My Favorite Reading Memory

   I've had a lot of great reading experiences.  A few come to mind immediately.  Catcher in the Rye in Costa Rica when I was in 8th grade (I thought the cover looked strangely plain. Also, the title confused me.)  Rabbit, Run in London in college (bought it at a book fair).  Ender's Game in high school and then later passing on the series to my youngest brother, who enjoyed it equally.

Delbarton's own Peter Dinkledge
plays Tyrion Lannister.

 
    But I don't think anything compares with reading the George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, Feast for Crows, and Dance with Dragons.  
     A few details about the series and myself.  These five books represent over 5,000 pages of reading.  And it's not fast.  The series contains hundreds of characters and traverses an enormous medieval-esque world.  It is an incredible achievement in prose and imagination--Martin has already been called "America's Tolkien" by Time magazine.  They took me nearly the entire summer, and I was taking four graduate classes to boot.  It was a lot of time.

Yes, it's also a TV show.  But read the books!
Credit: HBO

   
     I could go on about what makes the series so great.  I'm not normally into fantasy--I never read the Tolkien or Harry Potter books.  But there's something immensely real and complicated with the series.  Heroes die.  The reader is forced to empathize with the villains.  It's complex.  It has multiple point of views.  And I like that, because life is complex.  Something you'll find out this year: I'm not a big fan of black and white (see Captain Ahab).

    But it's more than that.  Reading is not just about appreciating craft or story.  Reading is a personal, active, physical event.  A read does not happen in a vacuum.  It happens to a person in time and space.  Going through a story, creating scenes and characters in your head, thinking of connections to your own life, to other books--this is the essence of reading.  It's personal.  It's an experience.  Reading a good novel is not reading your history homework.  It's not reading facebook updates.  And that's what makes it great.

   See, my parents split up in June.  And this summer, I just needed this series.  I needed to spend hours and hours creating a world that was different than my own.  To be there, around my fiancee and my friends, but not there.  To have something that I know that I could turn to.  I doubt I'll ever spend this much time reading one set of books again.  But it was important to me this summer.

   And here's the biggest thing for me: some teachers or parents might tell you that spending that all those hours reading was a waste of time.  I mean, I spent hours and hours on these five immense novels, and what do I have to show for it?  But for me, this summer, reading was its own reward.
   I hope all of you, all of my students someday get to this point with their reading lives.  Read.  Just to read.