Summer Reading
Looking back, I spent a lot of time in the library growing up. Well, libraries. Growing up poor in the war-torn streets of Seoul, my mom had found solace in the written page and she wanted to pass the value of reading along to her kids. As such, some of my earliest memories are in the Arlington Public Library surrounded by the comforting smell of musty old volumes stacked in labyrinthine shelves.
By first grade, I could actually read pretty well relative to age and by third grade my mom and I would start to have these reading contests. We would cycle between choosing a book and seeing who could finish it first and then have a conversation about it over tea like some sort of two-person book club. The real kicker is that if I won, my mom would treat me to comic books, trading cards, and pogs. My mom worked over forty hours a week and did the heavy lifting when it came to the household; I always won. I know now that she never intended to win but really just to get me to read.
The flip side of that literary coin is that my mom was learning English the same time I was. So she didn't necessarily have the best sense of perspective in terms of reading level. That means as she was getting into classic English-language literature, I was challenged to do the same. To a fault, I can't really turn down a challenge. Probably some sort of bushido thing. So at that tender age, I was reading Little Women, The Last of the Mohicans, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. That's a big jump if you're fresh off ZooBooks, Goosebumps, and Redwall. But it introduced me to Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne and for that, I'm eternally grateful.
As much as I like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I always preferred The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Huck is at once biting satire and social commentary of the antebellum South. It's Twain's quintessential novel but I preferred Tom Sawyer for its freewheeling spirit and celebration of youthful reckless abandon. Charles Dickens works a lot like Twain's opposite number albeit British. A Tale of Two Cities really is his masterwork, not just the literal comparative tale between London and Paris but of the two cities within one; the rich and the poor. It's so fucking good. Jules Verne of course is one of those writers that dared to dream (Yes, I'm aware his work was originally published in French) but my favorite book by him is actually his most down to earth: Around the World in 80 Days. That book gave me the travel bug before I even knew what the travel bug was.
By high school, the leisurely reading had given way to a much more regimented academic intake. For the entirety, I was enrolled in IB World Literature courses. For those of you who don't know, IB sands for International Baccalaureate. It's like AP courses except more international and more baccalaureate. To live up to that whole "international" aspect, we were reading stuff from all over the world. That meant Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sophocles, Eli Wiesel. It was world-building and thorough and I was good at it, but it took the joy out of it a bit unfortunately. It's something I try to stay mindful of when I write for various publications or run the podcast; even if it's about something that you love, there's an element lost when there's a greater responsibility tied to it. So it's always about keeping sight of why you started in the first place, what kind of absolution are you looking for whenever you pick up a book.
My favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird, this concise, concentrated dose of Americana straight from Harper Lee to you in all of its coming of age/end of innocence glory. That was a summer reading assignment and represented the American literature element of my tenth grade reading curriculum. It's not a particularly long book and that's part of why I like it. Sometimes long novels are great, Stephen King's best novels are fucking tomes (with the exception of The Gunslinger which moves fast like a damn bullet), for example, but they're always a commitment.
College was college. I definitely hung out in the library a lot but there wasn't as much leisurely reading as there had been in years past. Based on my interests in political communication, a lot of reading was theoretical and historical at that time. Kenneth Burke, Marshall McLuhan, and Jürgen Habermas were all prominent on the communication reading lists while history was all over the damn place. Grad school was even denser and even dryer. If you recall from an earlier post on here, the podcast was a direct reaction to all that, to remember how to observe and analyze things for fun again. Funny how a hobby turned into an entire growing side career.
Nowadays, what I read usually entails one historical/nonfiction prose text and one straight up, unabashed fiction. No racing for pogs, no postgame over tea, just pure, unadulterated love of the game. I've gone through two cheap bookcases within the past couple years from the books I've picked up; I guess the obvious solution is to shell out for better bookcases? Balance that with the usual comic book intake (both professionally and for fun) and I guess I log in about one hundred pages a day when I'm able. I grant you words with pictures don't take as long (and my parents never really considered comics literature which I never agreed with) but it still counts. And I have no intention of slowing down.
By first grade, I could actually read pretty well relative to age and by third grade my mom and I would start to have these reading contests. We would cycle between choosing a book and seeing who could finish it first and then have a conversation about it over tea like some sort of two-person book club. The real kicker is that if I won, my mom would treat me to comic books, trading cards, and pogs. My mom worked over forty hours a week and did the heavy lifting when it came to the household; I always won. I know now that she never intended to win but really just to get me to read.
The flip side of that literary coin is that my mom was learning English the same time I was. So she didn't necessarily have the best sense of perspective in terms of reading level. That means as she was getting into classic English-language literature, I was challenged to do the same. To a fault, I can't really turn down a challenge. Probably some sort of bushido thing. So at that tender age, I was reading Little Women, The Last of the Mohicans, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. That's a big jump if you're fresh off ZooBooks, Goosebumps, and Redwall. But it introduced me to Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne and for that, I'm eternally grateful.
By high school, the leisurely reading had given way to a much more regimented academic intake. For the entirety, I was enrolled in IB World Literature courses. For those of you who don't know, IB sands for International Baccalaureate. It's like AP courses except more international and more baccalaureate. To live up to that whole "international" aspect, we were reading stuff from all over the world. That meant Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sophocles, Eli Wiesel. It was world-building and thorough and I was good at it, but it took the joy out of it a bit unfortunately. It's something I try to stay mindful of when I write for various publications or run the podcast; even if it's about something that you love, there's an element lost when there's a greater responsibility tied to it. So it's always about keeping sight of why you started in the first place, what kind of absolution are you looking for whenever you pick up a book.
My favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird, this concise, concentrated dose of Americana straight from Harper Lee to you in all of its coming of age/end of innocence glory. That was a summer reading assignment and represented the American literature element of my tenth grade reading curriculum. It's not a particularly long book and that's part of why I like it. Sometimes long novels are great, Stephen King's best novels are fucking tomes (with the exception of The Gunslinger which moves fast like a damn bullet), for example, but they're always a commitment.
College was college. I definitely hung out in the library a lot but there wasn't as much leisurely reading as there had been in years past. Based on my interests in political communication, a lot of reading was theoretical and historical at that time. Kenneth Burke, Marshall McLuhan, and Jürgen Habermas were all prominent on the communication reading lists while history was all over the damn place. Grad school was even denser and even dryer. If you recall from an earlier post on here, the podcast was a direct reaction to all that, to remember how to observe and analyze things for fun again. Funny how a hobby turned into an entire growing side career.
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| Marking up text. This looks about college-era. |
