The Reading-Out-Loud Rainbow

There are 79 full days of summer. 79 days for my students to do something constructive, educational, eventful or completely unproductive. The choice was theirs. Good thing the middle school teachers compiled a list of books to assist them in their quest of finding summer activities. Me, I am not much of a reader. It does seem very contradictory seeing as how I am a writer, but let me explain.
I do not enjoy reading because I am a visual/tactile learner. As such, I read slow trying to a recreate the images the author wrote about. In doing this I tend to read the same page twice to get anything I might have missed while imagining. So fiction is out of the question. Instead I focus my reading efforts on nonfiction books.
It took me a few weeks of breaking it down and understanding Toxic Faith, but I finished it a few months before I graduated. I read The Da Vinci Code in three days while on a Thailand beach in the summer of ’06. All the notes I was taking in the margins of Forty Million Dollar Slaves had me finishing it in three weeks at the beginning of ‘08.
I am currently working on: He-Motions (T.D. Jakes), Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Jeff Chang), The Audacity of Hope (Barack Obama), Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded The U.S. (Roland Kelts), Quiet Strength (Tony Dungy), Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation (Natalie Hopkinson & Natalie Moore), Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It (Juan Williams) and The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell). These books in progress, the 20 or so other books I have yet to crack open and the pace at which I read, I think I have the rest of my reading-life plotted out.
I am cocooning into the reader LeVar Burton talked about.

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look, it's in a book - Reading Rainbow. I can go anywhere! Friends to know and ways to grow - Reading Rainbow. I can be anything!
Take a look, it's in a book - Reading Rainbow.

Reading Rainbow Theme, circa 1983

I might only be beginning to be the reader I should have been, but what is assuring are the great authors pumping out book after book in interesting series for this generation. Authors like Ann M. Martin (Babysitters Club) and Gertrude Chandler Warner (The Boxcar Children) have passed the torch to Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), James Patterson (Maximum Ride), Stephanie Meyer (The Twilight Saga), J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter Collection), Patrick Carmen (The 39 Clues), Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians), Christopher Paolini (Inheritance Series), Suzanna Collins (Hunter Games and Gregor The Overlander)
Authors with bestselling books are noticed by Hollywood who in turn produce multimillion-dollar blockbusters every summer. I felt for clever advertising again and jumped on the Harry Potter Book 6 movie bandwagon. 153 minutes of movie magic is better than 652 pages of…pages.
I must say, after watching the movie then hearing all the subtleties and details the movie could not capture I almost wanted to read the book. Then I thought better of it when I realized they hire people to read the books, record it and distribute it. With this whole new world of Audio Books, I finally get to read on my terms. Looks like I have some listening (reading) to catch up on. Only after I finish Eric Van Lustbader’s continuation of Robert Ludlum sifting though Jason Bourne’s identity crisis.