May 26, 2011

Dear Students:

I hope you're enjoying the start of a great summer. As you returning students remember, summer reading is part of our school-wide humanities course, which aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue, to create shared intellectual/artistic experiences, and to integrate our experiences here at the Governor's School. Each of the readings listed below touches on topics we know are important to you: the arts and artists and their connections to the world around them. The school's faculty and staff is also deeply interested in these topics; we have enjoyed choosing the texts and we'll be reading right along with you this summer in anticipation of our discussions during the first week of school.

Over the summer, please select one reading from the list of options below (but feel free to keep going!). As you see, the reading options include a variety: essay collections, a memoir, a biography, a novel.  All readings are open to (and will be challenging for) all students. The books are widely available at public libraries. If you'd rather purchase your selection, you can also find it in bookstores and on-line. You should read your selection carefully and actively, by taking some reading notes or marking significant passages if you buy your own copy. To give you an opportunity to synthesize your reading, and to promote dialogue in our small-group discussions, we will write on several prompts before discussing the book. You will complete this written response during the discussion session in August, and I will grade your work as part of your humanities course credit.

Reading options (one required):

John Berger. The Shape of a Pocket (2003) A collection of essays focused on the visual arts and opening out onto everything else. Here's an excerpt from a review in The New Yorker: "For some fifty years, the reclusive British writer John Berger has thought a great deal about art and artists, and this collection of essays includes a moving tribute to Frida Kahlo and a brilliant meditation on the achievement of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. But everything Berger has written-essays, novels, criticism, screenplays-has been filled with his passionate concern for what used to be called the state of man. That preoccupation is on every page here, whether he is recalling the patience of Antonio Gramsci or discussing Degas's nudes. [. . .] Berger is one of the few writers who answer questions we don't know to ask."

 

 

 

 

Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking (2007). A memoir on the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne in 2004. It sounds like a downer for summer reading, and it's often excruciating to read, but Didion's use of writing to respond to tragedy somehow transcends and transforms the pain she describes.

 

 

 

Barbara Kingsolver. The Lacuna. (2010). It's a huge novel in every way. I had to be encouraged to keep going past the first 45 pages-then I couldn't put it down (literally: I read while cooking). Written in the form of diary entries and letters, its protagonist grows up in Mexico in the house of Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky. Then he moves to Asheville, NC, where he writes political fiction that gets him investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The New York Review of Books called it a "tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition."

 

 

 

Haruki Murakami. What I Talk About When I TalkAbout Running (2009). The novelist turns to nonfiction here in an exploration of running: for long distances, alone. He's also riffing on a Raymond Carver title (see biography below) and makes a case for talking about much more than athletic efforts.

 

 

 

 

 

Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Addressed to a student in 1903, these ten "letters" read as essays advising the young artist (of any discipline). Sort of the grandfather of Anna Deaveare Smith's Letters to a Young Artist from this past summer, these were a big hit when we read them back in 2007.

 

 

 

 

Carol Sklenicka. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2010). This biography has just come out in paperback, and it offers a carefully-researched and thoughtfully-rendered account of the life and work of this American author. From Publisher's Weekly: "It's ironic that the master of the minimalist short story has his own life recounted in such whopping detail by short story writer and essayist Sklenicka. Earnest and carefully researched, this biography interestingly recounts Carver's working relationship with editor Gordon Lish and other publishing figures."

 

 

 

 

Please let me know if you have any questions. Returning seniors, you are invited to join faculty for our panel discussion after small groups meet. Just let me know if your reading really gets you going about something! I can best be reached by e-mail, which I will check every few weeks this summer: jthomas@scgsah.state.sc.us.  Happy reading!

Sincerely,

Jennifer Thomas, Chair
English and Humanities