College Reads

I used to brag to all my friends that I had the best major in the whole world, because I got to spend all my time reading really freakin' awesome books, and who doesn't love that? All the bragging backfired, of course, when I had to tell them I couldn't go out on a Wednesday because I had an epic paper due the next day (that I totally hadn't even started yet), and they'd just look at me like "don't you just read really awesome books all the time? where's the work in that?" It was challenging work sometimes, but the payout was, sadly, not a lucrative claim to the job market, but exposure to some pretty incredible works of literature. I'm fairly certain it was fair...right? 

1. The American, by Henry James (1877)

Christopher Newman is "committed to nothing in particular," and, feeling something is genuinely wrong with him and his place in the harsh realm of American business, takes himself off to Paris to learn how to live life passionately. Soon he finds himself enamored with a lovely woman named Claire, obsessed with the juxtaposition of new money versus old, and floundering in the world of art. It's a heartbreaker, mostly because I'm still not sure Mr. Newman has a heart at all. Social commentary, some humor, failed romance.

2. Le Morte D'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory (~1470)

The quintessential tale of King Arthur and his knights. The story of Camelot (the one without any Kennedys) and the round table and Guinevere's betrayal. If you're an Arthurian legend junkie like myself, you've got to read it; this is considered the massive forerunner of all the musicals and cable shows and reimaginings of the tale that have come since. If you're looking for the romances (and Lancelot's public shaming), try Chretian de Troyes's Arthurian Romances.

3. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (1918)

"Prairie books" have never been a particular favorite of mine, so the thought of reading and enjoying Cather's tale of the lovely, free-spirited Tony and friends in Black Hawk, Nebraska, never occurred to me. Enter my American Lit teacher junior year, who called me crazy and told me I'd be graded on it. Worked like a charm. My Antonia (pronounced Ann-toh-nee-ah, not An-tone-eeya) is one of Cather's Prairie trilogy in which the narrator Jim actually makes farm life interesting. Go figure.

4. Paradise, by Toni Morrison (1997)

The story of a town, Ruby, Oklahoma, a convent, and a group of women whose personal memories and experiences tell about a great struggle. It starts with one of Morrison's most famous lines - "They shoot the white girl first" - and opens with a massacre scene that sets the soul-crunching, heart-wrenching, emotionally-soggy novel rolling. I loved Beloved when I read it in high school, and after Paradise I went on to read all of Morrison's books because nobody since James Joyce could handle anti-punctuation stream-of-consciousness quite like she can. I re-read it whenever I feel like I need another hole ripped open in my heart.

5. American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar (1976-2008)
Gosh I love Harvey Pekar, that lovably sullen comix jerk! An anthology of his comic strips (for lack of a better word) was presented to me in a class on memoirs; they tell the story of an average man living an average life in Ohio, complete with his quirky girlfriend and his mid-life crises. Each installment is written by Pekar, about Pekar, but is illustrated by a different artist in order to capture the theme/emotion/point. I don't think there are too man comics I could write a twenty-nine page thesis on, but Pekar gives enough that I was able to do it for him.

6. Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett (~1953)

The play in which nothing happens...twice. The height of absurdism. Interpret from it what you wish.

 7. Prufrock and Other Observations, by T.S. Eliot (1920)
Never have I loved a poet with such fervor as I love T.S. Eliot. I'm not a big poetry person, usually because my take on the works have never been my professors' takes on them, resulting in poor grades or the insistence that I explain myself better. The best thing about Eliot, in my opinion, is that there is no need for explanations; it's all dark and dreary and romantic, like London under fog. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is my favorite (though "Hollow Men" is a close, close second) and it gives us such oft-quoted lines as "...have known evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured my life out in coffee spoons," and "Do I dare disturb the universe?" Read the title poem from this collection here.

Oh, Hello | An Introduction

When I was a freshman in college, I once took a class taught by one Dr. Franks, a British literature professor who thought himself, in no uncertain terms, to be the Absolute Greatest Living Being In the History Of All Creation And Then Some. Generally speaking, I like this sort of person, their lofty self-images notwithstanding. They are so enveloped by the world of academia, so often literally and figuratively raised on platforms above the minds they are to shape, that I cannot help but find some vein of reverent respect for them, and search desperately in their seemingly indisputable assertions for some small hint of how they managed to so far remove themselves from the average thinker. I, still very new to higher education at the time, simply assumed that a healthy dose of condescension naturally came with the doctoral territory, and if Dr. Franks had as much intellectual prowess in his head as he claimed, I was more than willing to give him the chance to share it with a lowly undergrad like myself. 

This professor in particular would stand in front of our small, cramped classroom every Monday and Wednesday at nine, thundering and flailing and stomping his feet to the tune of his lectures, drawing from some of my favorite works of literature bombastic conclusions that, he reminded us, certainly could not be discovered by ourselves alone. He was eccentric, unapologetic, and sometimes alarmingly cruel. For a few weeks, I sat in the back corner of the room - my usual seat, all through school - mesmerized by Dr. Franks, his apparent devotion to the literature with which he worked, and his all-consuming, indisputable, never-to-be-questioned status as the smartest man in the room. It was, at the time, very easy to believe him.

