteries. If you like mysteries or Baltimore, I highly recommend any of her books, like No Good Deed, the one I read yesterday!

Checking It Twice

Posted by Jackie in teaching

While I certainly had quite a streak going, I’ve had to slow down my reading pace in order to focus on some essential teaching prep work for this fall. So today, I chose three new books for my fall class, and did some thinking and planning work for teaching composition and grammar fundamentals to my ninth graders this fall. As always, it can be strange to switch back and forth between two different modes of thinking and fields of material, but I’m really happy with the work I have accomplished thus far.

For the ninth grade, we’ve chosen a new textbook for teaching grammar and are working on a structured set of lesson plans for the year (we being a fellow teacher and myself). I also spent some time screening relevant Schoolhouse Rock videos that I think my students will enjoy!

For my university course, I’ve chosen three new books: The Wisdom of Crowds, The Cult of the Amateur, and Millennial Makeover. I’m really looking forward to teaching this class again, with new books and a better-designed final project.

Laureate

Posted by Jackie in authors, book reviews, poetry

Kay Ryan was recently named the new U.S. poet laureate, and while I’m not familiar with her work, the more I read about her, the more I like her. Her essay about going to an AWP conference is hilarious, candid and sincere, and she seems like a great role model for people who see themselves as outside the literati (though not a mentor, per her thoughts on the word in that essay!).

Reading list progress: finished Uses of Enchantment, which I continued to find somewhat disturbing, though incredibly well-crafted. It’s a strange experience to read a novel where the main character is both dysfunctional and still the most likeable, functional character! I don’t know if I would read it again, but the elaborate structure and shifting narration did make for an interesting read.

This week, I read The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon, another one of my favorite authors working today. This was an elegant little novella about an elderly, retired Sherlock Holmes who gets back in the game for one last mystery, and was full of Chabon’s trademark dazzling sentences. I also read Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, a great novel for anyone who has enjoyed Dilbert/Office Space/The Office but also full of resonant characters, great dialogue, and more than one scene that made me laugh out loud. Also, Ferris uses a collective third-person narration strategy that feels perfectly suited to the material, not at all the gimmick it could have felt like. Highly recommended! Last night, I read my third book for the week, Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang, who is both the first woman and the first Asian-American to head the legendary Iowa Writers’ Workshops. I had first heard her name when she first took leadership at Iowa (I think probably via Poets & Writers magazine), so was intrigued by her novel.

I have blogged before about my love of a great sentence and all the different ways a writer can wow me on the sentence level. I would put Chang closer to Marilynne Robinson than Michael Chabon as far as sentence-level brilliance goes: Chang’s sentences are often spare, elegant and provocative, and she has the same sense of placidity in her work as Robinson, though it is a placid surface that is often masking the deep disturbances below. I enjoyed Inheritance as well, though in the end, I didn’t find to be as deeply resonant as Robinson’s work (for me, at least– your mileage may vary, as always).

Tidbits

Posted by Jackie in authors, book reviews, writing

Summer reading progress: finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, am working my way through The Uses of Enchantment (the novel, not the Bettelheim classic) by Heidi Julavits. Never Let Me Go was a disquieting experience in that it deals with a subject (cloning) that often gets treated with dystopian pessimism or social-problem earnestness, which Ishiguro avoids completely. It’s really more of an alternative history of sorts, and raises interesting questions about the nature of humanity and love. More on Uses once I’m finished.

One of my favorite working novelists, Nick Hornby, has started blogging after giving up his five-year stint at The Believer (which coincidentally was co-founded by Julavits), which makes me very happy. In one of his entries, he links to this list of the “new classics” from the past 20 years or so, which makes me want to read all the ones I haven’t yet read on that list! Ambitious, I know.

And finally, I have a short news piece in the latest issue of ColorLines on reverse redlining by Wells Fargo here in Baltimore. Check it out, why don’t you, and if you haven’t read the mag before, you won’t be disappointed by their incisive coverage of all aspects of race and racism in American society.

Bookwormin’ Once Again

Posted by Jackie in authors, book reviews

People are often surprised when I talk about the amount of reading I do, even in times of great business like my life has been lately, as we renovate our kitchen, help my sister move, and juggle various amounts of financial paperwork. But for me, times of great stress and frenzy have always been the times when I need to read the most, because reading has always been my escape and my way of meditating, almost, when I need that the most.

So far, I’ve read three more books on my summer list: Almost Moon by Alice Sebold, The Whole World Over by Julia Glass, and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. I remember the Glass novel getting less enthusiastic reviews than her first novel, Three Junes, but I really enjoyed it, even the way that September 11th entered the narrative. I also remember reviewers being even less enthusiastic about Sebold’s, which is also her second novel, and there I did agree. While the dynamic between the mother and the daughter was creepily authentic to me, all the other relationships in the book did not ring true to me, which made the narrative seriously flawed. I enjoyed Acres of course, which I’ve read several times before, but found deeper resonance in now after seeing Lear so recently and really being able to appreciate how she turned each of the characters into the opposite of the original, but kept true to the narrative and themes that had inspired her.

I have made little to no progress on my writing though, but am forgiving myself for that!

Summer Reading

Posted by Jackie in authors, poetry, writing

So far I’m doing well with my summer reading list, aided and abetted by my recent decision to try library-going again.  I finished the anthology of love stories I blogged about recently, the newest Stephen King (thanks to jury duty), and am still absorbing a great new book of poetry by Mary Jo Salter. I was pleasantly surprised to find a few ekphrastic poems in her work, and an interesting poem written to Goneril of King Lear, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately since I saw it in London on my school trip. I think I’ll add rereading A Thousand Acres to my summer list!

Before my next workshop starts, I’ve been occupying my writing muscles with selected exercises from The Practice of Poetry, which is just as great as everyone I know said it was! If you are looking for some exercises to encourage you to try new forms, new structures, new subjects, or if you need help with writer’s block or revision, this is the book for you. I’m hoping my fledgling poetry group will be willing to try some of the group exercises once we start meeting regularly.