Riordan, Haddix, and Barrett Browning

Those of you regularly check out The Wardrobe Door might have noticed that the "What I am Reading" sidebar has gone unchanged for sometime. Last night, I finally finished Rick Riordan's The Battle of the Labyrinth, and I enjoyed it a lot. Riordan balances well the epic and the mundane, exemplified in the scene near the very end of the novel when Poseidon shows up at Percy's birthday party. The awesome presence of the sea god along with the awkwardness of Percy's mom's ex meeting her new boyfriend illustrates the apples and oranges tone of the whole series. This mostly works for me, though there are times when I find it jarring. All in all, I find the basic premise of the books fabulous and inventive. I think Riordan crafts one of his most complex and interesting characters in Nico, and I am eager to see how he develops in the final book of the series.

I should say that I also read Margaret Peterson Haddix's Found recently, but I read it too quickly to post it here as in process. It's a compelling story which presents some classic issues (adolescent identity, adoption, and time travel) in a new way. I couldn't put it down and am eager to move on to the next in the series. I recommended it to my 9-year-old who also really enjoyed it.

Finally, I get to the meat of this post. The reason it takes me so long to read whatever I am reading is that I also read for a living. I tend to divide my reading into professional reading and reading-for-pleasure. While I do teach a course in YA fiction, I still consider Riordan and Haddix pleasure reading, whereas Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, which I've just finished reading with my seminar, is professional reading. However, I do take great pleasure from most of the professional reading I do. Aurora Leigh, for instance, tells a fabulous story in a lush and impressively crafted form. I think I've read it 4-5 times now, and each time it is a different text to me. This time, I was less interested in Aurora's personal story and more interested in her professional story. Of course, those of you who know the poem know that those stories ultimately come together, and that's my message here.

All the reading I do pleases me, and much of the reading that I think has nothing to do with my job ends up finding its way into my writing or into my classroom. When Aurora Leigh comes to discover that her engagement with the world around her and her attempts to put her soul into words on the page are fundamentally the same project, she reminds me that my students, my profession, my family, myself and even the texts themselves are better served if I do not separate the professional from the personal.