Summer's over--reading update

So summer is officially over and we're back into the full swing of another school year. It's going to be a busy one, with lots of work for a self-study as we prepare for re-accreditation next year (it's a private school thing).

But I did read some great books this summer. It was a summer of gay books. Band Fags!, by Anthony Polito, was so evocative of my high school days in marching band in the early 80's. Candy Everybody Wants, by Josh Kilmer-Purcell (which I ordered because I always enjoy his columns in OUT), was a little slow to start, but ended up being a novel with great, quirky characters. So much less tragic than Running with Scissors; yes, I'm one of the few who didn't like that one. Then there was When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris, with some "embaress yourself by laughing out loud on the plane" moments. I have loved every book of his I've read (and I think I've read all of them) as well as his work on NPR. And I'm psyched that we get to see him when he's here in town next month.

Then there was a non-gay interlude, with Odd Hours, the next in a series of Odd Thomas (he's a guy who can see ghosts) books by Dean Koonz--great spooky fluff to pass the time, followed by the non-fiction Shadow Divers, about a group of SCUBA divers off the NJ coast who find a WW2 German submarine wreck while the experts are all saying "there's no German sub there." I'm not a history buff at all, but have done SCUBA in the past, but it comes across as a mystery, with great character development.

Now I'm in the middle of Anne Tyler's Digging to America, but I'm having to put that aside because I've just been turned on to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I was talking to two other teachers at school about books and this Pulitzer Prize winner came up because the author is going to be in town for a reading. So some of us are going to that, which means I need to read as much of it as possible in the next week. Then, because of that same conversation, I've got a collection of Graham Greene short stories (I've never read any Greene), Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham, and The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst all waiting on the table.

So my plan is to not work when I get home, as much as possible, and do some real relaxation by reading as much as possible. We'll see how that plan unfolds.