Lazyteacher

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device of avoiding thought. Sir Richard Helps

While I was away at lovely Cama beach with my kids and LOML, I read two books about ineffectual men obsessed by woman: All about Lulu by Jonathan Evison and All the Sad Literary Men by Keith Gessen. Both of them had something going for them, but I’m not going to finish either.

Lulu is about a boy named Will growing up frustrated and vegetarian in a house full of carnivorous bodybuilders–his Dad Big Bill who constantly falls short of Mr. Olympia and two meathead twins Doug and Ross–until his Dad remarries and Lulu enters the house. Will falls not smitten but unhealthily obsessed.  The writing has a great undercurrent of humor and absurdity, but I wasn’t able to care about Will and whether or not he would capture the heart of his stepsister.  The character was venal and sarcastic but without enough of a wit to make it better. This may be my fault as I’ve always had a hard time following and caring about sad sack characters.

Literary Men is completely different. This is a series of connected short stories that revolve around hyper-educated Harvard twentysomethings canoodling on the Right Coast.  I had a hard time telling them apart except based on what major work they were writing or failing to write: Mark wrote about Mensheviks, Sam Zionists, and Keith liberal political essays.  Strangely, even though I  didn’t enjoy these stories–they felt self-absorbed and  cramped–I read them quickly and kept on reading. I think the fact that the characters are similar to me attracted me despite the lack of other qualities. Jonathan Yardley liked it better than I did.

I’m glad I read what I did, but I’m not going to finish them.

That used to be a big deal. I remember being 14 and reading Camus’s The Myth of Sysiphus and not understanding word one, but still reading the whole thing because, you know, that’s what you do.  I’m not sure if I got the irony of that.  My students too are surprised when I tell them they don’t have to finish a book.  We get so locked into the idea that the books we assign are to read in full so that we can have a multiple choice test on them that we forget that the books serve us and not the other way around.  We have the power to put them down and find another one, one who will treat us better.

Maybe there are a few books in a classroom where we’ll want the students to read it all so we can talk as a community about the entire enchilada and have everyone munching along the whole way.  But reading doesn’t have to be a Bataan Death March.  We/I should remind ourselves that when we stop reading a book we’re making a decision to take our limited reading time and filling it with the best we pages we can find.

What if we let kids apply the Nancy Pearl-ian Rule of 50 in their own writing? Lots of readers/bloggers struggle with this a bit, but I think it would be healthier if we admitted that we’re not always ready for even the greatest books?  How can we make the classroom flexible enough to accommodate this?