The Eclectic Reading Habits of a High School Librarian

Reflections on how my work influences my reading, how audiobooks expanded it, and how to keep it eclectic after I retire

What are you reading? It’s a question I ask and get asked often.

Being a high school librarian makes my answers delightfully eclectic. I love that.

At previous high schools, I read books written for a young adult (YA) audience, mostly sci-fi, fantasy, and realistic fiction, along with news and magazine articles. At my current school, I still read YA, along with poetry, adult fiction and nonfiction, and a steady stream of news articles and scholarly studies. How will retiring impact my reading habits—and how can I keep them eclectic?

I filled up my current journal this week. That’s what got me thinking about this. At the back of my journals, I keep a list of the books I’ve read during that journal’s time span. I began this journal in August 2023, so with just one week left before my summer break begins, this particular list provides a handy school-year snapshot.

The titles include student and faculty suggestions, selections for Dragons Read (my student-led library book group), books I ran across while curating the library’s collection, and ones for school-related research or professional development. They’re all in the mix amid poetry books, recommendations from friends, family, and a book group I joined last year, and titles I stumbled across some other way.

As I finish each one, the words, images, stories, characters, and themes that waft from this rich broth of books mingle with the questions, ideas, feelings, and insights they evoke to create a complex flavor of sorts. Sometimes there’s also an emergent element from their fusion that I can’t quite place. It’s an ever-shifting flavor that feeds my hungry imagination, a hunger that’s never quite satisfied.

Last week, my wife and I watched Carrie Pilby, a quirky rom-com about a brilliant young woman who’s a bit socially awkward and her reluctant (at least at first) quest to complete a challenge list from her therapist that includes tasks like make a friend and go on a date. In a scene before he gives her the list, he asks what she’s been up to since her last appointment. She tells him she read 17 books. Later, a flashback shows her expressing dismay to her literature professor that, even if she lives a long life, she won’t be able to read all the books she wants to read.

I’m not that reading-centric, but I get it. I’ve worked in four different high schools over the decades, and in each one I’ve been surrounded by colleagues and students whose areas of expertise and interests differ from mine. It’s an environment that regularly reminds me how much I don’t know—and motivates me to keep learning. And unlike students and faculty at a college or university, we’re together in the same building seven hours a day, five days a week—or more. This dynamic, this energy is one of the reasons I chose to teach in high schools.

During the years just before and during the pandemic, the hours I could dedicate to reading dwindled as other parts of my work absorbed more and more after-school time. Tension rose within me as my imagination grew hungrier, weaker. I had to do something. So, when our campus reopened in February 2021 after a year of Zoom teaching, I turned to audiobooks in an attempt to leverage my commute, walks, and chore time to reinvigorate my reading. It worked.

Now, about that list. My track record at remembering to add books as I read them won’t win me any ribbons. In my eagerness to keep reading, I often forget for several weeks, then use the timelines in apps like Libby (yeah, public libraries!), Libro.fm, and Audible, and the reading history on my Kindle to catch up. Print books (the ones that aren’t from a library) get stacked on one of two growing towers on the floor of my study. These stacks include books I’ve finished reading and ones I’ve acquired (often at a poetry festival, writing conference, or Little Free Library) but haven’t read yet. To find those missing from my list, I scan the top five or six on both stacks. 

The two stacks on the floor and the short stack on the nearby shelf hold a combo of books I’ve finished reading and ones I haven’t read yet.

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So…what have I read this school year? In the past ten months, I’ve read 44 books, a respectable number, though I expect many high school librarians have longer lists. I listened to most as audiobooks, except for poetry which I prefer to read in print, and graphic format books which I read in print or as eBooks.

