Summer Reading

Or, an Action Cookbook origin story

Before we get to today’s essay, I’ve got an update on Week 1 of the ACBN’s brand-new game, Where in the #@&% is Glen from Cincinnati?, in which readers attempt to locate a culinary supervillain who’s holed up at a restaurant somewhere in America.

---

Calling All Food Detectives

---

In Week 1, Glen offered a number of clues, but only seven readers correctly determined Glen’s location—The Starving Rooster in Minot, North Dakota!

(One additional reader guessed a different restaurant in Minot.)

The first correct guess was by Jeff Golds, and he receives this week’s ACBN merch package; the other correct (and near-correct) guesses earn points toward the ultimate Action CookBox prize at the end of the 10-week challenge. I’ve gone back and annotated last week’s post to show you what the actual hints were hidden in Glen’s poem, so you can get some insight into how I—uh, he—crafts these riddles.

Of course, by the time Jeff showed up at the Starving Rooster, Glen had already fled.

But he left behind a fresh set of clues as to his next location!

Near the Crossroads, in a small town

A roadside stop of decent renown

Serves a dish that draws attention

For its peculiar dimensions

Who’s the chef? I can say not.

I’ll just say, it is no Scott.

Pound the pavement, come on in

This hearty dish is awfully thin.

Think you can find him? Place your guesses through the Google Form (and not in the comments or anywhere else, please!)

Now, on to today’s piece.

---

Summer Reading

It’s only mid-July, just barely past the halfway point between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and yet I can already feel the end of summer creeping in.

In many ways this is good; late summer, for all its oppressive heat and humidity, brings some of my favorite parts of the season—fresh sweet corn, plump vine-ripened tomatoes and zucchini from the farmer’s market, the promise of state-fair midway food and early-season football tailgates not far ahead. My kids go back to school in less than three weeks, and for all the fun they’ve had this summer, I’m looking forward to living with two slightly-less-feral creatures come fall.

At the same time, a slight, nagging sense of dread lingers, mixing in with the twilight buzzing of crickets and cicadas, a sense that I’ve forgotten something.

I still need to do my summer reading.

You see, every year during middle and high school, the noble and well-meaning people tasked with educating me would assign a book or list of books to read over the summer. It would be an entirely reasonable amount of reading, something that could be parceled out in small bits over the course of three months and help students like me stave off total summertime brain rot—and every year, I would wait until the last possible minute to accomplish said reading.

This is, of course, in keeping with how I do virtually everything still to this day. Why work at a manageable pace throughout the time available to me when I could just work in a blinding panic at the eleventh hour?

Unfortunately, it had the unintended effect of turning me against much of the classic literature that I was supposed to be developing an appreciation for. (Maybe The Catcher In The Rye is a good book. It seems like people like it? I have no way of knowing if that’s true, though.) I would rush through the reading in a last-minute panic, barreling past any subtext or nuance or chances to connect with the work on a personal level, and then I would dutifully grind out essays on how yes I think the tree in A Separate Peace represented the tree of knowledge even though that’s not true, it was just a plot device, Finny needed to fall off of something and it needed to be something Gene could shake and you can’t shake a rooftop and god that book stunk BUT I DIGRESS.

I would get perfectly acceptable grades on these assignments—my niche as the B-minus student underperforming his test scores comfortably secure—and see no reason to ever change.

One summer, though, I screwed up.

The summer before my senior year, my AP English reading list was a dense one. I was to read three hefty books—The Iliad, Crime and Punishment and Catch-22—and write a series of fifteen essays from a series of prompts related to those books. Depending on the editions, that’s roughly two thousand pages of reading and around ten thousand words of writing, a nice healthy amount of work even if spread out over twelve weeks.

I, of course, waited until right about now—a Monday three weeks before school started—to even bother to look at the list I’d been handed in early June. And that’s when I realized it wasn’t due on the first day of school.

It was due when we picked our schedules up for the year, that Friday morning, four days from when I realized it.

This was roughly 18 months before the launch of Wikipedia, and though Cliffs Notes existed at the time, I wasn’t about to explain to my parents that I needed to go to the bookstore to get them. There was no shortcut through this pile: I had to read the books, and I had to read them quick. I read The Iliad on Monday. I read Crime and Punishment on Tuesday. I read Catch-22 on Wednesday—I’m glad I saved it for last, as I actually enjoyed that one—and then I set to writing the fifteen essays on Thursday.

Now, in many ways I am not the same person that I was at seventeen years old.

In the ways that actually matter, though, I am exactly the same person, and this means that after about four or five essays, I got a little loopy. I started deviating from the prompts, taking smart-assed takes on the essays and writing stuff simply because I thought it was funny. One prompt referenced the hero’s journey, and asked us to write about someone heroic—I wrote an exaggerated take on why I, a shit-for-brains seventeen-year-old, was the world’s greatest hero.

By the time I turned it in, I was sure I was going to get in trouble, or at least get a bad grade; I had quite explicitly made a mockery of the assignment, and there was no way it was going to fly with my teacher.

I got a 98.

It turned out that my AP English teacher, Ms. Glenn, appreciated my sense of humor. She found the essays hilarious—in fact, she loved them so much that she read a few of them to the class. It was in that exact moment that I realized that writing—even on a topic I very much did not want to write about—could be something more than an assignment.

It could actually be fun.

So, in spite of my absolute worst efforts to the contrary, I actually took something from a summer reading assignment that has latest for decades since.

And now you know who to blame for all of this.

(Thanks, Ms. Glenn.)

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

Tell us about a teacher who made a difference for you.

(Or, barring that, tell me how much you hated A Separate Peace.)

Getty Images / Liam Norris