It was summer, stinking hot in a small town and I was fifteen and bored. The town librarian had been giving me grief since I was eleven and in the sixth grade, when she issued her first decree that I wasn't "old enough" to check out what became the first of a long line of books I had to fight to read. It was also the first of many times when one or both of my parents trudged down to the library to insist equally firmly that she had no right to restrict my choices as I had their permission to read whatever I wanted.
The summer of my thirtieth year was especially difficult for this poor beleaguered woman. Her worst day came when I insisted on checking out all of Proust, every one of Thomas Wolfe's novels, and while I was at it, Joyce's Ulysses as well. After all, I reasoned, I had two weeks to keep these books and I was a fast reader.
So I took them home, to the old iron glider under the grape arbor, and I propped myself up on a bunch of pillows and dug in with the same glee most people reserve for hot fudge sundaes. I fanned the pages and decided to read Look Homeward, Angel first because I like the way all those words leapfrogged over each other on every single page. Wow! The exuberant rush and gush of all those words! The torrent was overwhelming, the words blurred, I was losing the meaning. I knew I had to slow the pace somehow before I would have to admit that the librarian was probably right and perhaps I really wasn't "old enough" to make sense of it.
And so I turned to Proust, finding relief within his exquisitely nuanced precision and pacing. My love of all things French was born with Proust, as I marveled at his privileged people and their luminous lives. Who were they really, I wondered, and was all of Paris like this, and if so, how soon could I get there? For the next two weeks, I cut back and forth between that unlikely duo, Wolfe and Proust, sweating from July's heat and the emotional impact of Brother Ben's death (best read when one is fifteen), then cooling off with the soothingly elegant rituals of Monsieur Swann and company.
	"It mattered that education was changing me. It never ceased to matter. My brother and sisters would giggle at our mother’s mispronounced words. They’d correct her gently. My mother laughed girlishly one night, trying not to pronounce sheep as ship. From a distance I listened sullenly. From that distance, pretending not to notice on another occasion, I saw my father looking at the title pages of my library books. That was the scene on my mind when I walked home with a fourth-grade companion and heard him say that his parents read to him every night. (A strange sounding book-Winnie the Pooh.) Immediately, I wanted to know, what is it like?" My companion, however, thought I wanted to know about the plot of the book. Another day, my mother surprised me by asking for a "nice" book to read. "Something not too hard you think I might like." Carefully I chose one, Willa Cather’s My ‘Antonia. But when, several weeks later, I happened to see it next to her bed unread except for the first few pages, I was furious and suddenly wanted to cry. I grabbed up the book and took it back to my room and placed it in its place, alphabetically on my shelf." (p.626-627)
Two weekends ago, I found myself accidentally proving the old theory that Harry Potter is a gateway drug to the wider world of serious literature. Standing in the very back of a gigantic horde at my local bookstore at midnight, wedged into a knot of adolescents reading People magazine through oversize black plastic glasses, I picked up and nearly finished a great American superclassic that I’d somehow managed to avoid for my entire life: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Under normal circumstances I would have been perfectly happy to go on ignoring it—the paperback had an unmistakable high-school-syllabus stench about it—but I was bored to death and the aisles were clogged with potbellied wizards and it was the only readable book within arm’s reach. A few pages in, I found myself hooked. By the time I got to the register, I was three-quarters of the way through (just after—spoiler alert!—Lennie the man-child mangles the bully Curley’s hand) and all I really wanted to do was finish it. But the employees were all clapping because I was the last customer, so I closed Steinbeck right on the brink of what felt like an impending tragic climax, took my Potter, and left. Ironically, this meant that Of Mice and Men was now suspended at roughly the same point in its dramatic arc as Rowling had suspended the Potter series before Deathly Hallows. So I went home and conducted a curious experiment in parallel reading: a two-day blitz of 860 pages, with a pair of nested climaxes—one hot off the presses, one 70 years old.
