Reading for Fun and Profit

I have just gotten back from a wonderfully busy summer.  I spent a good deal of time teaching summer school, a nice time traveling to see friends and hosting visiting family, and getting to enjoy the always elusive time to read for fun.

Reading for fun is a tricky

business for me. There is the always expanding "To Be Read" (TBR) pile that would take several lifetimes to accomplish.  There are the books I feel like I need to read because they are award winners (The Goldfinch, I am looking at you), books I slog through because I started them and keep thinking they must get better at some point (1Q84, that was 30 hours of my life I gave

you!) and books I really do need to read to make me better at readers advisory or simply knowledge of the world.  


I spent a lot of the summer on that third group.  I tried to work my way through the Abe Lincoln Award nominees for 2017 and got through quite a lot of them.   

• 100 Sideways Miles (Great book. An interesting perspective and vision)
• Bone Gap (Amazing! Powerfully imaginative and captivating.)
• Caged Warrior (A book I never would have just picked up but told a great story)
• A Court of Thorns and Roses (Elves! Romance! Battles! Mystery!  It has it all!)
• Fake ID (The best surprise of the summer. A
  
  book I never would have chosen, but am so glad I did.  A wonderful story, thought provoking, and intriguing characters.)
• I am Malala (It's Malala. How can you go wrong? What a life! What a
  
   woman!)
• Red Queen (A neat twist on the dystopian trend. A mixture of Hunger Games and Allegiant, while still being unique. )
• Grave Mercy (currently reading)
  

But it was my summer, and my free time, so I took a few detours through things I simply wanted to read: Red Rising, Shadow and Bone, H is for Hawk, and Half of a Yellow Sun (Holy cow, what an amazing book).

The summer school students I teach are almost exclusively international students from South Korea.  They are long term students who come in 8th

grade and stay until the end of college.  Studying in the US is less a cultural exchange and more an immersion into English and a pursuit of fluency and an American education.  This inevitably brings up the question of how to improve their English, and I give them the same answer I always do. 

You need to read. In English. For fun. 

You don't have to read Hemingway. Work your way through the Walking Dead.  It can be a

cheesy romance or a the-world-is-ending-we-need-a-teenager-to-save-us dystopian. I don't care.  It just needs to be what you enjoy. 

And they balk at that.  

So they slog through War and Peace when what would really be best for them is The Hunger Games. 

If you have a class that assigns War and Peace, fine. If not, if it is out of your interest and beyond your skill, skip it!  Should you skip it just because it is beyond your skill? Absolutely not! But if you don't care about it, it will suck your energy and love of reading dry.   

I find it easy to preach this message, but hard to live it at times.  

When I pick up the book I should read instead of the one I want, I hear echoes of myself.  "Why in the world are you crawling through Soul Mountain when you want to be eating up the

Court of Myst and Fury?"

So often we make reading into a business venture. What gets the fastest results?  What is my ROI for this book?  The way schools and testing are done today only adds to that.  Read to find the characters, theme, and symbolism.  Sure, there is a time and a place for this, and it is a valuable skill, but sometimes just the right book is a quick romance or a mindless Western. Something to cleanse the palate and the literary soul.   

In light of this, I am redoubling my efforts to avoid book shaming this year--not toward others, because I almost never do that--but toward myself. I should read  Prisoner of Night and Fog, and yes, I will eventually.  But right now, I am going to read what I want, what feels good, what meets my literary needs. 

So I am listening to Cinder.  

And enjoying the heck out of it. 
Guilt free.  

Because there is more to reading than the bottom line, not just for students but adults too.