What I'm Reading Next--Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

I just finished reading El capitán Alatriste. I wrote yesterday about how I may have discovered in it a whole new unit for my Spanish 5 class, so today I'll limit myself to a brief recommendation of the book itself. First of all, for those of you who don't feel up to reading a 200+ page book in Spanish, there is an English translation (Captain Alatriste). It's a very fun read. At the heart it is an entertaining adventure story. Captain Alatriste is a veteran of the Spanish wars against the Netherlands in the early 17th century, now back in a decadent and declining Madrid trying to get by as a sword for hire. He takes a job to ambush and kill two unidentified Englishmen, and soon finds himself way over his head in the middle of major historical and political events, just trying to get out with his skin in tact. Layered over the story is the historical and cultural context of one of Spain's (and Europe's) most interesting periods, as it comes out of the Siglo de Oro and finds its power and influence in the world declining. Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Velázquez all appear as characters, as do various kings and princes. It's just fun all around, especially for fans of historical fiction. Enjoy!

Next up: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Sometimes all it takes to get me to read a book is to hit me over the head with it enough times. I first encountered Carol Dweck's name during our faculty development day back in February. The presenter was Harvard neuropsychology professor Jane Bernstein, and she made extensive reference to Dweck's research at Stanford on achievement and success. Largely because of that presentation, Mindset is one of the two summer reading books for faculty. Then there was this NYT piece about the book, which my wife forwarded to me a couple weeks ago. In the end, I got the message, and I'm reading the book. I'll let you know how it is.



Posts about previous titles:
Watership Down
Three Cups of Tea
True History of the Kelly Gang
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: El Capitán Alatriste

I just finished reading Watership Down. The advantage of reading a book that I first read when I was eleven is that it goes pretty quickly 22 years later. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it is the story of a small group of rabbits who, worried that something terrible is about to happen in the warren in which they grew up, go off in search of a new place to live. The world is a big and scary place, full of predators, men and their machines, and other rabbits both friendly and hostile. It is a great adventure story, and I enjoyed reading it as an adult at least as much as I did the first time through.

Re-reading it with a teacher's eyes, I certainly understand why my teachers assigned it to me in the first place. Interwoven with the entertaining adventure story are all kinds of problems that young teenagers can identify with. There are issues of being outsiders and getting bullied. There are authority figures who won't listen to or believe the younger rabbits. There is the need to declare independence from those authority figures and set out on their own. There are societies with oppressive and unjust rules. I have long since forgotten any class discussions we had about the book when I was a student, but there are so many things to talk about that I wish I could go back and be a fly on the wall while seventh grade Jeff worked through the story with his class.

Next up: El capitan Alatriste
I am not a native Spanish speaker, so my Spanish needs regular maintenance. One thing I try to do is a read a book in Spanish on a regular basis. With the school year approaching, it seemed like a good time to dust off the language skills. The Alatriste series has been incredibly popular in Spain and has already been made into a movie. A number of my English students from our time in England recommended both the books and the movie to me.

While we were in The Gambia, a Colombian friend there lent me another of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's books, La reina del sur. What impressed me the most about that book is that Pérez-Reverte, a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, is able to tell a gripping adventure story without sacrificing any of the literary merit of the book. He is a gifted writer, and I'm looking forward to digging in to his most popular series.




Posts about previous titles:
Three Cups of Tea
True History of the Kelly Gang
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: Watership Down

I'm in the middle of a largely Comcast induced vacation from blogging. It's a long story, but let's just say I'm not recommending Comcast to my friends these days. In the meantime, I've had a chance to finish my latest book, and I have a few minutes at work today to write about it, so here goes.

I've just finished reading Three Cups of Tea. The story in the book is right up the alley of this blog, so I guess it's no surprise to say that I loved it. To give a quick summary of the story, the co-author/subject of the book, Greg Mortenson, goes on an expedition to climb K2. On the way back down, having failed to reach the summit, Mortenson accidentally wanders away from his guide and stumbles into a tiny village in the mountains of northern Pakistan. After the villagers nurse him back to health, Mortenson goes on a tour of the village and is shocked to see the children gathered in an open field, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks, with not a teacher to be found. He promises to come back and build them a school.

The journey that follows is inspiring. One school project turns into a half dozen, and then a dozen, and so on, all in rural villages in Pakistan. As the book concludes, Mortenson is in post-Taliban Afghanistan starting to plan for a whole new series of schools there. As I got to know Mortenson through the book, I found myself in awe that someone could so selflessly, and even naively, accomplish so much good in the world. The world would be a much better place if there were more of him.

The overall message of the book is a simple one. The antidote to extremism is not violence but education. If we help to provide a secular, modern education to the children of the world, we are cutting off the ready supply of converts to extremist ideologies. If we want to be safer here in America, we need to provide social services, education above all, to children around the world. We will be much safer if we are loved for our good works, rather than despised for the death and destruction we cause. The chapters surrounding the events of September 11th and Mortenson's response to them are particularly moving. I highly recommend this book!

