What and Why I Read

The beginning of my 2018 to-read list: These came back from America with me in my suitcase after Christmas break!

I have not always been an eclectic reader. The summer after 2nd grade I binge-read all the Nancy Drew books that my neighbor owned. For the next couple of years, I read mostly stories about horses and Indians. (One of the morals of this story is don’t be concerned if a young reader in your life appears to be single-minded in his or her taste.) As an adult, I grew an appreciation for nonfiction that I never had as a child. 

When I started teaching world lit 13 years ago, I realized my training had been almost entirely in British and American lit, so I set a goal of reading an author from at least one new country per year. When I read Penny Kittle’s Book Love four years ago, I realized I needed to broaden my horizons to YA lit to know books to connect to the interests of students who weren’t immediately enthralled by The Brothers Karamazov or even The Chosen. 

(Did you know that it only takes one “home-run” book to transform a reluctant reader into a reader? And consider that a person who avidly reads Captain Underpants may eventually read Pride and Prejudice, but a convinced non-reader never will.)

So bit by bit I’ve expanded my horizons. Every year I try to read a variety of genres and topics, to expand my knowledge of classics as a literature specialist, of world lit as a global citizen and a teacher of global nomads, of new books as a practicing reader, of pedagogy as a teacher. I read to discover books I will love and books my students will love. (Sometimes those are different, and sometimes they are the same.) I read to challenge myself to learn and grow, as well as to allow myself to have fun and relax. 

My Goodreads Challenge tells me that in 2017 I read 74 books for a total of 22,328 pages. Here’s a sampling of the highlights from a variety of categories: 

• Nonfiction: Evicted. Hearing Matthew Desmond’s stories of people living in circumstances more challenging than any I’ve ever faced, with little or no safety net, gives me a greater understanding of some of the complexity of issues of poverty in America and increases my empathy.
• Historical Fiction: Pachinko. Reading Min Jin Lee’s history of four generations of Koreans in Japan deepened my understanding of many of the Koreans I’ve known over 30+ years of living in Japan.
• Contemporary Realistic Fiction: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is another great novel from Fredrik Backman, the author of A Man Called Ove. The beginning of the book sets up the main character’s relationship with her grandmother, an eccentric old woman who nurtures the individuality and gifts of her 7-year-old granddaughter while the harried mother pursues her career. It starts with a bang in the emergency room of the hospital after a clandestine midnight visit to the zoo. Then the grandmother dies, leaving her granddaughter a quest that will eventually bring the child a deeper understanding of herself, her grandmother, her neighbors, and the meaning of community and compassion. 
• World Lit: Blindness. A tough, raw, weird read from the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, Jose Saramago, but I think it may haunt me forever. A Lord of the Flies-esque commentary on human nature and society as a mystery epidemic of blindness begins with one man and sweeps through the country.
• American Lit: East of Eden. Wow. I’ve read John Steinbeck before, but it was never like this. An intriguing tapestry of characters, themes, and patterns woven with style that ranges from dry humor (“She had a little round head full of little round ideas”) to lush description and a scope that ranges across the continental US and several generations. My favorite character is the Chinese cook Lee, who demonstrates a pretty sophisticated understanding of code-switching for 1952.

• YA Lit: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Speaking of code-switching. I loved this book—coming of age in a modern black family trying to negotiate loyalty to community, desire for justice, and pursuit of dreams.  
• Fantasy: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I was just really excited that I could recommend a new favorite to a student devotee of fantasy whose most damning evaluation of a book is “predictable.”
• Christian: In Emotional Healthy Spirituality Peter Scazzero gives a concise summary of many of the lessons I’ve learned over the last 30 years of reading mentors like Henri Nouwen and Ann LaMotte. I’d like to think that “emotionally healthy” and “spirituality” would be redundant, but we humans seem to have a proclivity for twisting ourselves into unhealthy knots, so this is an excellent primer or reminder, wherever you are on this journey. 
• Graphic Novel: March 1 - 3. Since I was born at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, for my education, it dropped into the gap of too-recent-to-be-history-and-too-distant-to-actually remember. I heard names, places, and events that I knew were associated with it, but I was too embarrassed to reveal my ignorance by asking about them. This graphic novel autobiography of John Lewis really pulled them all together for me. And it’s pretty cool how the frame story is the black congressman preparing to go to President Obama’s inauguration.
• Children’s: First 100 Trucks and Things that Go. Well, if not my favorite children’s book of the year, it is definitely the one I read the most times, thanks to my 16-month-old grandson’s obsession with cars. 
• Professional: Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools. I read other books that gave me specific classroom practices I can use to improve my teaching, but overall, this is the goal, and I absolutely loved this book that builds on Ron Ritchhart’s earlier book, Making Thinking Visible.
• Favorite Author: Hannah Coulter. Many years ago, I loved Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. Hannah Coulter was my first read of the year, a parting gift from my mom since she read and recommended it shortly before she died in September 2016. It’s just as beautiful and compelling as Jayber Crow: the value of a life well-lived, however hidden and ordinary, in a community well-loved (and every “hidden,” “ordinary” life has its own times of testing, choosing, joy, and sorrow). 
• Mystery: Vertigo 42. If you’ve never read Martha Grimes’ Richard Jury books, don’t start with number #14. But as a long-time fan, I enjoyed it as a sort of literary comfort food—visiting all the old haunts and renewing acquaintance with all the eccentric friends, with a few British lit allusions thrown in. 
• Expanding Genre Horizons: Action/suspense is not a genre I usually read, and my husband expressed his surprise (disbelief?) when I came home with Tripwire, a Jack Reacher book by Lee Child. But I’d seen the names of the author and main character several times recently in recommended book lists, so this caught my eye when I saw it on the give-away table in the staff lounge. I figured it would be my try-something-new book for the year. Well, I tried it, and I confirmed that action/suspense is not my genre. Still—that’s something I can share both with students who DO love action/suspense and with students who are deciding whether to venture outside their comfort zone.

What books am I planning to read in 2018? See the photo at the top of the page for the ones I’m starting with: a stack of middle and high school recommendations gleaned from librarian friends, from professional publications and blogs, and from a little vacation bookstore browsing. Then, as appropriate, I’ll pass them on to students and to other teachers to pass on to their students. If you want to follow my progress and see what I think of each book as I finish, follow me on Goodreads. (I’ve already finished and reviewed The Last Cherry Blossom and am now working on The Lost History of Stars.) 

What kinds of books did you read in 2017? What will you read in 2018? How do you encourage the readers around you to use books as both mirrors and windows, to learn more about themselves and more about the world outside their own experience? 

New books and challenges are good...but so are old friends that you can read over and over, whatever your age!