Dear Friends,
At the beginning of the year, you always see all sorts of resolutions and reading challenges that pop up online and in person. It feels like mid-February is around the time where everyone has given up on them – the lists have proven to be stressful, or uninspiring, or just more time-intensive than they expected. Maybe we put too much pressure on ourselves in making them strictures rather than suggestions to help inspire us in broadening our reading choices. I think most people do better reading things for joy than requirement.
Here at the Libray, one of the options I always include on the reading challenges I offer is to think of a book that you absolutely hated in high school, and try re-reading it with fresh eyes.
For me, this trend started with The Great Gatsby, that old staple of freshman year English curricula across the country. It was a book I loathed in school, and carried the assumption of that distaste well into adulthood. But I had a friend whose literary sensibilities I have always greatly respected, and it was one of their very favorite books. This was someone with whom I agreed on plays, novels, movies… I figured that, even if I still didn’t enjoy Gatsby for myself, I could at least appreciate what my friend saw in it. In very early June, in my late twenties, I sat down on the front stairs and tried again.
As Nick Carroway says:
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
Maybe it was just the right moment in time for me to find it again. It was summer, I was closing in on the age of the narrator (Nick turns thirty during the novel), and the language suddenly felt beautiful and vibrant in a way it hadn’t when I was thirteen. Freed from having to list and interpret the heavy-handed symbolism, I could see it as Nick’s elegiac attempt to impose narrative order on a strange and tragic moment in his life. With more experience and knowledge, I could put the characters’ lives into the context of the first World War, Prohibition, the social changes and social strictures of the 1920s, and just the sheer messiness of humanity. Teenagers are not noted for introspection, sentimentality, or regret; as an adult I could appreciate how much of Nick Carroway’s character is shaped by those traits and feelings – as well as enjoy how acerbic and sharp-eyed Fitzgerald’s writing could be.
C.S. Lewis (an author I have not warmed up to on re-visitation) wrote exactly one book that I think about fairly frequently – An Experiment in Criticism – which outlined his idea of “literary” versus “unliterary” readers. While a lot of what he says about these two types of readers does not work for me, I do love his basic premise that these two modes have nothing to do with what you read, but rather with how you approach what you’re reading. A literary reader is open to what the book has to say, savors the words, lets the experience of the book shape their world view in some way. They might come to it again and again, finding new things in the text each time. A literary reader does not differentiate between “highbrow” or “lowbrow” but instead engages with the books on their own terms.
I love that idea. I also want to add my own idea that there are literary and unliterary moments in every reader’s life. That sometimes you enjoy something for the pure, momentary entertainment – following what happens next to the end, enjoying it, and then never particularly thinking about it again. Then, other times, you just have the right frame of mind to really delve into something, sink into its words and feelings, take the time to find all its hidden depths. Both have their place in our lives. We can certainly train ourselves to be more “literary” readers overall, take more time with what we read, mull it over, really commit to the mental and temporal space for those books. But I think there is also a great deal of value in finding one in just the right moment for it to hit home.
I read The Great Gatsby in an afternoon. Spent the next day thinking about it. And then read it again.
With that in mind, I am going to recommend trying a book you hated when you were younger. I can’t promise it will be better than you remembered, or that it will strike you in new ways. You don’t even have to finish it if it still does not appeal to you. I just want to encourage you to approach it with an open mind and a literary sensibility. You never know, it might be eye-opening.
Cheers,
Meghan
Meghan Hawkes
Skidompha Public Library