Foot: Pleasure Reading???

I so wish I had the time to read for pleasure right now. I'm so bogged down with reading for school and other homework that even reading Deadline for the Facebook literature circle seems a chore. I look at all the novels to read on my to do list and I almost want to cry. Anyway, this blog isn't going to be about me complaining because I know I'm not the only one buried with school work (well, beyond these few sentences). We're all feeling it at the moment. No, I'd rather talk about the books I plan on reading before summer classes start.

I definitely want to read the Atwood books I bought a few months ago (Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood). I've read both of these books before, but it's been awhile and and I've been itching to read them again. Also, I feel that Atwood, while not easy, is pretty accessible for high school students, especially her novels that are dystopian in setting, like the mentioned novels and also The Handmaid's Tale. I read Oryx and Crake for an individual project in high school and loved it. The characters are engaging, the plot is creative and new; the whole concept is imaginative and I really feel like it would be a worthwhile book to teach in school. In many of my high school classes, we did some type of novel along the lines of dystopian novels and this was definitely my favorite. It also does deal with some of the same themes as Frankenstein as in it can be viewed as a comment on human advancements in science. This can always be connected with such topics as cloning or searching for cancer cures and a lot of students find these topics highly debatable. The Year of the Flood takes place before Oryx and Crake and is also a really good novel, but between the two (teaching wise) I would choose the latter.

At the same time, I want to finish the Percy Jackson series, re-read a ton of other books and I'm still working on my goal on reading all of Shakespeare's plays and a lot more classics that I can't even begin to list. I would also love to get the list of books my cooperating teacher plans on teaching next year and read those in preparation. Ideally, my whole summer would be spent on novels I want to read. However, I know this won't happen, but I will definitely try to read at least a few books for pleasure reading because I think that is highly important. Many students get turned off of reading because they are bored by what they read in class and think all books are like that. That's why I like summer reading; the lists can be mixed up and include books teenagers want to read, not just what we tell them to read.