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What I’m Reading: Flies and Cuckoos
What are you reading? I read a lot. Sometimes, it goes with the job. Gotta keep sharp. Sometimes, what I read is a product of curiosity.
Since my job is a mix of teaching various levels of students, fiction sand poetry writing, and writing speeches, this covers a lot of territory. Some American classic one day, a leadership book the next, and probably the Bible as well throughout.
The best writers, you’ll hear me often say, are the best readers. I’m not suspect of writers who don’t read. I’m dismissive. I will not hire a writer who hasn’t got a strong grasp on the classics.
Controversy
Two classics I’m reading this week are controversial and occasionally excluded intentionally from high school libraries. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and 
I don’t say censored because the United States government didn’t stop Ken Kesey or William Golding from writing or publishing, or anyone here from buying them. They may be censored in intellectually stifled countries like China and the Sudan, but here, just go to Amazon.
These two are controversial for reasons of violence, language, and sensuality. I have a student who needs to learn them so I’ll work with them. Read them and you’ll see why. Whether you believe they should be taught to teenagers is another question, but there is no doubt
Are you struggling through a book filled with difficult issues? Contact me. I can help.
What about you? What’s on your nightstand this week?
The Sot-Weed Factor (First Line)
The Sot-Weed Factor
In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, 
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (First Line)
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
Learn why this particular first line matters.
More great books.
The Catcher in the Rye (First Line)
The Catcher in the Rye
‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, 
John E. McIntyre’s trigger warning
“Take a seat, school’s back in session. Here’s John E. McIntyre’s “trigger warning” to new students at his editing class at Loyola University Maryland.”
John E. McIntyre’s trigger warning
This is a fun, yet honest look at how one editing professor considers his journalism class. I agree.
Meanwhile, see 
Saul Bellow on Chicago
I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, 
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong…
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
— G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
― Gustave Flaubert
Lloyd Jones, Mr. Pip
But you know, Matilda, you cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. For me, Matilda, 
― Lloyd Jones, 