This is a draft essay for my Intro to Literature course at the University of Montana. The prompt was to reflect on your life as a reader, specifically focusing on transformations in your reading experience over time.
The essay tends towards simplification and cliche, but despite that I still like it. I enjoyed writing it and look forward to doing the final draft at the end of the semester.
I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten. Even so, they have made me.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My experience reading has changed significantly throughout the stages of my life and has meant different things to me at different times. When I first learned to read it was what me and my mom shared. Later, as a child and young teenager it was a mix of compulsive escapism and a real love for new stories and words, and in my late teens and young adulthood it was a place I went to find what I wanted to be. Each stage left me with something that I will never forget.
My mom came from a family that did not have access to education. Her situation was typical for impoverished areas. Young single mom, did not know her dad, lot’s of addiction and physical health issues, most family members do not finish high school, and no one goes to college or learns a skilled trade. Her and her mom were the first ones to escape that. She attributes this to education, particularly the education she received at Head Start, a preschool for kids with financial need. This is all to say early childhood education and teaching me to read was very important to my mom. Starting when I was a baby, she would sit me between her legs, put a book in front of us, and scan the words with her finger while reading out loud. This happened almost every night, until after thousands of hours I could just read. Eventually I just wanted to read the books myself. From there reading became something entirely personal, still a gift from my mom, but something I did not share. The next stage of my reading life will probably be familiar to the person reading and grading this, if not from their personal experience, then the experiences of my classmates. There is a certain subset of the population who seems to get sucked into reading obsessively from the start of elementary school to late in middle school. If I think back I can vaguely remember how I became that person. The first, and most valuable to me personally was the feeling of being able to read new and harder books. I remember being so excited to learn a new word, or to be able to follow a book that seemed like it would have recently been beyond my abilities. This was my first experience with the thing that I think anyone who has learned to do anything or accomplished something they are proud of knows. Doing things that are difficult out of pure interest and expanding your capabilities is about the most rewarding thing there is, and every time I have had the same feeling as when I was a young reader it has been something I have treasured. The second part of my experience reading as a child is less laudable. I think many kids who read that much, myself included, do so because the world is uncomfortable and if you are reading you do not have to live in it. I think this was to our detriment. If you are nine years old and spend 5 hours reading after school you don’t have to think about the little fears and anxieties of your day to day life, and after many years you might end up with a habit of avoiding problems and being unable to confront them in general. It is no wonder that most of the people I know who belong to this group have struggled with anxiety through their later teens and early 20s.
For me this period of reading obsessively started waning during the beginning of my time in high school, getting to the point where by my junior year I maybe only read a book a month. It was not that I stopped enjoying reading, but more that my life was full of other exciting things. In this time I had gotten my first job, had started dating girls, and was generally enjoying and exercising my newfound independence. This lasted until graduation. There is a transition everyone has to make when they are young when they decide who they want to be. This is not necessarily choosing a career, although that is a part of it. I think a bigger part is choosing who you admire. By the end of high school I had chosen neither of these. My nominal plan was to move to Butte with my girlfriend and try to join the electricians union while she went to college there. The electricians union thing was something that looking back I think I only said so it sounded like I had a plan. The union rejected me so I had to apply for other jobs and ended up working at an asphalt plant. Work at an asphalt plant mostly entails pumping hot oil from a truck into a tank, then pumping hot oil from a tank into a rail car. This does not happen fast. It also does not require more than one person at a time. This meant I suddenly had an enormous amount of time to read. For my first year there I spent most days offloading trucks and reading in stretches of 40 minutes at a time. At that time, while the work was enjoyable, and things were going relatively well, I had a sense that something was not complete. I did not have the moral or spiritual direction that I sought. And so, almost by instinct I started re-reading the books that throughout my life I had found the most compelling. These books were not necessarily the greats of English literature. Some of them I wouldn’t even recommend. However as I looked over them I started to piece together some semblance of the person I wanted to be. This sounds sort of dramatic, but it really was me picking up little things from each book, whether it be a relationship between two characters or some trait of the main character I admired, which all added up to some pretty large changes in my life. To give an example, I got married about a week after my 19th birthday and I think a part of the outlook that led me to do that was in part ideas I got from some of the books I re-read during that time.
I’ve been thinking about my relationship with reading for this assignment and I’ve come up with a conclusion based on this reflection. I have mixed feelings about this amount of reading I have done in my life. I have two thoughts about it specifically. For one, I have read a huge amount of shit, almost all of which I have no memory of. Not the title, not the author, nospt the plot, not even the experience of reading the book itself. I am sure the books are perfectly fine, but just based on the amount of time I have spent, and the expense of my personal development, taken alone it sounds like a huge waste of my life. On the other hand, out of the maybe thousand or so books that I have read throughout my life, there are a few that left me a different person in a way that I would never give up. I haven’t really encountered anything besides literature that can change me like that. In the end when I weigh both of these, the thing that ends up breaking the tie is I just kind of like reading. I enjoy immersing myself in a story. I love when the writing is stylish and fresh and you can feel the life force and weight of the author’s voice. I especially like meeting someone who cherishes the same book as you or introducing someone to a book you love because they will end up sharing that little experience with you. So I will continue to read.
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