Summer Reading

I've been neglecting the blog for the past week or so, trying to get my moving situation to Champaign straightened out. The good news: I have an apartment, so I won't be homeless come fall.

At any rate, I received an email from one of my professors a couple weeks ago letting me know what we'd be reading in our craft class for the fall. And I don't know about the rest of you, but this is the kind of stuff that geeks me out. Books. Craft stuff. The kinds of books that can and will be taken apart, page by page, word by word. It's interesting, because I didn't always use to be this way. In high school, I absolutely hated those English classes, the ones where you read The Scarlett Letter or Jane Austen and then dissect it to death in a sort of faux-democratic style of consensus on what we thought about the book... except they weren't really our thoughts or opinions; they were the thoughts and opinions of the teachers, as dictated by their syllabus. And realistically, who in the world would expect 15-year-olds to express critical thinking about books that are completely outside of their realm of knowledge and world experience? Much less books that all took place before the 1900s? Why should they care? I often look back on those high school years with disgust. Is it any wonder why the population of active readers and book buyers decrease year after year? It's as if we wanted to ruin an entire generation to the idea of reading for pleasure during their most formative years.

Okay. That was a huge tangent and rant. Back to summer reading. The list of books as provided by my professor is about 6-8 titles long, including two craft books. Now, no one would ever accuse me of being well prepared, but being the nerd that I am, I went out and ordered three of the books from Amazon to get a head start. They are Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction by David Jauss, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche. Interestingly, I had the David Jauss book already marked for purchase six months ago -- I'm a huge sucker for craft books. And I've heard about the Joshua Ferris book, written completely in first person plural, which should be a great study, but I'm most intrigued by the Stephen Marche book -- a completely fabricated anthology about the island of Sanjania. In it, he creates a country and its culture from the ground up, which, to me, is nothing short of fascinating. As a writer, such a concept sounds so incredibly large and imposing. I have a hard enough time fabricating the lives and histories of invididuals and their families, and I simply cannot fathom doing the same for a population, a country, an entire culture. Heady stuff. I can't wait to get started reading.