Here’s the list, with my favorites in bold:

Poetry

• Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans

• How to Communicate by John Lee Clark

• Two Brown Dots by Danni Quintos

• Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson

• Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy edited by John Brehm

• Lately by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

• Thine by Kate Partridge

• Unalone by Jessica Jacobs

• Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance edited by Sandra Beasley

Adult Fiction

• Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera

• The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• Honor by Thrity Umrigar

• Mangoes and Mistletoe by Adriana Herrera

• Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree

• The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandana

• Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

• The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell

• Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

• My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman

• Foster by Claire Keegan

YA/Children’s Fiction and Nonfiction

• Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro

• Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

• Sold by Patricia McCormick

• Flamer by Mike Curato

• Looking for Alaska by John Green

• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Makesy

• Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert

• Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom by Lynda Blackmon Lowery

• Migrant Mother: How a Photograph Defined the Great Depression by Don Nardo

• When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed

Adult Nonfiction

• Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite by Dean King

• I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times by Monica Guzman

• The Breaks: An Essay by Julietta Singh

• Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

• Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir by Brian Broome

• Awakening Your Ikigai: How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day by Ken Mogi

• What We Say and How We Say It Matters: Teacher Talk that Improves Student Learning and Behavior by Mike Anderson

• Why Are We Still Doing That?: Positive Alternatives to Problematic Teaching Practices by Persida Himmele and William Himmele

• Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning by Liz Cheney

• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

• Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students by Annie Abrams

• Annotation (MIT Essential Knowledge Series) by Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia

• Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

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Wait, you might be thinking. When you retire, you can read whatever you want! Won’t that be cool?

Absolutely! But I’d like my book blend (hmm, that makes it sound like a custom cocktail, which I suppose it is) to continue fueling my imagination like the mixture above does. As much as I enjoy escaping into “cozy fantasy,” a new genre for me exemplified by Bookshops and Bonedust and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, I don’t want to curl up and stay there for months at a time. Such diversity won’t happen by accident. My book group will help, but I’ll need to figure out how else to continue cultivating such cross-pollination in my imagination. Another book group, perhaps?

Then there are the articles and studies I read regularly from the databases to which our school subscribes, most of which aren’t available through my public libraries. In addition to relying on these resources to inform my librarianship, I’ve consulted scientific studies in Science Direct to compile briefs for family members facing new medical diagnoses, accessed the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and numerous other news sources through ProQuest Central Student, and geeked out on myriad topics of personal interest in the scholarly archive JSTOR.

Thankfully, JSTOR curates an expanding collection of open access research reports, scholarly books, and special collections, so I won’t have to stop cold turkey. Individuals not associated with a subscribing institution can sign up for a JPASS for $19.50/month. Since other research databases charge $30 to $40 per article for non-institutional users, if they offer access at all, this is quite reasonable. I suspect there’s a JPASS in my future. Like a diverse book blend, maintaining access to at least some of the databases I now rely on will take intention—and strategizing.

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I skim my list again. Is it eclectic because I’m a high school librarian, or did I choose high school librarianship because I love learning about so many things? Yes, and yes. Curiosity is and will be the main ingredient in keeping my book blend diverse.

What’s on my summer reading list? I plan to start with these:

• The Salt Path: A Memoir by Raynor Winn

• Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

• Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) by Salman Khan (founder of Khan Academy)

• The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

• Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku by Natalie Goldberg

• Danger Days: Poems by Catherine Pierce

• Malcolm and Me by Robin Farmer

• A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger

• The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning by A.J. Jacobs

I’ll see where my reading path winds from there. . .

I can already feel these books beckoning, sense my anticipation building. I’ve journeyed partway down The Salt Path this week. What will I learn from each book? What will surprise or move me? I can’t wait to find out.

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Here’s a poem for your pocket until the next post: So Many Books, So Little Time by Haki Madhubuti, and four bonus links:

• Book Talking - a post by Kwame Dawes about the importance of reading poetry books that are single poetry collections by an individual poet.

• Reading Environments - an essay by John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind poet reflecting on the reading materials to which he has access—or doesn’t.

• Book Spine Poetry Wedding Invitations - about the creative ways two book lovers wove books into their special day.

• Things that Don’t Suck - a Substack written by Andrea Gibson, a poet on my 2023-2024 reading list. Check it out!

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What are you reading? If you’re retired, how (if at all) did retirement change your reading habits? If you’re still working, how does your work influence your reading?

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