I love books. I've written about this before, but really I have issues with books. I know the library exists and is a great way to avoid buying books, but in the event that I "love" a book I want to be able to 1) write in it (sorry B!) and 2) not give it back. I use the library to check out things I need as demos for teaching, but I rarely read books from there. This means I buys lots of books. I don't really want to calculate the amount of money I spend on books, but let's just say that I keep bookstores in business. This is mostly because I'm a sucker for a deal. If Borders sends me a coupon, I interpret it as a sign that I need new books (hence the filter "skips the inbox" for Borders coupons during the summertime). B-N was home to a Scholastic warehouse that opened to the public twice a year, until it sadly closed for good this summer. This was a major event in my life. The great thing about the sale was that it had lots of books for $1. Who can refuse a book for $1?
Fast forward through 2 1/2 degrees in English, and I have too many books. That's very hard for me to admit, but it's true. I have to get rid of the junk. I have books I've never read, mass market "junk" that I read in airports, books I had to buy for classes that I didn't want to take, etc. But ever since I took a Shakespeare class as an undergrad and bought the Riverside Complete Works of Shakespeare, I've had this issue with selling books.*
A couple of weeks ago I heard a friend talk about paperbackswap.com and my gut reaction was "I don't have any extra books." This afternoon I played around on the site. I'm by no means purging my library, but I did manage to find 20 books (a tiny fraction of my collection) that I could live without. I posted them, redeemed my two introductory credits and thought to myself "nobody wants the crap I just posted." Not true...I was shocked. Granted I have only swapped one book, but I'm thinking that this may be the solution to my book addiction. It allows me to get an even swap (I realize that this doesn't fix the volume of books issue), and it forces me to think about what I really need. Do I need 3 French-English dictionaries? probably not. The book that I sold (an old French book) was a great deal for the person who snagged it, but I was able to replace it with something I might actually read. Thanks Joe!
*I packed up my books to take the the campus "sell back" and looked at Shakespeare. Even though the book had cost me nearly $100, I felt could not in good conscious sell back the complete works of William Shakespeare. This moral dilemma quickly spread to other areas of my life, and I haven't sold a book since.
Showing posts with label summer reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label summer reading. Show all posts
Aug 3, 2008
Jul 30, 2008
"I Cannot Live Without Books"
Recently I received an email that asked something along the lines of "could you please tell me what books we are going to actually talk about in X class." When I read this, I instantly had a reaction that I won't repeat here, but I was shocked that someone would a) imply that I would require books that weren't going to be read/talk about and b) that even if someone thought this, he/she would be ballsy enough to ask. This morning when I was replying to the email, I started thinking about how I use books. I decided that today's post would be about how I interact with those books.
I have books in nearly every room in my house (the bathroom and the laundry room are the only exceptions that I can think of at the moment). I have not read all these books but they are all a part of my everyday life. This is probably largely the result of the fact that I didn't speak until I was quite old (a story for another post) and my parents read to me constantly. I have quotation from Thomas Jefferson on my Facebook page that says "I cannot live without books" and for me it's very true. The email bothered me because it came from someone who I assume doesn't have that perspective.*
For me books fall in several different categories...
Cookbooks: I love cookbooks, but I don't really use recipes. In fact I read cook books for ingredient combos, learn them and then don't generally get them out again. I don't know that I've ever actually made a recipe from a cookbook exactly as stated. For me, I think cookbooks are cathartic because they are both literary and not. I can read to learn, but not feel like it's work.
Classics: my relationship with the canon is complex. I rarely teach canonical works in my classes, but I also feel really bad about selling back a copy that I have. When I was working on my undergrad, I took a class on Shakespeare, and we were required to buy the Riverside Shakespeare. This was the first semester where I ever questioned the practice of selling back books. Have I used the Riverside Shakespeare since that class? No. Have I moved it moved it more than four times in two states? You bet. William Shakespeare doesn't lose money if I sell it, but I feel intensely guilty about selling classics.
Books about Driving: I only decided to add this category because of the number of people who end up on my blog after googling "road trip" and/or "reading" "novel" "adolescent." Books about roads make up a separate part of my books shelf. Sometimes these books are legitimate roadtrips like John Green's An Abundance of Katherines or Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road, and others include a car as a plot device Notes from a Midnight Driver, but all of these books feature the car as a character. These books go in their own section (or pile) because I use them frequently.
Books that I Can't Live Without: I really like my bookshelf to be alphabetized by author and separated by subject (essentially, I like to live in a library), but until we moved in this house, I would pull certain texts aside. They were my "if my house is on fire, I can't leave without these" books. This is not logical. They could be easily replaced. Some have notes, but most of those even could be replaced. This category is not really genre bound. There are childhood books (Make Way for Ducklings, The Secret Garden) and there are theory books (Roberta Trites' Waking Sleeping Beauty). These books are not necessarily books that I use everyday, but are rather books that represent major moments in my literary life. A picture book that I was obsessed with as a child, a critical text that made me realize people studied children's literature, etc.
