Summer love... catching up on junk reads.

I am ready for summer to begin! Oh, wait. This stack of research papers is not. They will dwindle here shortly... they are so much more fun to write than read, but I will find my way through them. I just hate taking off points, and so I end up just marking them and saying, "Yay! A for EFFORT!" and then the students never care to see what could improve it to say "A for astute academic discovery!!" and so I guess in that regard... Mrs. Rogers, you get a C for over praising average students. But I feel like they all deserve A's for doing the work.

SO then after that I am going to delve into my summer reading and reflecting on movies, books, information on my mind. I keep hearing myself talk about what I am GOING to do. Teaching really monopolizes your time like that-- if you have free time you are planning and grading and not reading and researching. And so I make plans to do it later. The first summer plan will be a good light reading novel. A nice 500 page light reading book about dark scary vampires. This is as close as I can get to a harlequin novel, so I guess it is trashy indulgence.

Last night I was feeling achy & cold sniffly, so I did not do any grading. I nosed into Twitter and Twilight. I am enjoying Twilight so far-- it's a cute little adolescent read, nothing too literary about it, and some so-so kind of use of imagery and realism and symbols. I can already in the first few chapters see how it really does fall into the adolescence genre, though. It can be pretty transparent at times-- Meyers is not hiding the story at all. You can already see in the first thirty pages that the group of weird kids at this high school are going to change Bella's life. She creates connections between Bella and the Cullen kids that are so obvious-- the light skin, being outsiders, her fascination with them... Very obviously setting up some themes for the book. So we will see what happens next. I think I can predict, but I will hold on and post about Twilight again after I finish the book.