What PGS Teachers Are Reading This Summer: II

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. Here, Mr Payne, Mrs Robinson, Mrs Worley and Ms Burns share their summer selections.


David Payne

I hope to read three books this summer:

The Moth and The Mountain, by Ed Caesar. It’s the story of one of the first attempts by a European to scale Everest. I should declare a personal interest here as I know the author, but I have always enjoyed reading about exploration and  the limits of human endurance (and have just read a biography of Shackleton which, no doubt, explores similar themes).

On recommendation from a dear friend I intend to read The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, despite the fact it was published before I was born! The friend who suggested that I read it said that it would change the way that I thought about conflict and the First World War in particular, and I have been meaning to read it for a while, having been reminded to do by the commemorations to mark the end of World War II.  

Finally, I hope to read All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Again, I am slow to this but have been intending to read this for a while. It comes highly recommended, and I think we all have much that we can learn and understand from the impact of conflict (of all types, and in its broadest sense) on children.

Sam Robinson

Reading has been a highlight of lockdown, though our new puppy, Fox, has a terrible habit of eating the last few pages of any book left within chewing height, so I've had to think up my own endings for one or two! 

The highlight has been Isabel Allende's A Long Petal of the Sea. Previously, Allende has described her own situation: 'I have been a foreigner all my life, first as the child of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the USA. Maybe that's why a sense of place is so important in all my writing. Where do I belong? Where are my roots?' These are the questions faced by the protagonists of her moving and profound novel, which focuses its narrative around a real, but unlikely, historical event in 1939: the poet Pablo Neruda shipping over 2,000 Spanish refugees from internment camps in France to Chile on the SS Winnipeg after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War. 

As a piece of historical fiction, this comes under the category of epic, spanning the Spanish Civil War to Pinochet's juntas, but the novel is more human than this, too, as characters, buffeted by time and tide, try to find ways to belong. A timely reminder that we live in a world where the battle between the desire for self-determination and the reality of uncontrollable events is everywhere.  

Miranda Worley

I'm going to read Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo. Its a counter-factual history, re-imagining Africans as the masters of European slaves in a reversed slave trade, following an English woman's experience. I've enjoyed Girl, Woman, Other by the same author and I hope this will be equally as well crafted and absorbing.  I like that this author selects women as her main protagonists, and exposes the truth in all our lives.

Emma Burns

I recently watched Selma, a very powerful biopic of Martin Luther King and the march from Selma to Montgomery. I will be reading Walking with the Wind by John Lewis, who was a key part of King's entourage, and later became a Congressman in his own right. 

On the same theme, I also have Slay in your Lane (Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinene) and White Fragility (Robin DiAngelo)  to read: I also borrowed The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon from our amazing PGS Library which is about immigrants arriving in London in the 1950s from Jamaica.

As I now am middle aged, I have begun to read Midlife: a Philosophical Guide by Kieran Setiya, in the hope that it will offer wisdom.

For fiction, I have randomly picked Chatterton (Peter Ackroyd) White Noise (Don DeLillo) and Birds of America (Mary McCarthy) from my bookshelves as they have been sitting there for a while, unread. 

I can honestly say that I am really excited about the reading time ahead of me.