In the spirit of our good friend Nick Hornby, I bring you… Stuff I’ve Been Reading, the semester-without-classes edition!
Books checked out from library:
The Reserve, Russell Banks
Lush Life, Richard Price
God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre, Richard Grant
from Sand Creek, Simon J. Ortiz
Men on the Moon, Simon J. Ortiz
Books read:
The Reserve, Russell Banks
That’s Revoloting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Boneshaker and Urban Adventure Leauge’s Cycle Touring Primer, both zines
from Sand Creek, Simon J. Ortiz
Indestructible, Cristy C. Road
You know that one book you’ve always been meaning to read? It’s always something a little cerebral, academic and fancy sounding. You carry it to coffee shops and read the first three pages again, and then you stare out the window at the well-dressed businessfolks passing by. You carry it with you to concerts and parties and friend dates, anticipating a few precious moments in which you will read The Book, and look really smart, and impress everyone with your taste in books, and feel better about yourself. For me this book is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire.
It was recommended to me first when I was still in high school, by a quasi-friend named Andrew. (In retrospect, he was–is–a bit of a genius; at the time he fell more into the category of creepy weirdo. Perhaps in support of these two conceptions, he just graduated from Deep Springs.) I can remember him leaning in, his puff of blonde hair way too close to my face: “Dory, you should really read this book,” in his slooowwwww thoughtttful voice, “I think you would appreciate it.” I was disarmed. Weeks later, I special ordered it from a small bookshop downtown. The woman behind the desk recognized my last name and informed me my father had raised me right. Brava! Young ladies reading Freire!
So commences the saga of Pedagogy of the Oppressed as fashion accessory. At Oberlin, the land of preferred-pronouns-please, Paulo escorted me to the dining halls my freshman year. I ate soft serve for dinner and peered over the patent red cover at passing upperclassmen, my teeth aching from too much cold too fast, my eyes wide. Also, definetly not reading. A few months later I found the people who would become my friends– and there, on their plywood college issue bookshelf, right between Foucoult and hooks: my good friend Friere. It didn’t matter whether or not they had read it. What mattered was that it was there.
Am I embarassed? Of course I am! I’m totally missing the point! It’s an incredible fucking book! And thinking of it as a class or social signifier is fucked up! Obviously! But I’ve never made it past chapter two, and maybe I will someday, but I know this much– it’ll be late at night, when I am bored and no one can see me, when I’ve taken it off my living room bookshelf and stopped dragging it to drink coffee with me. I will not read Pedagogy of the Oppressed in public, and I will not read it tomorrow. I will do it on my own time. Probably in bad lighting. Sitting on my bed, late at night. It’ll be illuminating. But, just like every book that really matters, I’ll read it in silence. I’ll read it alone.
