Why the HELL did we read THAT?

 I love literary fiction and I'm not ashamed to say it.

Hemingway, Melville, Hawthorne, Greene, Twain, Fitzgerald, Salinger, McCarthy, O'Connor, Trevor, Cheever, Munro, and Joyce forever and ever.

They make sense to me. The depth and heaviness and skill and wit and poignancy astound me. 

When Nick Carraway becomes paralyzed in Tom and Myrtle's apartment by the "inexhaustible variety of life," I want to cry.

When the Misfit says, "she would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," I can almost feel the three bullet holes in my chest.

My relationship now with literature is deep and enriching and vitalizing.

However, it wasn't always that way.

 In high school I was a punk that you probably hated. I didn't read the books. I rarely even used SparkNotes. My super power was to randomly pick a page and find a vague quote that sounded complicated to slap onto essays and the other--arguably more important--was that I could bullshit my way through pretty much anything. 

Regardless of never having read Frankenstein, or To Kill a Mockingbird, I often found myself asking, "Why the hell did we read that?"

Did I have the right to ask? No.

Did I do it anyway? Yes.

What did it have to offer me? It's just a book. As my dear friend Beau Spicer would say back in those days, "It's just lies, dude."

Fortunately for me, something changed.

I took a creative writing class on a whim. I was a Spanish major but writing I loved. Reading was a drag. Or so I thought, until I was required to read Flannery O'Connor's stories. One in particular, "A Good Man is Hard to Find", changed the way I thought about literature. In a moment of clarity, I saw that in order to write my best, I had to read the best. I felt ashamed for ignorantly denying all the rich and powerful books in previous years.

So I started with the ones I'd missed during my punk highschooler days. I needed to make up for lost time.

The Great Gatsby, The Scarlett Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I found that when you give yourself to them, they open up to you in ways you can't imagine. Especially with a newfound sense of maturity and perspective.

I even began to find the ways in which these intellectual, literary books were informing my writing. I saw immediate improvement in the quality of my stories. Something good had clicked.

So with an insatiable hunger for all things literary fiction, I noted every book recommendation form professors, classmates, literary journals, friends, and best-of lists in search of the next book to add to my perspective and feed me the magic of a damn good story.

And all of this self-reflection got me wondering...

What have these required books done for my classmates? 

Were they inspired to follow the direction in which we've been pushed as English students?

Are they enamored with literary fiction as I am?

                         Do my English classmates still ask, "Why the hell did we read that?"

              

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                                                                            --KRS