A few summer reads

It’s been pretty quiet around my corner of the blogosphere lately, but I’m alive and well. I’ve been enjoying the summer and experiencing some good benefits from reduced “screen time.” But I wanted to check in here and summarize my thoughts on a few of the books I’ve delved into in recent weeks.

The first two books are YA reads that I was curious about. I picked them both up at a book sale last fall because I’d heard good things about them and thought they might be promising for my 11-year-old. Savvy, by Ingrid Law, garnered all kinds of praise, but now that I’ve read it I’m mystified as to why. It concerns a family of people gifted in unusual ways. The narrator, Mibs Beaumont, has just come into her own “savvy” as of her 13th birthday, and through a series of unbelievable events finds herself on a road trip with an improbable bunch of eccentrics. It ends up being a life-affirming, individuality-affirming book, but not in a way I could relate to much, and I found the writing style distracting. I will stick it on the shelf and see what my daughter thinks of it, if and when she picks it up.

The second book, Leaving Gee’s Bend by Irene Latham, I liked much better. It’s about a family of sharecroppers in Alabama in the early 1930’s, and its speaker, Ludelphia Bennett, struck me as more credible throughout her adventures. Like Mibs Beaumont, Ludelphia is on a quest to save a parent in dire need, but she makes her journey alone. In the process she leaves her all-black community for the first time and comes face to face with wealth, whiteness, and racial attitudes at both ends of the scale. It’s written in dialect that I (who have been born and raised in the Northeast, so my opinion should be taken with a very large grain of salt) found convincing.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote that she always contained all of her earlier selves within. She was always the 13-year-old Madeleine at some place inside, as well as every other age she’d ever been. That has always rung true with me, yet I have to admit that neither of these books helped me to recover my 13-year-old Janet within. They seem to lack something that would carry them over the line into greatness… They seem, perhaps, “written for children,” rather than simply grappling with real difficulties and questions. There are children’s books and YA books that I can read and feel deeply moved by, and there are books from my own youth that I return to and discover new insights and riches. But I didn’t find that level of engagement in either of these. This is always such a subjective call, and there is always the chance that I was merely inattentive or read them in the wrong season. It will be a learning experience for me to hear my daughter’s reactions if she reads them.

At the moment, I’m reading Gifts of an Eagle aloud to the girls. It was given to us on loan by my hairdresser, who knows of our nature interests and thought we’d enjoy it. She was right. It describes the experiences of the Durden family as they raise a young golden eagle to adulthood. We are a few chapters from the end, but so far it’s been a fascinating study of animal behavior, one that recalls an earlier era in the conservation movement. You can read about the book and see some footage of Lady, the eagle, here.

I’ve crashed and burned in the attempt to read several books, too: Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Holy Earth, and Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian. I’ve reread and been totally inspired by the relevant sections of The Well-Trained Mind in preparation for next year. And I’ve taken in a few books on piano pedagogy. That’s about all I’ve been able to manage lately, but I’m looking forward to the start of a school year in which we’ll be exploring a reading list of classics I’ve taught to college students, and will now be reading with elementary aged children. I’m sure it’s going to refresh and challenge many paradigms!