Summer Reads

I’m sorry but I will not stop writing about summer and its end for awhile – I’m Canadian so I can bitch about the change of seasons more than others.

So, my topic of discussion for today is the reading we do in the summer.

We as in my socio-economic class or whatever post-modernist pith is being used these days. There’s inescapable to my life the undercurrent of capitalism which makes summer reads more than just the reading normal people do. Besides why read when u can find a more cerebral and relevant take on life in shows like ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ than you will find in anything written after John Cheever?

That is not to say that people do not write well these days, I think you need more than the reception of five or ten years to really decide a books mettle. So taking a large leap over post-modernism – because all they had was a few epiphanies about highly relevant topics, nothing more – the only good books I’ve read are by minority women.

I have no intention of reading some essentialism into this finding – all I’m saying is that Katherna Vermette, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Adichie and Nnedi Okorafor and many many others is the only books I’ve enjoyed by people still living and breathing. Even Stephen King can’t write for shit anymore. But I digress…

As an English Major, I reserve the right to rant about books. But, I want to talk about books as a social idea. Books are read because other people read them and so are important.

There’s much in this world that I would admit I don’t know in the same way that most people exhale and shrug if you ask them the last time they read a book in November – try it yourself if you don’t believe me.