What PGS Teachers are Reading This Summer

The summer holidays are the perfect time to explore new books, writers and ideas. Portsmouth Point asked PGS teachers to reveal what they are going to be reading over this summer.  

Dr Cotton

Seeing the fantastic Sixth Form production of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead reminded me of how much I love Stoppard, so I shall re-read Arcadia, an enduring favourite. Thinking of old favourites reminded me of Virginia Woolf, and I shall treat myself with To The Lighthouse, which I deliberately decided not to read many years ago so I could look forward to it at a later point. And I can never have enough  of cookery books; I adored Sam & Sam Clark’s Moro, and have been given Moro East, so shall look forward to immersing myself in that over the summer.

Mrs Morgan

I have a horrible habit of reading two or three books at a time, snatching odd pages of each here and there but rarely fully focusing. One of the things I am most looking forward to about the summer is the opportunity to sit and read without distraction. First on my list is Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire. Having heard his keynote speech at the Festival of Education recently, I was impressed with his sharp intellect and passionate engagement with racial issues in the UK. Next on my list is An Educator’s Guide to Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools. In September, I begin my new post as Head of Pupil Wellbeing and I am hoping this book will help to prepare me for this exciting new role. Finally, no holiday would be complete without a bit of trashy reading. My all-time favourite author of easy reads is Irish author Marian Keyes. Her new novel The Brightest Star in the Sky comes out late July and I can’t wait to binge-read it whilst lazing on the beach.  

Ms Burden

One of the books I plan to read this summer is “homework”: you may not be aware that staff at PGS are asked to select a book from a list and read it over the break. I rather like this as it forces me to choose something I might not usually have considered picking up/ This year, I’ve gone for The Secret Teacher: Dispatches from the Classroom, by an anonymous teacher, as it sounded quite funny. No doubt I’ll also read my wife’s choice (Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore).

I’ve also chosen Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, which is a re-working of Sophocles’ Antigone among a British Muslim family. Shamsie was one of my tutors on an Arvon creative writing course a few years ago and I’ve enjoyed one of her previous books. Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy, has been recommended to me a number of times, so I’ve added that to my list. Lionel Shriver’s books never disappoint and I’ve selected one of the only ones I haven’t read yet, The New Republic. My one-year-old twins are starting to enjoy books, especially lift the flap and finger puppet ones, and we usually read ten books a day together (over three short sessions!). The fictional character I currently identify with the most is Rabbit from Julia Donaldson’s Rabbit’s Nap – about an exhausted bunny who never gets a chance to sleep!


Mr Burkinshaw

I will be reading Educated by Tara Westover, her acclaimed memoir of how she escaped an isolated, abusive and traumatic upbringing within a survivalist family in Idaho, deprived of any formal schooling, to attain a fellowship at Cambridge University. I am also hoping to get to the end of Ezra Pound's epic, The Cantos, which I began over thirty years ago, as a student, and have been meaning to get round to finishing ever since. Pound had an extraordinary influence on so many great poets, from T.S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg. The Cantos are viewed by many as the greatest  poem of the twentieth century and by others as completely unreadable (or, at least, indecipherable). 

Unreadability was not something the great Edwardian children's writer, Edith Nesbit, was ever accused of. Having read the first two books in her superb "Psammead trilogy", Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet, my daughter and I are about to embark on the final installment, The Story of the Amulet. A former Sumerian desert god, now fallen on hard times and living in a gravel pit in Kent, where he is befriended by five children, the cantankerous, self-absorbed but magical Psammead is one of literature's great creations.