My summer reading list

May 4th, 2009 | Filed under: Uncategorized

Among the many feelings I have coursing through me right now in the last few months of my teaching license program is the gripping feeling “I haven’t read nearly enough!”

I’m heading into student teaching this fall and don’t feel like I’ve read anything that appears on the reading lists for the nearby school systems. I attended private schools up until my last two years of high school and the readings there were very different. I read the Shakespeare play Richard II rather than Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, though I don’t remember a bit of it, along with Canterbury Tales. I read essays by John Locke and Gandhi and speeches by Robespierre in history class. I took a year-long Old Testament survey course where I read it from beginning to end and studied it as a historical text. The school was focused on “classical education” and primary source documents, which I really appreciate now, but at the time my head was spinning.

But rather than fret over it, I’m just going to make myself summer reading lists that include some of those classics that my “classical education” seemed to overlook.

I’m not going to get to all of this over the summer, but here’s my list so far. The links take you to the books’ Goodreads pages or Wikipedia:

Fiction:
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov

Essays and Nonfiction:
On War by Howard Zinn
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel*
A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

Poetry:
Yehuda Amichai
Louise Erdrich

Comics and Zines:
The rest of the Y: The Last Man series by Brian K. Vaughan
Start the Ex Machina series, also by Brian K. Vaughan
Epileptic by David B.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
On Subbing: The First Four Years by Dave Roche

Young Adult or Stuff on Student Reading Lists:
Night by Elie Wiesel
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
My Son’s Story by Nadine Gordimer
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut