Anthony Bromberg
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You might think it sounds funny, but I’m going to be doing
a lot more reading this summer than I did for the entire past year
of classes.
Summer has hot days and warm evenings that last well into the
night. Summer has boredom and sweat. Summer is the perfect time to
read. Whether you want to escape or be intellectually or
emotionally stimulated or, ideally, all of the above, reading is
the way to go. I mean think about it; we’re supposed to milk
the whole poor-intellectual-arty-college student thing which makes
movies too expensive to do every day, and besides, what else are
you going to do? Sit around and watch the mailman walk by pushing
his cart while the grass grows?
So, at this point hopefully you want to be hanging out at the
pool, paperbacks in hand and sunscreen applied. What kind of books
do you want to read this summer?
Because maybe you’re a better student than I am, and
you’ve done a lot of reading, gone to class and become so
sick of books you can’t simply skim through that you want to
pick up some lighter fare. There are plenty of fun books out there
right now, so maybe you’ll try a “Harry Potter,”
(I just read the third one myself) but then you remember that you
already saw the movie. You browse through some other best-sellers
and start to become disillusioned because you know the Hollywood
endings to what seems like most of them.
So, with your head slightly hanging down and some of your
initial-invigorated-small-elf-tickling-your-toes excitement
beginning to shatter, you head over to what Barnes & Noble or
Borders (depending on your bookstore orientation) tend to refer to
as the literature section. Momentarily, you get the smallest shiver
of icy dread down your soon-to-be well-tanned spine as the word
“literature” registers in your consciousness as a
red-alarm word setting off your class-teacher-school sensors. Take
a breath, and it passes. Relish the fact that no matter how serious
a book you pick up, no one is going to make you raise your voice in
a crowded room and analyze the use of eye imagery as a metaphor for
existentialist philosophies on the dying and birthing process. No
one is going to give you a quiz to see how your progress is going.
And no one is going to make you write a paper.
So, pick up whatever book catches your fancy. If you’re in
the mood for some anti-authoritarian dreamy prose, give the
recently deceased Ken Kesey a whirl. If you want to do some heavy
thinking on your own, without any outside pressures, pick up a
philosophical treatise if you can stomach it. Don’t be afraid
of the classics. You’ve got all summer so read a rumbling
behemoth like “War and Peace,” or “Crime and
Punishment,” or “Ulysses.” You could even read
poetry that makes you want to shout violent and touching words into
the skies crisp summer nights. You may thank yourself later for
accepting the fact that you don’t have to be an English
student, and might even get by as an engineer, to find greater
truths or friends in characters of a book with small print and a
lot of pages. And don’t be afraid to pick up a trashy novel
that is based on plot if that’s what gets your rocks off.
Not only will reading give you something to do, you’ll
also find that it gives you something to talk about. Say you run
into an old friend back home and there’s an awkward lull in
the conversation. Without missing a step, you’ll be able to
fill the void with witty banter about Leopold Bloom and Roddy
Raskolnikov.
Then there’s the added bonus that the opposite gender
finds reading incredibly sexy. No really, don’t laugh because
they do. Or at least I try to tell myself girls want me because I
pretend to be well-read, and not just for my body.
OK, so you don’t have to be a reading fanatic like me and
you don’t have to be somewhat obsessive about the
possibilities that lie within the moonshine gems we call words, but
remember not to be afraid of them either. There’s a lot to
read about beyond the classroom.