I'm Reading Too Many Books!

I have a (bad?) habit of reading several books simultaneously. I like to have choices of the kind of book I want to settle in with at the end of the day. So I'm usually at various points in different books till I either get totally absorbed in one book and don't want to read anything else or I decide it's time to finish several of them and I just set a goal of finishing a number of them before starting something new. And I tend to order up ILL books 6 or more at a time, so when they come in, I want to take a "taste" of several of them.

But this time I may have let it get out of hand. I set down Inkheart by Cornelia Funke a couple weeks ago, halfway through it. I am nearly finished with James Owen's The Seearch for the Red Dragon (the second volume in his Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series. I'm about halfway through Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand Is Singing. (I just recently discovered Sedgwick's YA fiction, and this is the fifth of his novels I've read.) I'm about 100 pages into Ellen Hopkins's Glass, after reading her Burned and Impulse sometime in the past couple months. I started Jim Lynch's The Highest Tide, and I really like it, but I haven't been in the mood to return to the world of the giant squid in the past several days.

I'm reading Finn by Jon Clinch, and I love it. It feels a bit Faulknerian--maybe because of the darkness of its subject matter. I realized a couple weeks ago that I hadn't read anything specifically for Black History Month, so I picked up a book I've never read but have meant to for years, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. I love it too. Both of these books use language in extraordinary ways. And I've started Lloyd Jones's Biografi, after reading Mister Pip. I haven't gotten very far with it yet, but I'm intrigued. Over several months, I have been reading/rereading Iris Murdoch's novels, and I'm currently on The Unicorn, which I haven't read in 20 years or so. Because I noticed I was pretty ignorant about the British novel in the post-WWII period, and I was thinking about this while I was teaching a seminar in George Orwell in our 3-week Interterm in January, I decided to start reading John Wain's first novel, Hurry On Down, published in 1953.

Of course I'm reading several professional books, as usual: Differentiated Instruction in the English Classroom by Barbara King-Shaver and Alyce Hunter; Teacher Identity Discourses by Janet Alsup; Literature & Lives by Allen Carey-Webb; and Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse by Candace Spigelman--to name a few.

Then there are the books I started reading before Christmas, from which I got distracted by the end of the fall semester, the holidays, and the challenges of teaching a 3-credit seminar in a 3-week period: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood; William Faulkner's The Hamlet; Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies; Charles Dickens's Bleak House; Koren Zailckas's Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood. This last is one that I've recommended to my comp students, and I've seen some good essays come out of their engagement with this book. Then there's Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

As I write this, I am beginning to wonder why I'm sitting here, writing about all of these books instead of reading right now! Maybe I'll steal a few minutes for reading before I turn my attention to some ENG 102 essays that I need to return to students tomorrow.