Summer’s already half-way over, which is really hard for me to grasp. I love summer so much — I live for those hot, sticky days that virtually everyone else loathes. I credit living in central Texas for the appreciation. 

With taking a month off of blogging, I had a lot of opportunity to sit down and do some of the things on my reading goals list that I’d talked about in my post about slowing down. Rather than let myself succumb to the pressures of reading every new book months before it hit shelves, I decided to step back and catch up on some backlist and classic titles I’ve been meaning to read but hadn’t yet. 

The project so far has been going extremely well. In slowing down more than one part of my life with the blogging break, I was also able to take reading the books I wanted to at a much better pace. I’m not a particularly fast reader, but I dedicate a lot of time to reading; having a plan of books I wanted to read helped me more quickly move from one book to the next, without the stress of choosing what next. And since I wasn’t then sitting down feeling like I needed to write something thoughtful or coherent about the book, I was able to instead let the words and pieces I felt important permeate my mind and only my mind. 

In some ways, being less social with my reading made me appreciate reading for myself a little bit more. But it’s been interesting, too, not sharing those thoughts with fellow readers. It gives me time to work the things I need to work with into my own life, rather than spending time thinking about the broader take aways to an audience. 

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was the first book I picked up that I talked about in my initial post. It was also the first book since I graduated from college that I found myself wanting to take a pen to and mark as I read. It’s a short book, but reading with pen in hand forced me to slow down, to savor the language, and to mark the passages that really stood out to me. 

And you know, I didn’t write anything about the book yet. I feel I got a lot of value in reading it, taking the time to pull from it what I needed for me, and letting the rest of the pieces of story land within me how they were meant to land. I do plan on writing more in depth about this particular book, but it’s not something I feel pressure to hurry and talk about. I want that slow burn to take hold, and I want space between when I finished it to better inform what I have to say about it when I pick it up again to look through the things I marked while reading. They stood out to me for a reason in the process of reading — will they still hold up later? Will they resonate even more?

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood really hit me hard, which I completely expected going in. I knew I’d love it from the minute I started, but what I found most valuable about this particular reading experience was that I had zero baggage attached to the book. It wasn’t something I’d ever read before, and as I read, slurping down each of the words and images and carefully constructed sentences, I realized how much more I was getting out of the book than I ever would have gotten had I been assigned to read this in high school or college. I always loved classroom discussions, but I was always the person who chose to skip out on participation points because I don’t care to discuss out loud. I like the act of listening to others talk and thinking about how their points and ideas do or don’t fit into the framework of my own thinking about a text. It’s in that act that I’m able to consider a piece of art. That’s why writing about books works for me — I get as much private time thinking about other’s words and my own as I need before I share something. 

But what was interesting about reading Atwood’s book was that there were times I found myself sharing her words or wanting to talk about her words. I restrained myself, only copying one particular passage onto Tumblr to share, which was this:

The thing about the quote that haunts me is that it’s not just about sexism. It’s about racism. It’s about classism. It’s about ableism. It encompasses so many systems of oppression and yet…Atwood does it in such an economy of words that it’s a gut punch. 

I’ll be honest: I haven’t read a lot of other books on my goals list from earlier this summer. I’m definitely going to get to Americanah, and I’m definitely going to dive into Harry Potter. But beyond that, I’m actually finding interspersing these back list reads with titles I’m really looking forward to for the fall is helping me appreciate both a little more. Likewise, I have been reading more adult non-fiction, a category of books I have always loved but sort of pushed a bit to the side in favor of the newest, latest, and the upcoming. But this summer, I dove into reading Ta-Henisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, both of which should be required reading alongside Jessmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, which I read in late spring. All tackle the complexities of race in America. That’s such a simplification of what these books are about, but it’s the best way to adequately capture why reading them should be vital. I think for anyone who works with teens especially, it’s tough reading but it’s important. Reading those three book did a lot more for me in terms of thinking about race than my reread of To Kill A Mockingbird did. 

This summer I also blew through a huge pile of YA horror. I read about haunted houses and ghosts. In non-fiction, I spent time learning about the history of the board game Monopoly (which is yet another entry into the story of how women paved the way for influence but were overshadowed by men) and I learned about the Beanie Baby phenomenon of the late 90s — I hadn’t realized that so much of that frenzy took place in my backyard and how my own experience with and to beanie babies would have been different were I not a child in the Chicago suburbs. 

There’s still half a summer left, and I’m eager to see where my intentionally slowed-down reading takes me. I am absorbing more and I’m observing more. The pieces are sticking where they should, and I’m allowing my brain and my heart new places to explore. Pushing myself has been fun. It’s damn fun to walk into the library and pick up not just the normal stuff I’d read, but to stumble upon a new book of poetry from a favorite poet who I haven’t read in nearly a decade. 

Maybe it’s because I blog and because my job is to be on top of the book world, but slowing down and being deliberate has really been invaluable in terms of reconnecting with what reading is to me and what it adds to my life, my thinking, and my place in the world. In many ways, choosing to be quieter and slower has given me better capacity to speak and be critical in ways that hurrying, that feeling like I need to perform, hasn’t. 

I’m being a better listener now.