When I was in elementary school, my parents forced me to take dance classes and join a soccer team. Otherwise, I would spend every waking moment reading.
I read while eating breakfast, on the bus to and from school, when I finished my work in class, during recess, after school, and before bed (my room was downstairs, so I had time to hide my books under the covers and switch off the light by the time they made it down the stairs).
In the summers, my dad would drive me, Phil, and Katie to the library, and we would carry out as many books as we could hold (and sometimes more). All day, every day: sitting in various positions around the house, all of us reading. When we ran out of books, we would trade, and read each others’. My mom would come home late from work, and we’d get in trouble for not doing any house work [the second shift a little bit?]. My knees were pink strips, poking out from under hardcovers that I read in the sun at the end of the porch.
Without realizing it, my summer reading became themed.
Middle school:
Summer of Classics (chosen from the two rotating racks at the library- Dickens, Austen, Hardy, etc.).
Summer of Mark Twain
The summer of Agatha Christie followed closely on the heels of the summer of Arthur Conan Doyle, just as the summer of Ray Bradbury followed the summer of Isaac Asimov and the Foundation novels.
In early high school, I spent the sunshine months with 1984, Brave New World, A Canticle for Liebowitz, and a bunch of other dystopias recommended by Dad.
Obviously, I no longer have time for days upon days of reading, and when I do, I become restless pretty quickly- fiction doesn’t hold my attention the way it used to, I get fidgety, and there are things like bike rides and barbecues that are more pressing. After my first year of college, I spent the summer reading feminist theory; nonfiction claims my free time now.
I don’t even know where to begin with my own summer reading list. On my bedside table, I have two piles of books: the fresh books, and the ones I have been working on for multiple months. In the first pile: PoMo Sexuals; Cinderella’s Big Score; Gender Outlaws; The Name of the Rose. In the second pile: The Chalice and the Blade, Pretty in Punk, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Sonnets.
So, rather than running through my grocery-list of summer reading plans, here are some of my favorite books that I’ve read during the summer.
SUMMER 2007: summer o’ feminism
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: one of my favorite recent reads. It’s partially a love letter to literature, and I had a whole list of book recommendations culled from the pages of this book. The best was Dream of a Common Language. As I spent the summer negotiating the confounding geography of my own sexual identity, Alison Bechel and Adrienne Rich’s words mirrored my own discoveries, but with greater wisdom and eloquence.
From Adrienne Rich’s 21 Love Poems, included in Common Language:
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own-
only the thumb is larger, longer- in these hands
I could trust the world, or in many hands like these …
I also read Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, which was a fitting capstone to the masculinity project I embarked upon a few summer ago. See, my friend Jessica came to visit me, and told me that she was starting on what she called “the femininity project”- exploring what she felt was her otherwise-latent feminine identity. She started buying dresses, wearing make-up, paying for haircuts, and claiming her femininity full-force. I, on the other hand, had stopped shaving a few months before … thus, the masculinity project. I wasn’t so sure about it, to begin with: I was already good enough at acting like a lesbian while thinking I was straight, and I didn’t really want to send messages that were any more mixed than the ones currently being transmitted. But it stayed on my mind, and I dealt with my own internalized bullshit and started inhabiting and experimenting with my masculinity.
And Judith Halberstam’s book is the definitive work on the subject of female masculinity. If you’re interested. Which I was. And am. Even when she says essentialist stuff like,
However, the revelation that gender is a social construct does not in any way relieve the effects of that construction to the point where we can manipulate at will the terms of our gendering. Judith Butler says as much when she argues with critics of GENDER TROUBLE who had confused construction with voluntarism.
My final recommendation: The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter. Because no summer would be complete without fairy tales; especially adult fairy tales; especially feminist revisionist fairy tales. Oh, so fucked-up! Oh, so evident of J. Halberstam’s statement, “Desire has a terrifying precision”! So perverse and uneasy and pure poetry! Especially “The Erl-King,” which is breathtaking and languorous and otherworldly.
I never know how to end these things.