Books I Teach: I RARELY teach something that I really loved as a child. Most of my syllabus is better described as books that I read as an adult, so these books don't ever overlap with the previous category. I can tell if a book is a "teaching" copy by the way it looks. Teaching copies are full of post-it notes and have lots of things written inside the front and back covers. I used to write out notes for classes and have discovered that putting my quiz or my bullet points for teaching inside the book is more effective for me.
Books I Buys Because They Are Cheap: This category I'm slightly ashamed of. I have lots of books that are not great, but Scholastic was selling them for $1 at one of their warehouse sales and there are very few things that I won't spend a dollar on. Most of these books I haven't read, but they stay on my bookshelf in hopes that someday, someone will ask be for a book about X subject, and I will proudly pull a title off the shelf.
Pleasure Reading: I don't know that this is a good title for the category because it doesn't really reflect the value I place on these books. I try and always have a "pleasure" book in addition to required reading and reading for the classes I teach. Many of these books become essential to my dissertation and to my teaching, but they start as pleasure reading. Someone told me to read Scott Westerfeld's books, so I bought them for this category. These are the books that I read to formulate my ideas for myself not because I "have to" read them.
This is really why I can't answer that student's question because ALL of my books have a purpose and a value for me--even those that I don't read and/or talk about. I still think that the writer of the email that made me think about this was more direct and assertive** than I would have been, but I applaud her for making me spend an afternoon with my books. And, in case you are wondering, we are going to talk about all of the books on my booklists this fall. :)
*before you tell me it's likely an economic thing, I want to clarify that I have been the poor college student majoring in English and I get the cost of books, but I would make other sacrifices to buy the books. Eating out=optional; Books=required. (at least for me)
**Maybe I should recommend course in politeness theory
I have books in nearly every room in my house (the bathroom and the laundry room are the only exceptions that I can think of at the moment). I have not read all these books but they are all a part of my everyday life. This is probably largely the result of the fact that I didn't speak until I was quite old (a story for another post) and my parents read to me constantly. I have quotation from Thomas Jefferson on my Facebook page that says "I cannot live without books" and for me it's very true. The email bothered me because it came from someone who I assume doesn't have that perspective.*
For me books fall in several different categories...
Cookbooks: I love cookbooks, but I don't really use recipes. In fact I read cook books for ingredient combos, learn them and then don't generally get them out again. I don't know that I've ever actually made a recipe from a cookbook exactly as stated. For me, I think cookbooks are cathartic because they are both literary and not. I can read to learn, but not feel like it's work.
Classics: my relationship with the canon is complex. I rarely teach canonical works in my classes, but I also feel really bad about selling back a copy that I have. When I was working on my undergrad, I took a class on Shakespeare, and we were required to buy the Riverside Shakespeare. This was the first semester where I ever questioned the practice of selling back books. Have I used the Riverside Shakespeare since that class? No. Have I moved it moved it more than four times in two states? You bet. William Shakespeare doesn't lose money if I sell it, but I feel intensely guilty about selling classics.
Books about Driving: I only decided to add this category because of the number of people who end up on my blog after googling "road trip" and/or "reading" "novel" "adolescent." Books about roads make up a separate part of my books shelf. Sometimes these books are legitimate roadtrips like John Green's An Abundance of Katherines or Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road, and others include a car as a plot device Notes from a Midnight Driver, but all of these books feature the car as a character. These books go in their own section (or pile) because I use them frequently.
Books that I Can't Live Without: I really like my bookshelf to be alphabetized by author and separated by subject (essentially, I like to live in a library), but until we moved in this house, I would pull certain texts aside. They were my "if my house is on fire, I can't leave without these" books. This is not logical. They could be easily replaced. Some have notes, but most of those even could be replaced. This category is not really genre bound. There are childhood books (Make Way for Ducklings, The Secret Garden) and there are theory books (Roberta Trites' Waking Sleeping Beauty). These books are not necessarily books that I use everyday, but are rather books that represent major moments in my literary life. A picture book that I was obsessed with as a child, a critical text that made me realize people studied children's literature, etc.
Books I Teach: I RARELY teach something that I really loved as a child. Most of my syllabus is better described as books that I read as an adult, so these books don't ever overlap with the previous category. I can tell if a book is a "teaching" copy by the way it looks. Teaching copies are full of post-it notes and have lots of things written inside the front and back covers. I used to write out notes for classes and have discovered that putting my quiz or my bullet points for teaching inside the book is more effective for me.
Books I Buys Because They Are Cheap: This category I'm slightly ashamed of. I have lots of books that are not great, but Scholastic was selling them for $1 at one of their warehouse sales and there are very few things that I won't spend a dollar on. Most of these books I haven't read, but they stay on my bookshelf in hopes that someday, someone will ask be for a book about X subject, and I will proudly pull a title off the shelf.
Pleasure Reading: I don't know that this is a good title for the category because it doesn't really reflect the value I place on these books. I try and always have a "pleasure" book in addition to required reading and reading for the classes I teach. Many of these books become essential to my dissertation and to my teaching, but they start as pleasure reading. Someone told me to read Scott Westerfeld's books, so I bought them for this category. These are the books that I read to formulate my ideas for myself not because I "have to" read them.
