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| Sunday, 21 November 2004 |
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Reading... A chore or pleasure It all began with my friend Rupa Gupta, the former editor of a teenage magazine in Dubai. She was compiling a list of books that schools were recommending the students to read and wanted to know what Sri Lankan kids were reading these days.
As a kid there was no greater pleasure for me than reading. And the passion has continued into adulthood. But looking back to my school days and books, what remains etched in my mind, is an imaginary red line drawn right across the book world. The line - vivid, stark and sometimes forbidding, sometime smudged at the edges- divided every book that had been written and printed and that came my way into My Books and Their Books. My Books were the stuff I loved to read and wanted to read. Stuff that I would forsake everything else for. Stuff with which I would cuddle under the blanket on cold and wet afternoons. I vividly remember the guilty pleasures of reading Black Shirt, while the rest of the class was doing something boring. Their Books were what I had to read because that was what the teachers wanted and the syllabus recommended. Their Books were what I forced myself to read during the English period. Their Books were the compulsory stuff. Moby-Dick is a good example of a really bad choice of compulsory reading. I remember my struggle with it in grade eleven, as one long low-grade migraine headache. Their Books which I was forced to read in Grades 11 and 12 - were dull old tomes like Hamlet, Siles Marner, Moby-Dick (alias the Great White Bore) and what seemed like hundred of odd elliptical poems by an American spinster named Emily Dickinson. Of course my English Literature teacher who figured Shakespeare was Elvis-the-King- Wordwise, called me a 'philistine' for not being able to appreciate good writing and authors - especially Shakespeare, who in her view was genius because of his brilliant use of the language and the emotional insight he brought to his story. My Books on the other hand were more current, more vivid and spoke with greater urgency about the world around me, a world that simultaneously intrigued and frightened me. I read John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels for love. I read Ed McBain's tale of the 87th Precinct for the same reason and lived and died with detectives Carella, Kling and especially Myer Myer, the cop who had two last names. I spent days caught in the quaint world of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and Shirley Jackson, Particularly Wuthering Heights (Bronte) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Haunting of Hillhouse (Jackson). Montegomary's Anne of Green Gables took me to another world of childhood mischief, innocent joys and looking for a place to belong. Tolkein and his hobbits simply ravished me, swept me away in an ecstasy of imagination that was light years and galaxies way from 'The Great White Bore'. I didn't care much for Shakespeare, but I scamped my literature assignment to read an abridged version of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers. My English teacher had told me it was gut-bustingly funny, but I didn't get the jokes, and besides, all the people Dickens made fun of were a hundred years dead. Along the way, most often falling behind on Their Books,I also read the Saint series; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey; the early essay of Tom Wolfe; most of the books written by Robert Ludlum, about a trillion comics books; Margaret Mitchell (only one by her, but it's a good long one) Agatha Christie, Ayn Rand, and hundreds of others. Once I was out of school and away from people who wanted to hook a kind of mental IV up my forehead and force feed me literature, I read a lot of books for love.I read Mills and Boon romances, horror stories, western stories and fat sweaty tomes that gave an intriguing peek into the life and loves of King Henry VIII. With the pressure gone, I read the Adventures of Tom Sawyer on my own and loved it. I was asked to read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but hated it and cast it aside after three chapters. I found it pale stuff indeed after the high excitement of Tom and Becky lost in the cave, with Injun Joe lurking somewhere near. But sometimes, just sometimes, the red line would smudge and the chasm would be bridged. Their Books would cross over to My Books and I would really really have a grand time, converting pressure for pleasure. One was Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Another was Tess of d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. My English teacher (she was a great influence) told me Tess would introduce me to 'the naturalistic school of writing'. At that time I didn't care a damn for the naturalistic school of writing. What I cared was Tess, a country girl who knew so little, tried so hard and ended up with her neck in the hangman's noose. My heart broke for her, and as I looked at the world through her eyes, I came to understand for the first time, that ways of living and systems of morality were great, dangerous beasts, slow to wake, but almost impossible to escape once they are on their feet. Tess impressed me so deeply that I went on to read most of Hardy's other novels, encountering other characters almost as vivid as Tess along the way, most notably the naive Jude in Jude the Obscure and the nastiest woman in English literature, the virulent Sue Bridehead. John Donne was another author who straggled that imaginary line, crossing over to my side more often than remaining in Their's. I loved (still do) the sense of morbidity and the candidness with which he projected his message, be it death, love or life. William Blake was another who crossed over to my side with his poem 'I asked a thief to steal a peach'. Now, that I am older, wiser and able to understand thing better, I have started re-reading all those books that I discarded as bores. And know what, I still feel Moby-Dick is boring. But the others.. Hamlet, (my English teacher will love this) is a tremendously exciting study of madness, procrastination and obsession that probably has no peer. Huckleberry Finn is indeed better than Tom Sawyer, deeper, better, more textured. Dickens, I re-discovered through the Tale of Two Cities and couldn't help wonder whether it was the same man who had written The Pickwick Papers. It hardly seemed possible. Pickwick had been awful, Cities was wonderful. So was Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations... Wondering if I had gone wrong somewhere, I tried re-reading The Pickwick Papers recently, and guess what? It is still lousy. I discovered some incredibly wonderful and surprisingly powerful worlds of beauty spinning inside Emily Dickinson's small oddly shaped poems, and love sometimes stark truths within Robert Frost's more conventional verses. Looking back I can't help wondering, why book that now seem perfectly readable and enjoyable from an adult perspective, were such a chore as a student. Did it have something to do with authoritative figures and inherent juvenile rebellion. A matter of choice, or rather the negation of choice that makes things compulsory. One of the greatest pleasure I've had of recent times, was re-reading Hamlet and discovering it was great on my own. Hana Ibrahim |
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What are they reading if they are reading anything at all? I didn't
have the faintest idea. But contemplating her request had me reminiscing
about my school days.
