Summer Reading Report Card

I am happy to report that I am managing to read this summer. Once I took reading in the summer as a given--classes came to a close, and what else would one do? Now I continue onward: as one set of classes ends, I teach the next set. But summer still feels spacious in a way that other seasons do not, in part because I'm working from home more, commuting less.I would likely not have picked up Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, if a friend hadn't talked about how much she liked it; she read it after her grown up son raved about it. After the movie came out a few months ago, she asked if I had read it, and after her recommendation, I added it to my ever growing list of books to read.I read The Martian (I wrote about it in this blog post) and liked it well enough, but Weir hasn't been one of those writers whose work I seek out. Project Hail Mary felt familiar yet different. I liked the flashbacks better than the parts in the spaceship. I found the premise intriguing, the in-depth mechanical…