Opening

I'm not working hard enough on the other blogs, so I thought I would throw this one out there. Since I do a lot of reading of books for this age group. As a middle-level reading teacher, I feel obliged to read as much material as I can. It doesn't hurt that I love reading this stuff.

In recent months, I've read all of the His Dark Materials series, the Septimus Heap series, and the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (or whatever that one is called). I've really enjoyed the first two books of the Ranger's Apprentice, and I've read the first books in the Dark is Rising series, the Pendragon series, and the Artemis Fowl series. I wasn't able to finish Gregor the Overlander, Cirque du Freak, or Into the Mist. I read Fever, Maniac Magee, Hoot, Among the Hidden, Don't Look Behind You, Wanted, and The Outsiders.

I've been a lifelong reader of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and several science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. I've read a little Grisham and Tom Clancy. I've recently fallen in love with Ursula Le Guin, Jim Butcher, and especially Michael Chabon. I've read The Chronicles of Narnia, all of the Harry Potter series (several times), The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, the Foundation series by Asimov, quite a bit of L. Ron Hubbard's "dekology" (before I knew anything about scientology, and without any connection with that religion before or since). John Irving is an old favorite, as are Nabokov (I don't usually think of his work as a scholarly interest - it's too weird for that) and Philip Roth. I read a little Salman Rushdie to shock people, and enjoyed his prose despite that.

Apart from these, I'm also a grad student working on a dissertation on Faulkner. As a scholar, I've studied Faulkner (of course), quite a bit of regional fiction, Hemingway, Cather, Henry James, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, Whitman, Dreiser, Chesnutt, and lots of others. I've done a good amount of work on Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and some medieval texts such as Piers Plowman, and, of course, Beowulf. I've read a little classical literature - Utopia, some Greek tragedies (especially Sophocles), the Iliad and the Odyssey, some of the Divine Comedy. I've read a lot of Plato and Aristotle for my philosophy double-major.

I also think it's important to mention that I've recently become a connoisseur of classic film, especially film noir. I've dabbled in some foreign film and fallen in love with Godard, Kurosawa, and Bergman. I think it helps to see the connections between film and fiction, especially insofar as one informs the other, artists in one medium often work in the other, and movements in one medium cross to the other. It's an interesting intertextual relationship that I would like to spend more time studying.

I suppose I'm trying to give my credentials, not merely try to brag and sound pedantic.