Summer Reading List

Well, it's Summer Time now.  All of a sudden, I have a lot of time on my hands, and plan to fill it up with a hodgepodge of odd jobs - doing research for professors, tutoring, maybe doing some data entry jobs, nothing too strenuous, y'know - and then doing a whole lot of reading and writing.  Of course, I'll also be working on my profession, trying to snag up those last two evasive credits to finally finish my Master's of Education degree, and sending out my resume and hitting the rubber to the road looking for teaching openings in the area.*

One thing that I have been planning has been my Summer reading list.  For years - roughly from college to the three or four years after college - I had an annual tradition of reading at least one Dostoyevsky novel every Summer.  If you ask me Crime and Punishment is the ultimate Summer novel - the heat, the sweatiness, the claustrophobia of living day-in and day-out in your stuffy city apartment with the rats and the rags - but both The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov  are not far behind.  I know that I probably love Dostoyevsky more than he merits (mostly on account of his descriptions of hallucinations) but the length and content of his novels just made perfect Summer reading fare for me.  After I had read almost all of them - I never finished Demons, which is something I may have to rectify - I tried transitioning into reading his short stories, or reading other Russian authors (Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita being one of my favorites!) but it never really stuck.**

So, this Summer, I am starting to craft my reading around a new theme.  Some of these books I have started reading, some I have read and then put down, and others I haven't even started:

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson:  I was recommended this book from Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent blog series on The Ghetto Is Public Policy.  I'm only on page 28, and so far, so good.  Additionally, Coates' blog has got me thinking about the ways in which education in America is being re-structured so that it functions as a transfer of wealth from African Americans - as tax payers - to White business owners via the use of school vouchers and the charter school movement.  But this remains a thought half-thought.

I have read several chapters out of Foucault and the Government of Disability, edited by Shelley Tremain, so far, and it has got me thinking about the uses of power in terms of disability and impairment.  I don't understand why Foucault is not placed front and center in any teacher training program, whether that program is general education or special education.  As far as I can tell, Foucault is concerned with three structures: The prison, the hospital, and the school.  Disability is that point of focus where all three of these structures coincide. Teachers need to be concerned with all three.

God dammit, I have been reading this book for months, and just now got poor LBJ to Washington D.C.  He's heading up a New Deal program getting young folks in Texas to work, digging ditches and renewing parks.  I may have to skip a few chapters - or, um, volumes - in Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winning five-volume planned biography, but I am fascinated by one question: What motivated Johnson to pass Civil Rights legislation?  Caro has painted him as a real sonuvabitch, a political opportunist who is willing to push the progressive program at the same time that he bemoans FDR's socialist agenda (all depending on the audience!)  So what was behind his decision to hand over the South to Republicans for generations?  Caro knows that it is all about power - but how is that power wielded?

The Ugly Laws, by Susan Schweik: My wife bought this book for me a while ago, and I have yet to crack it open.  However, it claims to be a history of disability.  I TA'd this Spring for a course on the culture of disability, and I was struck by how alienated so many of the freshman undergraduates were when regarding what it means to be disabled in America.*** And so, if there were a theme to this Summer syllabus that I am building for myself, it's that power structures in the United States are not accidental.  At some point, for some reason, someone decides that one group of people will be advantaged by a set of laws or policies, and another group will be disadvantaged, and that these power discrepancies are then concealed by other structures, so that it seems that discrimination is something accidental, not purposeful.


*This weekend, I have been doing a lot of hobknobbing, going to art shows and bars and farmer's markets, running into local teachers, reminding them that, yes, I will be graduating this Summer, and yes, if you happen to know of a job opening at your school, please let me know, and please keep me in mind for this opportunity, and so on and so forth.

** Just a thought: My perfect reading calendar might be: Summer: Russian Lit, Fall: English Lit (Henry James, Virginia Woolf), Winter: Sci-Fi, Spring: History and Biography.  The exception to this would be Moby-Dick, which is something that is meant to be read over the Summer.

*** Not what it means to have a disability.