summer reading round-up

Randy invites us to give a run-down of current or recent reading material. I'll bite, especially since I can count on one hand the number of days left in my season of discretionary reading.

• Joanna Kadi, Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker. Kadi combines theory, reflection, and polemic, talking through her childhood, Disney films, homophobia in the workplace, and a range of other subects. An intersectional approach to critiquing hegemony, all from the point-of-view of a lesbian, working-class, Arab-American woman.
• Lolita Hernandez, Autopsy of an Engine. Hernandez offers stories based loosely on her experiences working the line at Cadillac assembly plant here in Detroit. Touches of magical realism, particularly in a Rashomon-like story that narrates an engine block falling off the line from multiple points-of-view, i.e., various line workers who all have different songs in their heads. Hernadez is going to visit my honors students this term, who are reading some of her work.
• Laurie Halse Anderson, Fever 1793. I was a little disappointed in this novel, Anderson's follow-up to the great young-adult novel Speak. Fever 1793 is about a sixteen-year-old's harrowing experiences during the titular epidemic in Philadelphia. Lovely plot, compelling protagonist, but comparisons to Speak (an absolute classic) are inevitable and this lacks the intensity.
• Alice Sebold, Lucky. Sebold's memoir of getting raped during her first year of college. Actually, in lage part, this is her memoir of how others react to her and to her trauma. This got huge amounts of press a few years back. The hype was deserved. Honest, filled with real people, filled with moments that make you wince and some that make you nod. The poet Tess Gallagher, Sebold's creative writing teacher at Syracuse, figures into the narrative in interesting ways, becoming Sebold's friend during her attacker's trial. A fascinating representation of the role trauma plays in the classroom. There's a sequence involving Gallagher pressuring Sebold into writing and then workshopping a poem about her rape. Powerful.
• Stephen King, The Colorado Kid. Picked this up at a rummage sale a few weeks ago and fell for the packaging. Hard Case Crime is a new imprint that uses retro, noirish looking covers for new works of pulpy detective fiction. King liked the idea and lent his humongous name, and an indulgent novella, to the venture. King has a blast with over-the-top, much-exaggerated Maine accents, which become distracting after ten or twenty pages, especially given the story-within-a-story plot device King uses (two old newspapermen telling the story of a mysterious dead man to their young intern). A quick, but ulimately less-then-stimulating, read.
• Lots and lots of Kenneth Burke. For article revisions. There are so many ways to look at Burke on identification. I've never had a conversation about Burke that didn't involve somebody saying "That's not how I read Burke." So I'm trying to walk the line between considering the reviewers' perspectives and holding true to my own reading.