Maybe it’s just our school district—maybe we’re slackers—but
I have noticed something that tortured me endlessly in my school days seems to
have miraculously faded from popularity. I speak of the dreaded Summer Reading
List and accompanying Book Reports.
Maybe it was just the fancy ass private school my parents
insisted on sending me to (some drivel about a good education, I don’t know—I
actually hadn’t turned down the volume on my Walkman the way I’d been
instructed to when they started the conversation), but for years when classes
would end in June, they would pass out a list of “Recommended Reading.” Maybe I
misunderstood the definition of “recommended” but I was always under the
impression that a recommendation wasn’t necessarily a direct order to execute.
With a recommendation, you had the option not to participate. That was not the
case here. On the first day of school you were to bring back with you some
appalling number of reports on books you’d read over the summer.
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you
I love to read, do now and did then. It was probably my
favorite thing to do as a kid (since sports
clearly wasn’t high on the list). But to read books and then have to write
book reports just plain sucked. In the first place, they seldom picked books
that I wanted to read. They always picked all those coming of age books like
“Up a Road Slowly” (and really, why did it seem that every heroine in the books
on these lists wanted to be a writer? I get it—write what you know, but where
does imagination come into play? Couldn’t these people imagine a little girl
who wanted to be anything other than
a writer, even though that was clearly what they wanted to be when they were kids?) and deep books like
“Bridge to Terabithia” and “Where The Red Fern Grows.” Frankly, my problem with
all these sorts of books is, they’re
depressing. They never picked things like “Starring Sally J. Friedman As
Herself” or “Hangin’ Out with Cici” (which is apparently out of print now, but
was written by Francine Pascal, so those of you who were “Sweet Valley” high
fans might want to see if you can find it at your library).
I had enough trouble with depression as a kid. It was not
necessary for me to read about kids with dying moms, dying friends, dying dogs,
or other unfortunate circumstances. I had enough trouble dealing with my own
problems, I didn’t need to read about problems other kids had that I couldn’t
do anything about. And if it was about animals suffering (lookin’ at you “Incredible
Journey”) just forget it. Fuck that noise. I was a huge animal lover, and
couldn’t stand the idea of an animal in any sort of pain. I didn’t even like “Socks”
because of that.
But I had no choice. Every summer I would go through and
pick the least depressing of the gloomy lot. Of course now I go look at my
school’s website and not only have they changed the requirement (only one book
is mandatory, and no reports on the others they have to read), but they’ve
added all the good shit—Judy Blume, E.L. Konigsburg (loved “The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”—I just read
it to my kids, and they loved it too), and J. K. Rowling. Not that J.K. Rowling
was in print when I was a kid, but just to illustrate that they’ve really
broadened their offerings.
Naturally I never did this exercise voluntarily, or ever
particularly early on in the summer. Mid to late August always found my mother
hounding me to figure out which books to read, and me spending multiple hours
reading books I hated, and then having to write up some sort of stupid summary
of them. Part of the reason I hated doing this is because I stink at it—there’s
a reason I’m not writing reviews for the New York Review of Books. Although,
ironically, I have an English degree, but an English degree is surprisingly
easy to fake. If you can’t think of anything else to write, you can pick a pet
theory, and apply it to every text.
Treatment of women? Even if you’re reading “Lord
of the Flies” (which was one of the dogs I had to read in high school at
one point—dear lord how I loathe that
book, and I’m sorry to say it’s still required reading if you’re going into
Grade 10 at my old high school) you can make it work. Postcolonialism? Sure.
Freudian theory? No problem.
But these were “little kid” book reports, not a treatise on
the application of a literary theory to a text. Most of the time they wanted
the title and author, main characters, and a description of the conflict. Then
they wanted you to say something you liked about the book. This was always a
huge challenge for me, because, as I’ve said, I almost never did like the
fucking book. I would have been glad to detail what I disliked about the books,
but my school didn’t want to know (or perhaps my mother wouldn’t let me be
honest). They were all “la la la what did you like about this book?” I would
have said, “I thought it was depressing as shit and it brought me down for days
to have to read about these dreary people in these cheerless, miserable
circumstances with bleak prospects.” (Or, you know, the ten year old version of
this.) Oh no, in spite of having made me read these lugubrious tomes, they
wanted me to say what I liked.
Please don’t think I wanted to read nothing but Nancy Drew
or V.C. Andrews or other similar literary junk food. I was willing to read
decent books, I just didn’t want them to be such downers. I read and loved the
Little House books, “The Secret Garden” (“A Little Princess” not so much), and
the whole “Ramona” series. But they rammed “The Bluest Eye” and “The
Once and Future King” down my throat (in high school, naturally—not when I
was nine). And to be fair, “The Once and Future King” isn’t depressing, but holy hell is it long as shit and quite
frankly not my genre.
Absolutely the only good thing that ever came out of this
whole experience through which I suffered for more years than I care to count
is that I learned to spell the word “character.” At one point I misspelled it
on one of my reports, and my father made me write it over some absurd number of
times to learn to spell it correctly. To this day, when I write that word, I
think “char-act-er” because that was what my brain was saying the whole time I
was writing it out to learn to spell it back in the day. But I’d say that’s a
fairly small payoff for what I can assure you was hours of thankless work,
between reading and writing up reports.
And now it seems the whole practice has either disappeared,
or been reduced down to a more reasonable effort. To have been asked
to read a single book and just be able to discuss it, without having to
fabricate a positive response to it would have been heaven. Maybe that’s why I was
actually successful in getting an English degree. I remember telling a
professor once that I refused to read “Wuthering Heights” and asking if there
would be a problem with that when it came time to write papers. I was reading
it, I explained, when my mother died suddenly of an asthma attack two years
earlier, and I couldn’t read it again without remembering the whole horrible
experience. Her response was that reactions to books are very personal, and she
wouldn’t force anyone to read something that would cause them to react in a way
that would make them uncomfortable. I wish she’d been in charge of my summer
reading program all those years ago. If nothing else, I might have been spared “Lord
of the Flies.”