Next up: Watership Down
It's time for a re-read again. Watership Downwas my summer reading going into seventh grade. My mom made reference to it while the family was gathered over the Fourth of July weekend, and I realized I didn't remember almost anything about it, other than it's about rabbits. That's a good sign that I should pick it up again. Hopefully I will enjoy it as much now as I did twenty or so years ago.




Posts about previous titles:
True History of the Kelly Gang
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: Three Cups of Tea

I just finished reading True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. I came upon it through my habit of scanning through the lists of award winners on Amazon and picking a couple that seem interesting. In this case, Carey won the Booker Prize for his novel about the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

The premise of the book is that Kelly has written the story of his life to his young daughter in order to explain himself to her, so that she will not believe the lies that established society has spread about him, but will know that her father was a good man doomed by circumstances. In order to create the voice of the uneducated bushman, Carey forgoes the use of much of the punctuation, which takes some adjusting to at first, and would be a great project to teach kids how proper punctuation makes communication clearer; but once the reader gets into the flow of the text, the book is absolutely mesmerizing.

As a protagonist, Ned Kelly is always appealing, always believable, and easy to empathize with. The story of how his life is directed by the poverty into which he is born, and by the corruption that surrounds him, makes for great tragedy. Before we ever start reading Kelly's manuscript, we are shown his eventual capture by the police, and the rest of the novel is like a runaway train, accelerating towards that moment. I finished the book wishing I could reach in and redirect the path somewhere along the line, so that Kelly could find the redemption he is seeking. It's a great book and I recommend it highly.

Next up: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
When I first sent out emails telling all my friends about this blog, my friend Georgia responded that the project was very "Three Cups of Tea" of me. At the time, I was vaguely aware that it was a reference to one of those books that educated teachers all knew about, but I didn't know much more than that. A few weeks ago, my school had its spring book fair, and there it was with the other books for parents and teachers. I bought it, trusting Georgia's taste in books. I'm sure I'll find some blog related inspiration in its pages.




Posts about previous titles:
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: True History of the Kelly Gang

We took the train up to New York this weekend to visit friends from our year on Long Island. It was a beautiful weekend, and great to catch up with people. Back in April we made a similar trip by car, and I have to say I really enjoyed going by train this time. Not having to sit in traffic trying to get out of DC on a Friday evening (or across Staten Island at any time) is totally worth it. Besides, sitting on the train instead of behind the wheel of a car finally gave me the chance to finish reading Lolita and get started on my next book.

It's a stange thing to suddenly find myself reading in public. I have always enjoyed talking about books, but the awareness that I would be announcing my book choices to a largely anonymous audience is definitely an adjustment. When I was choosing what book to read next in my self-imposed cycle (fiction-->non-fiction-->re-read), I went to my bookshelf and scanned through the titles. Lolita immediately popped out as something I wanted to read again, mostly because I had just been skimming through Reading Lolita in Tehran for this blog, and so I had Nabokov's novel on my mind.

At first, I hesitated to choose Lolitabecause I wondered how it would appear to be reading a famously scandalous novel about an older man's relationship with a school-age girl as part of a feature for a blog about schools. Judging from the wink-wink, nudge-nudge tone with which my friends asked me how I was enjoying the book, and the eyebrow-raised curiosity with which my wife watched me answer, I wasn't wrong to think twice. In the end, though, I decided to go ahead and read Lolita, in part because at the time nothing else seemed as appealing, but mostly because I felt that if I started changing my reading habits too much because of the blog, both reading and the blog would start to seem like more of a chore than a pleasure.

So let me adress all those raised eyebrows out there, both real and imagined. I did, in fact, enjoy the book very much. Nabokov is a very seductive writer--a master stylest, even in his adopted language. He plays with language like some combination of magician and matador, drawing you in only to dance away again and begin a new trick. The great accomplishment of the book is that he takes a monstrous character--a pervert and confessed murderer obsessed with pubescent girls--and, without diminishing the horror of his crimes, persuades the reader to empathize with him. We are not asked to forgive him, only to understand him, despite his horrible acts. Lolitais a tragedy in the classic sense, in which a fatal flaw (both in the sense of deadly and predestined) leaves an inevitable trail of destroyed lives in its wake, the protagonist the most destroyed because he must also suffer the guilt for the destruction he has wrought.

Lolitais certainly a sensual book, especially in the first half when Humbert Humbert is in the early stages of his 'romance' with young Dolores Haze, but it is no more an apology for his proclivities than Macbethis an apology for ambition or Oedipus for incest. What it is, is an exquisitely written book that plays on the full range of human emotions, and leaves the reader feeling that he has truly come to understand another human being.

Next up: True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel
Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel about Australia's most famous outlaw, narrated by Ned Kelly himself. Another prize winner, for my list. The Booker rarely lets me down.




