It's Monday! What are you reading?

I was determined to finish one of the books I started last week, so I plunked down on the couch with The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

I'm not sure I went into book coma mode...just started skimming faster and faster, feeling like I had to wrap up this complicated story of family dysfunction and connection.  Even though it is written as first person memoir, Walls just glances over traumatic childhood events with the same shoulder shrugs and moving on as the child she once was did to survive.  I wanted some kind of social justice conclusion, but there was none to be had; it was what it was, end of story. The way Walls describes it, at least three of the grown children have walked away from the chaos seeing it clearly in retrospect, without replicating it in their current lives.  There was chaotic dysfunction and addiction, yes, but there was also a consistent undercurrent of love, and the family has maintained its connections because of it.

This complex ending left me feeling a bit disoriented when I finally closed the book and got off the couch.  Maybe because the story hit a little too close to home, with the blame game played out daily in the news, or maybe because of the underlying collective depression many of us (myself included) seem to be feeling as we ride out the pandemic.  Maybe because it made me wonder how many of our students in our classrooms and libraries are experiencing chaos outside of school, and how that is affecting learning--and teacher retention--with this climate.  I'll have to sit with these feelings awhile, but in the end, I think I'll just have to accept them...the way Walls has accepted her own history.