Falling Back in Love with Reading

     As an English major, most of the last three years of college have consisted of me reading books and writing papers. I didn't mind the writing papers part. There's something very formulaic about writing a literary analysis. Thesis, claims, evidence. The part I started to dread, though, was the reading. I have a confession: I hate Shakespeare. An English major and future English teacher who can't stand Shakespeare? I know, I'm a fraud. But in general, I have little patience for literature written before the 20th century. It just seems so fake. I can't get into characters who talk like every word out of their mouths has come from a script, or address their siblings and best friends as "Mr." and "Lady" or somesuch nonsense. And those books have such little scandal! Or the scandal is so over-the-top like a triple murder and a faked hanging. Orrr the scandal is that somebody kissed somebody's third cousin before they were married.

     All that is to say that I didn't like most of what I'd been assigned to read over the past three years. I read them all, because I think it's absurd when English majors don't READ the stinking books they're assigned to read and just fudge their way through the final essay. First of all, that gives a bad name to English majors everywhere who are already frowned upon by society for majoring in a fruitless "art", but it also just doesn't make sense because didn't you major in English knowing you would be reading a ton of books?

     Anyway, so I read the books but I didn't like most of them and because I was reading so many books I didn't like and it took so much time to read these old crusty novels I started to think that maybe I didn't like reading after all. Because I was reading Charles Dickens and Henry James, where sentences lasted half a page (I kid you not, there were sentences that had so many clauses I was surprised they didn't start "ho ho ho"-ing), it took a lot of effort to fully grasp what was happening and to keep paying attention to the 5-page descriptions of sitting rooms and gardens in order to get to the meat of the action. I would count pages and every page I read would feel like some small victory. And a chapter! To get through a chapter felt like I'd run a marathon. I started to think that maybe that's what reading was like once you became an adult. Boring as heck, and hard, and tedious. So I just stopped reading for fun, since I was too swamped with my assigned reading to pick up anything else with words on it, and because I just assumed I wouldn't be able to get into a novel, since I hadn't enjoyed one in some time.

     It was only after I'd had a semester off of English classes studying abroad in Spain that I started to get back into reading for fun. I read six books in less than three months this summer, which isn't much for some people, I know, but is a ton for me. Sure, none of the books I read had literary "merit". They were romances and realistic fiction and fantasy. But man did I get sucked in. I didn't keep track of pages or chapters or how much longer I had until I could put the book down and call it a day. I didn't have to time myself or reward myself with candy after I'd finished a chapter. I lost track of pages and time and let the book play through my head like a movie. This was why I loved reading. That feeling of being so immersed in another world that you forget where you are or what time it is. You just read, get wrapped up in the characters and the world and the drama.

     I don't care that the books I like have no literary merit. I wish we'd stop focusing so much on that word, "merit". Just because it's not old, crusty and "canonized" doesn't mean it's not worth while. And I think if we let students read more of what they like maybe we'd have more well-read citizens in this country. Maybe illiteracy rates would drop. Maybe people would be more worldly and less ignorant. Instead, we force-feed students Greek mythology and Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne and sonnets and Mark Twain and soon enough young people think that that's what reading is: irrelevant, useless, and a waste of time. Let's give them books like The Hate U Give, books that speak to the times, books that kids can see themselves in, books that kids can learn from and become more informed, compassionate citizens because of. Let's give them memoirs and sci fi and fantasy. I know no better way to teach sympathy and creativity than reading. And if there are two things we lack in this modern, digital age it's sympathy and creativity. But that's for another blog post.

-SE Wagner