I suspect that most of us who teach at the college or university level look forward to summer not because we don’t have to teach, but because it’s an opportunity to focus our working hours on research and our development as faculty members. Of course, we create lists of writing and research projects that we want to work on – and my lists are always overly ambitious, to say the least.
But I think it’s also important to create reading lists. While I do take some time to read lighter fare (I’m looking forward to Nicole Peeler’s next installment in her Jane True series, for example), I like to create an academic reading list for the summer. I’ve generally tried to have a theme: a writer’s entire body of work or major works from a particular literary era where there is a gap in my own education. So, I’ve had summers of William Faulkner, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare (I’m an early modern scholar, not a Shakespearean per se), nineteenth century British novels (that one really just meant Vanity Fair and several Hardy novels).
I’m currently casting about for what my reading list should focus on this summer. I have a book to review for an academic journal and research-related reading to do, but that’s not the sort of reading that I’m talking about. Likely, I’ll settle on Ben Jonson’s work – I haven’t read many of his tragedies. Though, as I write this, I have to say that Frances Burney’s work also sounds appealing to me right now. I’m still undecided.
I’ve been doing this since before graduate school – but my habits with the readings have changed since then. While helping me prepare for my graduate exams, my committee chair told me that I needed to write after everything I read, even if it was just a few sentences. I took this advice and it generated hundreds of pages of my impressions of the works. It’s something that I continue to try to do, but with less success now. Blogging about what I read is a great tool, but it requires time and discipline during the regular semesters. It also requires writing something beyond the impressionistic response of a first read.
This is important to me, despite the fact that it risks taking the sheer joy out of reading (which is, after all, something I think all of us share). This summer reading is about further developing as professionals. Many of us – especially those of us at teaching-centered institutions – become by necessity pinch hitters in the classroom. My specialized field is seventeenth century city comedy; my job description was to teach Shakespeare, which I only do every other year. But I teach Intro to Lit and Intro to Literary Studies, and those are courses that require me to move beyond even my primary or secondary eras (early modern and Restoration/Eighteenth Century). If our goals in Intro to Lit courses are to help students become better readers and more appreciative of literature in general, we want to have them read as wide a range as possible.
So summer reading can serve that purpose: filling in knowledge gaps so we are better able to teach our students. Or it can give us that opportunity to re-inhabit those time periods that we really love, without the pressure of the researched article looming over the reading. It’s refreshing – recharging. And it’s all in the name of improving ourselves and our teaching.
I love that we study and teach literature. I really do.
So … what are you planning for the summer?