I'm Reading! I'm Reading!

Books--they're so precious to teachers. We use our breaks to catch up on a year's worth of reading. We are free, free, free! We are free from the fifteen hour work days. We are free from exhaustion and we are free from grading. Well, during Spring Break we do have grading to do, but we just don't do it.

Spring Break is the time where I can go into the school's library and build a fort out of books and magazines (I call if Ft. Read-o-Sabe). And, of course, there isn't a librarian to kick me out. It's pathetic. I'm so behind in my reading. Did you know that Harry Hamlin is People's "World's Sexiest Man"?

I do have to be careful not to slip into some kind of reading coma. Can you imagine Principal Pécan coming in here on Monday to find me is some kind of reading coma? I'd be sprawled out with Camu and Larry McMurtry clinched in my fists--drool seeping from my mouth--murmuring lines from books:

"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up."

"I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods."

"It was love at first sight."

"George is my name; my deeds have been heard of in Tower Hall, and my childhood has been chronicled in the Journal of Experimental Psychology."

"All this happened, more or less."

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

"Call me Jonah."

"Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a blackboard bolted to it."

"Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them."

"This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."