The Sunday Salon -- The Book Nerd Who Loved Assigned Reading

I feel like I had an excellent reading week. I read and finished Signora da Vinci by Robin Maxwell which I loved, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, which I loved, and I'm almost finished with Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home by Kim Sunee, which I am loving. It really doesn't get better than genuinely looking forward to whatever you're reading.

Back in December, author Mitali Perkins posted about assigned reading, and how adults need to step back from forcing their reading choices on (especially) teens. I told her (on Twitter) that while I understood her point, I had loved most of the books that were assigned to me in school and that I might not have read them otherwise. She seemed surprised. Earlier this month, the popular meme Musing Mondays asked a similar question. While I don't participate in this meme, I was surprised to read many bloggers state that they did not really enjoy assigned reading.

The books that were assigned to me to read, starting in the seventh grade and on up, are so deeply a part of me that I can't imagine life any other way. I don't what it is about that age...when all your senses seem heightened and your emotions feel like life or death, but to open a book and find the exploration of morality, of life and love in the pages helps you know you're not alone.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have always been a bit of a book nerd. In high school, I was in the literature club. (I mean isn't that enough said?) We actually chose books and poems to read and discuss after school, and we put together a few literature magazines of student stories and poems.

I know I owe a lot of this to my mom, who read to my brother and sister and I when I was young...we are all still avid readers. When we were little, my sister and I would play library, when I was in elementary school I would pretend to be my favorite characters from books, and when I was in seventh grade I got my first assigned reading book. Up to that point, we had read stories out of a text book, but this time we got assigned to smaller book clubs and actual shiny new books in our hands. What book did I get? The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. Oh how I loved this book! It's possible I became obsessed with it. I watched the movie. I bought every other book she had written at that point and read them. (for the record, my favorite was That was Then, This is Now)Then I watched all the movies based on those books.

It only got worse with reading The Diary of Anne Frank, Flowers for Algernon, and Night in eighth. I remember reading with horror the circumstances in the concentration camps and the loss of human dignity. Flowers for Algernon broke my heart. And The Diary of Anne Frank was just that...someone's diary.

In high school, I took the International Baccalaureate course for English and enjoyed reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time, falling in love with the tragedy of it all, and the language so foreign to my way of life and yet so true. I read Lord of the Flies and had vivid nightmares that shook me to my core, A Separate Peace which unsettled me, "The Cold Equations" a story I have never ever been able to forget, Jane Eyre, a favorite to this day.

In my upperclassmen years, I read Death in Venice, many Poe stories, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I was surprised by how much I liked it) and The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun. Sometimes, lines from these plays and stories will come back to me at the oddest of times. And of course, my favorite poetry to this day, T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets.

My hunger wasn't satisfied by what was read in class. During this time period in my life, I sought out many of the classics and read them for myself.

Maybe it was my young age. Maybe it was the way discussing a written work can bring it to life in new ways, stamp it a little more firmly into your memory. I don't know, but I do know this...I'm glad I read everything that was assigned to me. I'm thankful that the opportunity existed for me to read such great works and to learn what they meant, even if it wouldn't have been my first choice. I'm thankful for the way those books helped shape me, helped me know I wasn't as alone as I thought, opened up new ways of thinking, new worlds in their pages.

There is so much talk these days about the change in reading. We seem desperate to keep kids reading and willing to do what it takes. I have a few theories on the decline of reading, but I'm not sure that easing up on assigned reading is going to be the answer. Sometimes, yes, we need to be told that reading this is good for you. In the same way that children may not want to eat their vegetables, we don't then say, okay! Eat french fries only, because I'm worried if you don't you won't eat at all. No instead we have them eat the healthy stuff because they must, because it nourishes their bodies and makes them strong. And they eat the french fries because they like them. I think we must expose our children to enduring literature. I think that it will feed their minds and make them strong. Will they love it all? Probably not, but they will be able to think critically about it, and participate more fully in the shared human experience these texts offer. Does that mean there's no room for popular fiction? Absolutely not! There is room for both.