The List of Many
I missed out.
When I was in 8th grade, the smart class got to read The Hobbit. I was bitterly jealous, having read that one on my own. The smart kids were being forced to read it—I loved the notion of reading and writing about The Hobbit as homework!—with no real interest of their own. Instead, my class read boring, depressing stuff like John Steinbeck's The Red Pony. (In retrospect, I actually liked those Steinbeck stories.)
Then in high school, I was elevated into the honors English classes, so at last, I was one of the smart kids. (Not in all subjects.) While my class had to read Catch-22, Heart of Darkness, and Pride & Prejudice, the dumb kids got to read Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and The Oddysey. The injustice of it! To this day, I've still never read those first two. Can you believe it? I have some major catching up to do.
There's so many books out there. Very intimidating. More fantasy novels than I'll ever be able to check out. And science fiction, I want to read more of those, too. Many have been recommended to me that I haven't yet seen fit to pick up. Nor I don't want to stay limited to these genres, either. I've absorbed more nonfiction books than I ever realized, too.
I've always heard that writers, though they are highly encouraged to read a lot, find less and less time to do so the more they write themselves. If life keeps me from taking in as much as I want in all these coming years, well...God willing, I look forward to sitting in a comfortable chair by a fire someday when I'm old and grey with thinned, wizardly hair all loose around me, snoozing and dreaming with a book half-opened in my hand.
"We read to know we're not alone."
- Shadowlands
Word of the Day
The books I read, while not typically disparate, have been steadily expanding from one another; no writer should stay too confined, after all. Though I'm not sure I agree with him, R.A. Salvatore told me once that he thought the last few pages of James Joyce's The Dead was the finest piece of writing ever.
When I was in 8th grade, the smart class got to read The Hobbit. I was bitterly jealous, having read that one on my own. The smart kids were being forced to read it—I loved the notion of reading and writing about The Hobbit as homework!—with no real interest of their own. Instead, my class read boring, depressing stuff like John Steinbeck's The Red Pony. (In retrospect, I actually liked those Steinbeck stories.)
Then in high school, I was elevated into the honors English classes, so at last, I was one of the smart kids. (Not in all subjects.) While my class had to read Catch-22, Heart of Darkness, and Pride & Prejudice, the dumb kids got to read Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and The Oddysey. The injustice of it! To this day, I've still never read those first two. Can you believe it? I have some major catching up to do.
There's so many books out there. Very intimidating. More fantasy novels than I'll ever be able to check out. And science fiction, I want to read more of those, too. Many have been recommended to me that I haven't yet seen fit to pick up. Nor I don't want to stay limited to these genres, either. I've absorbed more nonfiction books than I ever realized, too.
I've always heard that writers, though they are highly encouraged to read a lot, find less and less time to do so the more they write themselves. If life keeps me from taking in as much as I want in all these coming years, well...God willing, I look forward to sitting in a comfortable chair by a fire someday when I'm old and grey with thinned, wizardly hair all loose around me, snoozing and dreaming with a book half-opened in my hand.
"We read to know we're not alone."
- Shadowlands
Word of the Day
The books I read, while not typically disparate, have been steadily expanding from one another; no writer should stay too confined, after all. Though I'm not sure I agree with him, R.A. Salvatore told me once that he thought the last few pages of James Joyce's The Dead was the finest piece of writing ever.
posted by Jeff LaSala at 1:56 AM
4 Comments:
Indeed. Ulysses is a piece of crap. :) However, I did manage to BS the midterm in college when I had to write two essays on that book. I got a B+. I'm still very proud. I never *really* read that book. Generally speaking, I have a low opinion of James Joyce.
Heh, that reminds me of a report I had to do on Ivanhoe in high school (jr year, I think). Only time I ever used Cliff Notes. Loved Beowulf; could have done without half of the Canterbury Tales. One of my personal favs was reading Thomas Milton's Paradise Lost my senior year. And I consider Steinbeck one of my inspirations, more for his short stories than novels.
My reading has definitely been neglected as I write more, which is unfortunate, because I get inspired to write every time I read. I finished up Sword of Shannara over my vacation. It definitely helped me get through some rough spots where the creative juices failed.
I was posting a comment and it got really, really long... Imagine that - me getting long-winded while talking about reading and James Joyce and so on. Gee, that *never* happens... So I moved the comment to my blog.
I don't remember a lot about high school English classes, except that I liked the British lit class better than the American lit class and that I got into trouble in 10th grade for circulating a petition among my classmates requesting that the grammar instruction stop in favor of more literature. I got into some trouble on that last one. But it was so stupid to waste our time on memorizing grammar rules - after *years* of memorizing grammar rules - when there was so much reading we could have been doing instead.
It seems to me that in high school several of you read some things we didn't touch. That's OK - I thought I had a good high school education until I got to college, and then I thought I had a good college education until I got to grad school. One of the problems is that in high school what you read of, say, The Canterbury Tales is the sanitized bits, so that only the persistent who approach the text later in life - perhaps in a college class or in reading on their own - discover just how bawdy the text really is. Being in the class can help you more easily understand how important the stylistic and structural elements are, as well as how the text fits into the historical progression of literature/culture. Beowulf is important as literature but also as a historical document, but that's a whole 'nother point, and, look, I've gone long-winded again.
Well, I had started a comment and it grew too long, so I moved it to my blog as a post - and there I encountered some kind of technical glitch that made publishing the post cause a javascript error. The problem seems to have been resolved; the post is now published. But the comment I'd left here earlier hasn't shown up. Oh, well... It was just something about English classes in high school. I do think it's important to note that the Chaucer you read in high school is usually significantly different (read, sanitized) from the Chaucer you might encounter on your own or in a college-level literature class, where the bawdiness really stands out. The high school lesson informs you about the historical importance of the text and about its place in the literary tradition, at least. What bothers me are English classes I've heard about in which Goethe or Camus or Dostoyevsky are included in the curriculum. Ummm.... *not* English literature. Anywho... Back to work or something.
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