All posts by Pepper

First Monday Book Day

Summer Reads

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Grab your books and head to the beach! Or . . . not. I've read on a beach once exactly once in the past six years. The book? Infinite Jest.

In theory, summer is supposed to be a time for fun, breezy reads. I don't know that this is true for me. (But then again, I have a particular tendency to gravitate toward overly serious things. The summer after eighth grade, I read Hamlet. But don't worry--I didn't understand it.) As a kid, my favorite thing about summer was that I could pick anything I wanted to read. And to be sure, I went through my fair share of Choose Your Own Adventure books along with those that were out of my league.

As an adult, I haven't noticed that my reading habits change much with the seasons. But perhaps I'm anomaly. Do you gravitate toward different reading material in the summer? If so, what?

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Philando

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A week and a half ago, I attended a breakfast held in honor of this year’s winners of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards. The honorees all spoke—about books, about art, about children, about being black in America. Author Jason Reynolds gave a spoken word performance that brought the audience to its feet. Here is an excerpt:

if you listen closely
you can hear the machetes
cutting the air
in half
connecting for half a second with something
breathing and growing
breathing and growing
before being chopped
down like sugar cane in a Louisiana field
yes there are machetes everywhere
the sound of them cutting the air

chop CHOP
chop CHOP

we try not
to bend in the wind
try not to bow or bow
try to wrap fingers around our own
saccharine souls
and brace ourselves
for the

chop CHOP
chop CHOP

the machetes
cutting the air in half
coming for us

You can read the full poem here, and you can see it performed in this video, recorded by a person in the audience.

Last night police officers shot and killed a black man. This is nothing new. But these were the police officers from the place I call home. The police officers whose station is an easy walk from my house. Whose station is in the same building where the jalapeno started going to daycare last month. The police officers who wave to my boys when we’re walking home from the park.

While eating breakfast this morning, I told my boys that too many black men are being killed by the police. I told them that last night our police officers shot and killed a black man. The peperoncino, who just turned three, got it. He said, “That’s not okay. The police need to say sorry for killing.”

It’s hard to know how much to say to young kids. It’s hard to talk about racism. But I didn’t have a choice this morning because I needed the jalapeno to know in case things were different today in the building where his daycare is and where the police station is. I wanted him to hear it from me--not from an older kid or a teacher.

Things were pretty quiet this morning, but when I was leaving from dropping off the jalapeno, a protester had arrived. He was a skinny, young white guy holding a large cardboard sign. Handwritten in black marker was FUCK YOUR BADGES. I wasn’t sure what to do, but with the peperoncino in the back seat, I rolled down my window and waved. I said, “Good luck today.” He nodded and said, “Thanks.” While I probably wouldn’t phrase my own sentiments the same way he phrased his, I wanted to say a kind word to him, to let him know that I support him in believing that the killing has got to stop.

I didn’t know Philando Castile, but this morning my heart hurts for him and for all those who loved him.

First Monday Book Day

What’s Your Pie Chart?

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No, I’m not going to do the same pie chart survey that nibs did for FMD a bit ago, as enjoyable as it was. I’m thinking more about the range of books we each read as individuals.

For those who contribute to the First(ish) Monday Book Day discussions, I see what you’re reading at any given moment. But how would you characterize your reading? Mostly fiction? Split between fiction and nonfiction? What type of fiction? Do you gravitate toward classics or do you seek out what’s new? Now, “all of them” is of course an acceptable answer to this question.

I’m doing a bit of traveling this month, and the other day I was telling a coworker about what books I'm taking with me. In case I finish need a break from Infinite Jest, I picked up a couple of books from the library. One is a work of young adult nonfiction about Shostakovich and the other is a non-young adult nonfiction book about the origins of the Civil Rights movement in Minnesota (non-young is totally a term, right?). My coworker commented that I seem to read a lot of nonfiction.

The conversation got me thinking about what my own reading looks like from the outside. The current batch of books is perhaps not especially representative of how I see my own reading. I found nibs’s comment in the most recent FMD about not seeking out much new music interesting--I don’t recall seeking out much in the way of reading material after the jalapeño was born, excepting books about babies, breastfeeding, sleep, and all that good stuff. My brain was just so overloaded trying to make the transition to being a parent that I couldn’t take in anything else. Meanwhile, one of my great memories of my maternity leave with the peperoncino is tearing through book after book, many of them young adult fiction.

I’m an inconsistent reader. I get ambitious, I take breaks. I get books from the library only to end up returning them on their due date not having gotten through a single page. But I also adore the experience of reading, and I get nearly as excited about talking about books as I do about reading them. (Which you can probably tell right now, as you’re silently saying, “Pepper, just wrap this damn thing up already, would you?")

The featured image for this post is a pie chart of my current reading habits. Feel free to share a pie chart of your own along with whatever it is you've been reading lately.

Fun fact: my first attempt at the pie chart added up to a total of 130%. Perhaps I need to read more books about math?