On Reading

This summer I read masterworks of fiction in preparation for teaching them at DU’s University College graduate Creative Writing program. I’m reminded of the British expression for higher education work: he’s reading history or she’s reading law at university. Americans say majoring in or studying.

Summer reading

I’ve always liked that British emphasis on reading, because in fact that is the bulk of what you do to get your college education, in liberal arts especially. You read. This summer I read seminal writers selected to illustrate the Romanticism and Realism movements which still dominate the arts today, along with influential examples of genre fiction in suspense, detective, science fiction and fantasy. Ten books, one per week for the ten-week quarter.

Half I’d read before—Joyce, Woolf, Chekhov, Achebe and Borges—but long ago. Reading them now was sometimes familiar the way a face can be familiar, one you knew in your youth and can almost place despite its aging. In those cases, the stories changed, meant something different now than they did when I first read them. My reaction to and awareness of how they were written changed.

The ending of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I did not precisely remember and do not think hit me this way thirty years ago, devastated me this time. I was less judgmental of the main character, Okonkwo, felt more sympathy for him, understood him better. Or perhaps I understood better what Achebe was doing with Okonkwo and the tremendous extent to which he succeeded.

Receptivity! Otherwise known as readiness. Responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader—no less than between people—is that deepest of all human mysteries, emotional readiness: upon which the shape of every life is vitally dependent.

—Vivian Gornick

This entry was posted in Education, Tidbits, Writing. Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to On Reading

  1. jsornber says:

    Lovely meditation on reading books again years later!

  2. Barbara Fairchild says:

    My frustration as an English teacher in Miami high schools and the University of Miami was that I was having young people read excellent literature partly so they would have a frame of reference in the reading for the rest of their lives, but I was almost always making them read things at the wrong time in their lives. At 17 or even 21 you can’t relate to Willie Lohman or even Gatsby really.
    Thanks for another wonderful post. Wishing you a great class.

    • dubrava says:

      I remember not being much interested in King Lear and then rereading it when I was over 60: big difference. Thanks, Barbara!

  3. Bob Jaeger says:

    Thanks, Pat. So true. Poetry I read in college classes strikes so much deeper now.

  4. C.M. Mayo says:

    Hola dear Pat, You inspire me to reread THINGS FALL APART, which I read in (oooo) 1980. Hey, the M in name does not stand for Methuselah!

  5. Pingback: A Few Excerpts: 2021 Reading | Holding the Light

Comments are closed.