Now that I have the chance to reflect, I've decided that taking summer classes while working full time is a crappy idea that I never should have tried. Sure, I needed the credits. Sure, I had the time. But taking classes has deprived me of three months of summer reading, which, now that regular classes are starting again, will take me a very long time to make up.
At any given time I'm reading five or six books consecutively, because whenever I find something interesting I start it, instead of doing the logical thing and putting it aside to finish the book I'm already reading. Whenever someone hands me a book to read, I start that too, unless it looks like it's not something I'd like to read.
With that in mind, I wanted to get a couple out of the way, because over the next semester I will undoubtedly pick something else up, and as soon as I get my hands on my texts for the fall I will read them instead.
First in the queue was Alice Sebold's Lucky, for no reason other than it was the first one I grabbed, and it's short-ish compared to everything else. It had already made the rounds between my mother and sister, and came with a warning. The first chapter is hard to get through, but it gets easier as the book goes along. It's a personal memoir, dealing with the author's life.
Life, in this case, a subjective term that means a period of time that ends with the writing of the book and begins, unfortunately for her, with her rape as a college freshman. The event is played out in great detail, which is why the first chapter is difficult. The rest of the book details the trial and conviction of the rapist and her long road to recovery, with a particular focus on how the way that the justice system and society in general chooses to deal with these things is inherently flawed.
Much of the book made me very angry, and that's a good thing. There's no point in reading a book if it doesn't make you feel something. My favourite parts, though, were the passages where she described the little town she grew up in. They have a lovely, evocative quality about them.
But seeing as it's finished now, I'm on to another book that makes me angry for a completely different reason. The anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody was sent by the government to talk to the Beaver Indians in northeastern British Columbia, to figure out exactly what their land use was, draw a line around it on a map and then the government was to take away the rest for oil exploration and such.
The whole book is about how this task in itself is entirely more difficult than it sounds, partially because culturally and linguistically we don't see eye to eye and because even today government policy is inherently racist in nature and makes no attempt at understanding the people and institutions whom it serves to destroy.
Unfortunately, I don't think I have the time to finish it before I start reading for fall. Just as well. I've already bored you to death.
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