Reading List Experiment: Inspiration and Drudgery

As an English major during undergrad, I frequently felt like I was on a forced marathon of reading. Most nights, I read two to three hundred pages, depending on how many literature classes I was taking. During my last semester, I took three literature classes, an upper-level Latin class, and an anthropology class. The amount of reading was almost enough to make me want to never look at a book again. And yet, when I arrived home after graduation, the only thing I wanted to do was to read. Not to read something productive, mind you, but something that I could blow through with little to no effort in comprehension. All I wanted was a good story. No biographies, no plays, no Old or Middle English, nothing that required the slightest bit of brain power. I found my book soul mate in Brian Jacques' Redwall series. Yes, I am 22 year old college graduate, and yes, those books were written for children. But there was something in them, something in Martin the Warrior and Mariel and Matthias that no book I had ever read in college had given me: simplicity. They were written by Jacques as a way to entertain children who attended a school for the blind in England. Sure, they contain messages of the importance of hope, truth, and courage; and every single book contains an epic battle between good and evil. But these books weren't written with any social commentary that I needed to parse out. They weren't written to tell of someone's tragic life story that contained lessons of the limits of humanity. Nor were they written to reveal any mysteries of the universe. And that was what I loved about them more than anything else. It was so refreshing to not have to slog through a list of texts that had been deemed "IMPORTANT" by a college curriculum or a professor or society as a whole. Not that I have anything against important books and their revered authors; in fact I advocate having children read them whether they see the value in them immediately or not (admittedly, Shakespeare's value wasn't apparent to me until my sophomore year of college--Titus Andronicus' hilarious gorefest is one of the most underrated works of all time). It's just that after an entire educational career based around reading "important" books that are good for you--like broccoli is good for you--it was nice to have some cake.  

And this brings me to my Reading List Experiment. After having exhausted the entire collection of Jacques' menagerie, I've decided to turn my attention back to books that are more useful in an academic setting. So, I compiled an ever-growing list of books that I've been hearing people rave about as being "important," and I am currently on book number two. Book number one was Sapphire's Push, the novel that the award winning movie Precious was based upon. Book number two is Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. And since there is no such thing as a book club in my neck of the woods, I'm going to start my own with only two members: myself and Hippolyta the semi-functional laptop. I say semi-functional because she's getting quite old and her screen just isn't what it used to be. As a matter of fact, she has decided that she has done enough work for today and is beginning to get crotchety, so the one-sided discussion of Push will just have to wait until next time, or I won't be able to see what I'm typing.

"You can tell a lot about a guy by the way he responds to the words "BBC miniseries."

-A