My reading life during the pandemic
I got so bored recently in quarantine that I actually read some books.
I am kidding in implying that forced time indoors is what caused it, but I will say that in recent conversations with many of my friends, we all shared with each other how hard it’s been as adults to devote the time we’d like toward pursuing quality time with literature. And keep in mind that several of these people are accomplished professionals, and some of them are professional academics – even fellow English teachers like me.
Whether it’s the overwhelmingly busy nature of our jobs, families, hobbies, volunteer efforts, coaching/mentoring, home improvement projects or creative endeavors (or the degenerative literacy and attention spans caused by our collective electronic devices), it’s clear we are doing less quality reading overall as a people.
Many of us probably hate-read tens of thousands of words a day in articles published online and in comment sections on social media platforms, but working on polishing off even a pleasure read like a beach novel can be challenging at times these days, even for the most literate among us.
I am proud that I have attempted to buck this trend throughout my adult life, but I also confess my efforts are somewhat feeble compared to my reading life in school, when I was voraciously tearing through any recommendations my parents, teachers and librarians could give. I probably read anywhere from 25-50 “chapter books” a year from later elementary school through the end of college. Now, though, I am lucky, honestly, to finish a handful of good books a year. Having a 4-year-old, a puppy and a cat may have something to do with it.
I have been lucky at my day job as a special education and English teacher because, in addition to our curriculum texts, one of my colleagues, Andrea Turner, introduced our department several years ago to the idea of daily independent reading (DIR), in which we, along with all of the students, read for pleasure a book of our choosing at the start of every period. I have finished off several great books per semester as a direct result of this initiative.
In compartmentalizing an increasingly complicated adult life, I tend to keep a bathroom book, a bedside book and a coffee table book at the ready, but I’ll make minimal progress in each. However, during the self-imposed quarantine my family has overtaken for the past two months, there finally have been some stretches of downtime, lulls in the child’s behavior and breaks in the pets’ antics to actually be able to sit and go on a good reading jag like in those times during childhood I fondly remember spending in between sports, scouts and church events. It was this luxurious time spent alone in my room reading for hours, “cultivating a Rich Inner Life” as Ignatius Reilly put it in John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
Before I go into my current favorite reads, the following is a short list of my all-time favorites: “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story,” Gary Schteyngart; “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams; “V,” Thomas Pynchon; “Dubliners,” James Joyce; “A Confederacy of Dunces,” John Kennedy Toole; and “A Light in August” by William Faulkner. Then, of course, I Iove most of the classics we teach at school. Also, as a rule, I have never met a Russian novel I didn’t like; they are imbued with a wry, self-deprecating humor that is very unique.
Do all of these books have something in common? I’ll get into that in a moment.
Like my creative efforts writing, recording and performing music onstage or physical efforts running and working out, one major alluring aspect of reading to me is the fully present meditative state I achieve when I am very focused on one intense attention-consuming activity rather than managing several activities poorly (like watching “Parks and Recreation” and monitoring the creatures while I work on this).
Sometimes I wonder if the main reason I even perform, work out, bathe and read anymore is to create situations where I am forced to stop multitasking, if even only for a moment. It forces me to detach from technology for some brief moments of clarity, peace, curiosity and imagination.
I started off by finishing a random assortment of books that were either gifted, handed down or recommended to me that I’d been dragging my feet on for a long time. I enjoyed culturally insightful yet emotional, heart-on-the-sleeve rock criticism from Hanif Adburraquib in “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” gifted to me by co-workers Ed and Judy Sullivan. I enjoyed learning more about the songwriting and recording process from both “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)” by Jeff Tweedy and “Fortunate Son” by John Fogerty. I learned more about our nation’s complicated history of racism in “We Were Eight Years in Power” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And I indulged in a collection of whimsical short-story vignettes (each prominently featuring an antique typewriter) in celebrated actor Tom Hanks’ literary debut, “Uncommon Type.”
The selection of my current, second round of quarantine books and novels took on a more intentional trend: pushing myself to read more female authors. It came to my attention that I tend to watch, read and listen to works of art that tend to be primarily helmed or dominated by male creators. I have worked a lot at reading more authors of color and writers from other regions, countries or social groups. I began reading and listening to more LGBTQIA+ authors and artists. But the group historically most consistently marginalized across all cultures and within their own cultural groups is women, and listening to more music by all-female or female-led groups, watching more female comics and, yes, now reading more female novelists has been very instructive, eye-opening and paradigm-shifting.
The books I recently finished or that I am deep enough into and have formed an impression from this set include: the class struggles and family drama in “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng; nature’s beauty and a Lowcountry murder mystery in “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens; a hilarious yet touching character study of the very eccentric titular protagonist in “Eleanor Oliphant (is completely fine)” by Gail Honeyman; and the messiness of family dynamics in “Lark and Termite” by Jayne Anne Phillips. Next on the docket is the literary journalism of “Little Soliders: An American Boy, Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve” by Lenora Chu and “The Girls of Atomic City” by Denise Kiernan (which is not to be confused with “Radium Girls” by Kate Moore, which I’ve also heard is great and plan to read one day).
Among those books, there is war, sex, relationships, survival in nature, murder mystery and non-fiction analysis of international education and regional history. Nothing strikes me in these books as markedly “female” or overtly feminine, feminist (which aren’t antonyms, by the way) or female-centric, other than adeptly giving female characters rich interior lives, which male authors often do a horrible job of creating or ignore altogether.
There are intensely specific descriptions of nature, emotions and action in all of these books, as well. There is insight into the human psyche. There is conflict, action, philosophy and examinations of finance, geopolitics and more. I would mainly say this to my fellow males who have also avoided female authors in the past: It’s good stuff, and we hopefully will be able to relate to it or at least learn from it so that we can relate better with the other half of humans on this planet.
If I’ve learned anything from my renewed efforts of working on my literacy more intentionally, it’s my cultural literacy that needs the most work. Really attempting to listen to, learn from and more deeply understand voices from groups different than my own to build knowledge, understanding and empathy has become important to me. I have a long way to go in those arenas, but I feel like this exercise of making really intentional reading choices and committing to them has been beneficial to me.
The more that those of us born to groups more cloistered in privilege read accounts written by people with different perspectives, the better. Obviously, this should be done in addition to mingling with folks who are different than ourselves, getting to know them and building relationships with them in order to learn from them and be allies with them. Hopefully, actions like these help us attain knowledge over ignorance and foster unity over division.
At the very least, we might sound a little smarter at fancy parties if we read more.