Previous titles:

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: Lolita

Latest in the "What I'm Reading Now" feature of this blog.

For the last few weeks I have been reading Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick. I originally put it on my Amazon wish list back when the New York Times picked it as one of the best books of 2006, and just now finally got around to reading it. I have to admit that when it comes to deciding what to read, I tend to be a bit of a snob. There are so many wonderful books out there, that I don't want to waste the three or four weeks it usually takes me to finish a book on something that I'm not going to love. (Part of the problem is that I feel compelled to finish every book that I start, even if I'm not enjoying it.) So I tend to gravitate towards the classics and the award winners. I like my reading to come pre-vetted.

Mayflower was indeed worthy of its praise. It does what every good non-fiction book should do, educate while telling a great story. Before reading this book, my knowledge of early American history went pretty much like this:

In 1492 Columbus came sailing on his three ships, ended up in the Caribbean instead of in India, and landed on Hispaniola where he proceeded to decimate the Native population. Then in 1620 the Pilgrims came (I'm from Massachusetts, so Jamestown was always less important to us), landed in Plymouth, nearly starved to death, but with the help of the local Indians managed to survive the winter; they had a big meal to celebrate being alive, and lived happily ever after. Then in the 1770's the Colonists got tired of the overbearing British, tossed their tea in the harbor, Paul Revere rode to Lexington and Concord, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and we had ourselves a country.

I am condensing and oversimplifying (I don't want my former teachers or current colleagues to be too horrified), but that is the basic timeline of what I knew about early America. With that as a starting point, Mayflower knocked down my misconceptions on a number of points.

1. While many of the passengers on the Mayflower were religious Pilgrims seeking escape from Charles I's oppressive rule, about half were businessmen and fortune hunters, hoping to cash in on the natural resources of the Americas.


2. Far from being the "first contact" situation that I had always imagined, there were a hundred years of interaction between Europeans and the Indians before the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, a fact that made their relations with the Indians far more complex, and far more dangerous, than I had previously thought, and made their early diplomatic successes all the more impressive.


3. The 150 years of history that I was missing between the founding of Plymouth and the American Revolution is mostly about conflict and war between the Indians and the European settlers who kept expanding to take more and more land. When I think of Indian wars, my image is more of The Trail of Tears and Custer's Last Stand: the big westward push of the American states. But before they could do that, they had to conquer the Northeast.

In fact, the real story told in Mayflower--above and beyond the departure of the Pilgrims from Holland, their deadly sea journey, and their even more deadly first winter in Plymouth--is the story a generation later of King Philip's War, in which the English lost 8% of the adult male population (almost twice the percentage of American men killed in the Civil War) and the Indians lost between 60 and 80 percent of their population to war, starvation or disease. It is more than the imagination can fathom.

In the epilogue, which he titles "Conscience", Philbrick cites a 2002 estimate that there were approximately 35 million descendants of the Mayflower passengers living in the United States. If my math is right, that works out to a little less than 10% of the population, a reminder of just how much their story is our story, and how important it is that we learn from the mistakes that were made by our ancestors along the way. I highly recommend reading this book.

Next up: Lolita
I'm the kind of person who likes to create artificial structures to give his life a sense of order. Recently, I have been reading in a specific rotation: one new fiction book, one new non-fiction book, re-reading a book off my shelf (I keep pretty much every book I read, so I have lots to choose from). It's the re-reading spot in the rotation, so I have picked up Lolita. I first read Lolita in college mostly to see what all the fuss was about. My recent post on Reading Lolita in Tehran, brought it back to mind, so I thought I'd give it a more mature read.

What I'm Reading Now

One of my favorite things about being a teacher is hanging out with other teachers. Teachers as a demographic tend to be interesting, engaged and knowledgeable people, and I enjoy learning from them. Teachers also tend to be readers, and I love sitting around the lunch table or in the faculty room talking about what we are all reading and what our favorite books are. If it hasn't come up already here, I love books.

With that in mind, I want to add a little side piece to this blog, not directly related to the project of designing a school, but more with the idea of creating a community for teachers to engage with other teachers about things that interest them. So, over on the side bar, just above the archive, I've got a section called What I'm Reading Now. I'll keep it up to date with whatever book I happen to be reading at the moment. (I tend to savor, so it will usually only change a couple of times a month). I'd love to hear from other people who have read, or are interested in, the same book. I'd also love to hear about what other people are reading. Once I've finished a book, I'll post my thoughts on it, and put up a new one.

First on the list: Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick. I'm about halfway through so far, and am enjoying it immensely. I have to admit a very poor knowledge of the actual events leading up to and following the founding of Plymouth Colony, despite growing up about 50 miles away, and almost annual pilgrimages (so to speak) to Plymouth Plantation for most of my elementary school years. I'll post a fuller commentary when I finish, but so far I really recommend it.

Coming soon on the subject of books:

My Five Favorite Books of All Time

and

Five Books Every Student Should Read Before Graduating