Summer Reading

    Have you ever felt a little reluctant to tell people about a "classic" you are reading? If you are a few years removed from those glorious school days of youth people will often say, "you haven't read that" accompanied by a look of sadness for your unenriched life. 

    I just finished reading The Pearl, by John Steinbeck. Go ahead, sigh and make that "tsk-tsk" sound. If you haven't read it or cannot remember if you have read it, it is required for you to say, "I think I read that in Mrs. Jenkins class in 9th grade." 

      I loved the book.  My superstar reader wife will probably read it now.  She reads almost everything and then, just for fun, she reads whatever I read as a literary dessert.  I am not sure why I often turn to Steinbeck for my first book of the summer after a year of teaching. Actually, the answer is easy- the distance from the front cover to the back cover usually looks pretty short and I need a "doable win" to kick off the season.

        I read Travels with Charley: In Search of America by Steinbeck to kick off my summer a couple of years ago.  I was reading it during the run up to the Presidential election of 2016 and Steinbeck was commenting on the Nixon/Kennedy race during his 1960 road journal.  That book still makes me daydream about the future truck and dog that I want to ramble across America with. But, to change gears (ahem...) The Pearl hit me like a beautiful uppercut to the gut.  I sat in my suburban American backyard, yet somehow was in a canoe escaping the heat and humidity of a Mexican summer by leaping into blue-green water to gather oysters and maybe much more.
   

   Kids need to read...more...alot more. So do I.  Screen reading in your palm is amazing.  It is addictive. I realize though, that "phone reading" is usually grazing and not feasting.  I cannot recall much from the last dozen articles I have read on educational innovation, current events or technology, but if asked (please don't) I could probably draw a detailed timeline of The Pearl and relate the lessons, symbolism and emotion of the book to boyhood memories, my philosophy, and those BIG life questions.  I might even happily connect the message of the book to debates we have today about poverty, wealth, happiness, morality etc... Reading is fundamentally amazing. 
   
     I feel a quick "shout-out" to my phone is needed. The ability to

read and try to guess what a word means in the context of a story can be fun. It is even more fun to possess the superpower to instantly ask the Cosmos (or Google) for a vocab lesson.  My new vocab knowledge from The Pearl below. Match the word to the picture and write an essay describing how... 😂

Hmmm...

?...

  

This is.....

Freshet      Legerdemain
        Pulque