Required Reading

That Holden Caulfield is one whiny punk.

I have been honestly floored by how much I disliked reading Catcher in the Rye over again. I will be teaching it this year to the 10th graders, and my book club chose it from the selection I suggested based on my teaching load. This is a book that I distinctly remember enjoying passionately as a high school. I created this very neat (if I do say so myself) project for my 10th grade English teacher, who helped me to realize how much I loved literature. I made up a name for Holden's pyschoanalyst and I took a small yellow legal pad and jotted down quotes in the novel that I thought were particularly psychologically disturbing. I added the doctor's fictional notes on these quotes, and made little doodles in the margins. As Holden would say, it "killed" Mrs. Green.

It is not a book worth revisiting in adulthood. I would recommend letting Holden Caulfield rest in peace in our collective adolesence.

A book that is worth dropping everything to read again, however, would be The Great Gatsby. I don't think I was really keyed into the fuss that my 11 grade English teacher was making about this novel at the time (although I tried adamently to disagree with everything that guy said). But after re-reading it this past week, I went a little kooky for Fitzgerald's style. He turns an incredible phrase. Consider this little sentence, which, I think, packs a sucker punch: "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." Or, if you'll bear with me, the description of Tom Buchanon could knock you off your feet like it did for me:

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. His family were enormously welthy--even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away...
...This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight into Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the framatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

I can't wait to teach this stuff.

Other required summer reading/upcoming teaching assignments/ultimate dream syllabus:
The Crucible
Lord of the Flies
Huck Finn
The Scarlet Letter
MacBeth
Antigone
Oedipus Rex
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakaur
The Little Book of Plagiarism, by Richard Posner

Unrequired summer reading on my list:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (currently sitting on the chair begging me to read it)
The Life of Pi (finally joined the bandwagon and read this book on the plane, perfect for vacationing)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (must not let Paul tell me every detail before I get to read it)