I am happy to report that I am managing to read this summer. Once I took reading in the summer as a given--classes came to a close, and what else would one do? Now I continue onward: as one set of classes ends, I teach the next set. But summer still feels spacious in a way that other seasons do not, in part because I'm working from home more, commuting less.
I would likely not have picked up Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, if a friend hadn't talked about how much she liked it; she read it after her grown up son raved about it. After the movie came out a few months ago, she asked if I had read it, and after her recommendation, I added it to my ever growing list of books to read.
I read The Martian (I wrote about it in this blog post) and liked it well enough, but Weir hasn't been one of those writers whose work I seek out. Project Hail Mary felt familiar yet different. I liked the flashbacks better than the parts in the spaceship. I found the premise intriguing, the in-depth mechanical explorations less so.
After finishing Project Hail Mary, I was in the mood for something shorter. Kevin Wilson's Now Is Not the Time to Panic fit the bill. Wilson captures a different kind of summer from the one I am having, a teenager without a job kind of summer. Wilson captures the mid-90's, captures what it was like to have artistic aspirations in a pre-World Wide Web age. The parts of the book about the girl artist grown up were a bit less developed, but I wasn't as curious about her--should I have been?
When I was younger, in my middle school years, my goal was to read 100 books in the summer. Often the local library had some kind of contest. Of course, those were easier books which I could read in an afternoon. When I was older, in high school, I was reading the books I felt I should read by the time I went off to college, along with pulpy romances and multigeneration family sagas.
Now I just want to be reading books that call to me when I'm doing other tasks. These two books did just that.
No comments:
Post a Comment