Finally at the end of my escape to "Bookland" (as dumb as it may sound), I decided to go back out to my parents. My mom called my dad, who, unbeknownst to me at that time, was at the car getting our family’s jackets. She told him that she was going to take me down the boardwalk further, and browse more stores. After she hung up, we headed down the long line of shops and restaurants, pausing occasionally to walk inside the quaint, snugly side-by-side stores and browse their individual items on sale. Eventually, my mom got tired, so we found a bench to sit on and patiently waited for my dad.
Moss, Joyce, and George Wilson. Literature and Its Times. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1997. Print.
Richard Wright, in his essay “Discovering Books,” explains how reading books changed his outlook on life and eventually his life itself. The first book that widened his horizons was an overtly controversial book by H. L. Mencken. I have a story not so dissimilar from his.
Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 5th ed. Ed. Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2002. 1616-26.
For me, like many students born around the 90s, that story took the form of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. As a first grader, the story was just beyond my grasp, so my dad read to me from that sacred text, one chapter a night, sometimes two when I begged. And piece by piece, I was dragged into this whole new world. By the time we were halfway through the next book in the series, I was reading of Harry’s heroic acts as often as my dad was reading them to me, and by The Prisoner of Azkaban I was reading them on my own
The impact that reading Of Mice and Men had on me is not unusual, many people are influenced by what they watch, listen to, and read. Many parents and guardians want to protect their children from the potentially bad influences that can be found in these various mediums. Parents have a lot of control, as they should, in what their children are exposed to. They can moderate what they watch, read, and listen to in the home. However, out of the home it becomes harder to control. In school, many classes, primarily English, introduce students to books and films as part of the education curriculum. As the students get older, the reading material becomes more mature. For decades guardians and parents have been fighting to keep literature they deem inappropriate out of their children’s classrooms. This has led to many books, including Of Mice and Men, to being banned. According to the American Library Association, in the past decade – from 2000-2009 – 5,099 books were challenged. http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
I’ve always taken after my dad, so it should not have been a surprise when my reading habits took after him too. My whole life I have been able to sit and read for hours on end without disturbance, however as I began to read your book The Book Thief I felt a shift. It wasn't your book per say. It was more like the entrance to a new era. The hours I spent on the fantastical worlds turned into minutes, and the time I spent with my mom became time spent with my father. It just took your book to realize what was truly happening. I was growing up.
No one could ever comprehend the hatred I had for reading- no one. Reading to me was just like being deathly ill, stuck inside, watching the neighbors play and know you couldn't join. On Monday morning I sat down in my teacher Mrs. Daniels class. I had a strange feeling reading would be an assignment coming up soon. I was dreading what I knew she was going to say next. “Class you will have 4 weeks to complete this book.” As I heard these words come out of her mouth I lowered myself into my seat like a turtle slowly going into its shell. I felt as if I was drowning and no one could save me until my life was over. Not only did I hate reading but I hated it even more when I was forced to. I thought in my head, “Why. Why make us read a dumb book that will do nothing but take away my social life.” Never did I know the book I was about to read would have such an impact
I remember vividly, scrolling through the isles and shelves of books looking for my next adventure. I had already read Swiss Family Robinson, and Robinson Crusoe, so I regarded myself as an accelerated reader compared to my classmates, but the task I was about to undertake would prove far more daunting than anything I had attempted thus far. As I walk throughout the isles I see the books getting thicker and thicker. I thought to myself that maybe
Baym, Franklin, Gottesman, Holland, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
Baym, Nina et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1995.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and Meyer Howard. The Norton anthology of English literature: The major authors. W W Norton & Co Inc, 2006. Print.
The books that lined the shelves were of many different colors, of many varying ages, and of many various authors. The bindings were leather and paper and even a cotton fabric material, and the lettering embossed upon them was in gold and silver and sometimes in plain ink. Authors that had been passed on reverently from age to age sat mightily in their rightful places, next to their respective equals: such writers as Defoe and Hawthorne sat side by side, while others, like Whitman and Thoreau surrounded them. Each book had been lovingly placed in its specific niche, and as the little girl gazed about the room, it was obvious to her that many hours had been spent placing and caring for this massive collection.