Sometime before mid-semester, Dr. Franks gave us an assignment based on To the Lighthouse, a novel I had read and loved years earlier which still held great literary and emotional value to me. I was excited to hear what the self-possessed Absolute Greatest Living Being In the History Of All Time And Then Some had to say about the book. The night before he was set to begin his lecture on it, I stayed up all night re-reading the pages I knew well (because even for subjects I love, I am a terrible procrastinator and do everything last minute), highlighting and underlining and making notes in the margins. After a while, the thoughts of what Dr. Franks would say about it in our upcoming class slipped away, and it was as it should be: just me and the story and Virginia Woolfe's beautiful words and the dark, clear, quiet night through which no one disturbed me. I genuinely laughed, honestly cried, and felt the weight of worlds and hearts beyond my own suspended on the simple, elegantly rendered novel that seemed to mean more to me with each passing page.

As far as reading experiences go, I still remember it as one of my best.

By the time our nine a.m. class came around, I was bleary-eyed but deliriously content, ready to spring up from my seat in the back corner of the room with the same sort of overwhelming feeling and driving love for the book that had captivated me the night before. I knew enough to keep the personal parts out of it -- neither Dr. Franks nor my equally bleary-eyed classmates would care that To the Lighthouse had been a book that my aunt bought for me once before she died, one that I had spent a summer with her and my family reading it in the sun -- but I found that the more I considered what I would say in the class discussion, the more I realized it was nearly impossible to refrain from injecting my analysis and discussion with my very personal response to the text. Such is human nature, I think, and such is the value of literature.

When Dr. Franks at last posed a question to the class that I, still lingering in my post-book glow, felt I could sufficiently answer, I leapt at the chance to do so. Now, years later, I don't remember exactly what I said, or what the question demanded, but I do know that it pertained to the part in the novel in which the young Lily Briscoe, an aspiring painter, despairingly considers her latest work a failure: 

"She could have done it differently of course; 

the color could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised,

...but then, she did not see it like that.

She saw the color burning on a framework of steel; 

the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral." 

 
I admit I hadn't realized how much of my notes, reflections, and considerations of the work began more often with "I feel..." and "I believe..." than with the far more scholarly, "The text suggests..." or "As supported by chapter X, line xx...". I knew then, as I know now, that from an academic standpoint, nothing matters so much as what the text says, and what is expressly printed on the page. Had Dr. Franks accepted my answer with just that caution, or redirected my feelings toward facts with even the most pedantic, condescending hand, I would certainly have forgiven him. Maybe I would have even appreciated him, for showing me the difference.

But that is not what happened. Instead, Dr. Franks, a teacher I had already known to be cruel at times and always leaning toward elitism, turned to the other students in the class, pointed his finger at my back corner, and said, "That, friends, is exactly the wrong way to read a book." 

I remember I wasn't embarrassed until later, though I think now it had been his main intention to embarrass me in that moment, not teach me. He curled his lip at me, smirked at my silliness, and spent the remainder of the class snidely referring to my answer in tones of great amusement. It was laughable to him that I had felt something instead of inferring it; it made him happy to tear apart my response and drag it through the proverbial mud of his far superior academic prowess. I know that because he told me so, four years later, just before I graduated with honors from the lit program, and still in my head I heard loudest his words from that day, clear and haughty, when he told our class that he was afraid people like me would "always give stupid answers like that."

It was the last time I answered a question in Dr. Franks class. In fact, it was the last time I said a single word in front of him, in front of his most prized students, in front of his colleagues for a long time. I would linger in my back corner seat, thinking how maybe this wasn't for me, maybe I didn't know how to read critically or analyze literature, maybe the parts that really mattered to me weren't really all that important after all.

In truth, it took far longer than it should have for me to recover from that odd experience with Dr. Franks, but I am not afraid to say that while it was a teacher who tore me down, it was a host of other teachers who built me back up again. Slowly but triumphantly, I figured out that there really is no difference between reading like a Book Lover and reading like a Student, as long as you love it enough to learn, and you have learned enough to love it.

from the incomparable The Phantom Tollbooth

Looking back, I do owe Dr. Franks for one thing -- he forced me to develop a philosophy, a standard by which I read all books now, and by which I enjoy them. While I take pride in my academic foundations, I, like Lily Briscoe, do not want to boil down my perceptions of art so far that I miss the burning color and vibrant light that it holds. What good is knowing the analytical cues and scholarly assertions of a text if the words and characters and stories hold no personal meaning? What good is any work of literature to me if it does not, in some way, make me feel? Reading critically does not mean reading heartlessly; if it did, I would not read at all.

Now, as I start this blog, I am far enough removed from my days as a quiet undergrad in the back of the classroom to know that my silence following Dr. Franks's To the Lighthouse lecture served only to limit my own participation in the wide realm of literary discourse, and my own development as a reader. I have come to celebrate anyone who finds themselves so moved and so touched that the regulations of people who consider themselves The Absolute Greatest Living Being In The History Of Creation And Then Some play no part. When there are no grades on the line, the only thing that matters is what you personally draw from the words in front of you. The moment you sit back from it and think on how it touched you is analysis enough.