This is really why I can't answer that student's question because ALL of my books have a purpose and a value for me--even those that I don't read and/or talk about. I still think that the writer of the email that made me think about this was more direct and assertive** than I would have been, but I applaud her for making me spend an afternoon with my books. And, in case you are wondering, we are going to talk about all of the books on my booklists this fall. :)
*before you tell me it's likely an economic thing, I want to clarify that I have been the poor college student majoring in English and I get the cost of books, but I would make other sacrifices to buy the books. Eating out=optional; Books=required. (at least for me)
**Maybe I should recommend course in politeness theory
Jul 3, 2008
Two-Way Street: Or Three Theories on Recent Road Trip Novels
Right now I'm reading Lauren Barnholdt's Two Way Street. Although my dissertation is not exclusively about roadtrips, everything I do looks at how adolescence is economically defined. This is not to say that I think it should be economically defined, but rather that ya lit again and again seems to define it in those terms. The car tends to be the metaphor that most often represents this economic definition of adolescence and the movement from child to adult. Because of that, I read a lot of road trip novels. Lately I've noticed some things that I'm not quite sure what to do with.
The classic YA roadtrip novel is Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road. It's not necessarily a classic because of age, but is one of the first that was a) popular and b) was about a teen driving across the country. Bauer's novel doesn't specify the year that the story takes places, but it reads as a look back at an adolescence of an earlier generation. Bauer concentrates on the characters and their development and doesn't spend much time describing the ephemeral conditions of adolescence in Jenna's life. Her novel is about the growth from adolescence, and not surprisingly moves along a north/south trajectory.
In the last 4-5 years, however, there seem to be lots of YA novels that do the exact opposite. Barnholdt's novel reads more like two people in a small space who talk about pop culture (okay, I get that that is probably would a adolescent road trip would look like) who just happen to be moving across the country (north, for those who are interested in my map theory). Jordan's SUV is really just a means of keeping the pair in a small space for a prolonged period of time in which they concentrate mostly on how many pieces of popular culture they can consume simultaneously. This novel will be out of date within a couple of years. For example, Courtney and Jordan spent most of their relationship debating whether Laguna Beach or OC is better. I know teens like it, or at least those pretending to be teens on Amazon's reviews say things like:
this book has the modern twist of what it is really like to be a teen now a days. i like how it goes from the past to the actual trip.Bernholdt's not alone in this ephemeral move. Andy Behren's All the Way is full of pop culture references and has been made into a MTV movie (with quite possibly the most offensive movie poster I've seen in a very long time) to be released this October. The upside of this production is that it proves my point that in adolescent literature cars are often metaphors for sex because we can't talk about sex and adolescents without getting into censorship issues. The weird side is that the road trip is becoming less and less of a "classic" tradition and more and more of a pop culture plot.
The comment that the trip doesn't become the focus is particularly interesting to me. In some ways that Amazon reader made me think about something that I hadn't realized before--it's becoming less and less about the car. I have three theories about this
- My theory based on no evidence at the moment: Cars are becoming less and less accessible due to rising gas prices. Pop culture is now more of a solid aspect than the car. YouTube keeps everything accessible, gas prices don't keep cars accessible.
- My more supported theory: the road trip at one time showed literal movement, but now the car itself has become such an accepted metaphor that authors can spend the novel on the pop culture that their readers would be familiar with. Bauer couldn't do this because she was already setting up something new.
- My cynical theory: more recent road trip novels are written by authors who don't really care about what their novels do in the long term and only care about how many books they will sell this summer. The OC will sell books.
May 5, 2008
And then she did (not) die of consumption...
I'm not sure if the knowledge that this was my final full semester of course work ever (I do still have to take one class this summer) made me a little more zen this semester or what. Even though I left two major projects untouched until the weekend before they were due, I did not allow myself to stress to the level of previous semesters. Of all of the semesters that I thought that stress may have gotten the best of me, this was definitely a contender.
I got walking pneumonia in February and spent the better part of the spring wondering if I would ever regain lung function. After spending a semester researching 19th century child diaries (many of which end "and X days later, she died of consumption," it seemed like an appropriate illness.
Now that I am relieved of all of my student duties, I can now return to the world of guiltless television watching (House, LOST, CSI) and pleasure reading. I haven't decided what is on this summer reading list, but it will probably be young adult texts, since I'm teaching YA lit in the fall. I welcome suggestions...
I got walking pneumonia in February and spent the better part of the spring wondering if I would ever regain lung function. After spending a semester researching 19th century child diaries (many of which end "and X days later, she died of consumption," it seemed like an appropriate illness.
Now that I am relieved of all of my student duties, I can now return to the world of guiltless television watching (House, LOST, CSI) and pleasure reading. I haven't decided what is on this summer reading list, but it will probably be young adult texts, since I'm teaching YA lit in the fall. I welcome suggestions...
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