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Middle of Summer


Summer is about two-thirds done, and it’s time (for me, at least) to begin thinking about the fall semester. As I write this, I’ve got the skeleton of the Blackboard Learning Management software set up, but I haven’t really settled everything about the course. Every semester is different: some previous readings don’t work any more because the current events or politics have changed (and, to tell the truth, sometimes I assign readings that just didn’t work too well). So every time I teach, I rethink things.

I rode the Great Allegheny Passage bike trip, which I mentioned before, from July 10 to 13. We went from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, about 140 miles. It was gloriously wonderful, and I’ll probably keep talking about it for the next six months. This trip was a direct result of reading some advice about spending money to make yourself happy: spend it on experiences not possessions. Good advice.

Summer isn’t really done yet, so in the few remaining weeks, I suggest you find a shade tree and settle down to do some reading. That’s one of the joys of summer.

Some shade tree reading

These are all very available: you can certainly get them from your local public library, and both Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble nook carry them.

Almost anything by Ray Bradbury is worth a read. I never quite recovered from reading Fahrenheit 451 when I was a boy—it’s about a time in the future when the government has banned books and firemen have the job of finding books in people’s houses and burning them. (The title refers to the temperature at which book paper begins to burn.) Bradbury has written a lot of short stories (which I like because I don’t have much of an attention span). I really enjoyed The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man.

The Bradbury novel brings to mind three other dystopian novels: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell. All were written in the 1930s and 1940s, and all predicted a dire future.

On a lighter note, you might consider digging into both the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings series. (OK—“lighter” refers to the mood of the writing, not the physical weight. Both sets are somewhere near 15 to 20 pounds.) If you have seen the movies before reading the books, you will be amazed at the amount of extra detail you get. If 1500 pages at a clip seems like too much, the original J.R.R. Tolkien tale, The Hobbit, would be a good choice. It’s not huge and epic like the movies; it’s a simple tale originally told for the author’s children. Good shade tree reading.

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