right now i'm reading To Kill A Mockingbird, which i know i read at some point in high school, but i really had no capacity to fully understand or appreciate it back then—not the poignancy or importance of the story, nor the wonder and elegance of the writing. i can't tell you how glad i am that i decided to give it a second read. i swear, with every page the book gives me goosebumps, makes me smile, takes my breath away or has me jotting lines down that i want to remember. i know this will sound dramatic, but i really think the book is changing my life.
i've been reading some classics along with contemporary books this year—like Sense and Sensibility and Catcher in the Rye. i'm absolutely loving them all. and i absolutely know that in high school—despite being as voracious a reader as i am now—i had very little interest in them, no patience to comprehend them, no real ability to fully grasp them. and, hell, i was in AP English. was i just too preoccupied with being a teenager to care, or were the books really over all our heads?
my dermatologist noticed Mockingbird in my bag at my appointment the other day and she said the same thing—her husband was re-reading the book for fun, and that she really wanted to re-read the classics, too, because she hadn't realized the value of them back in school. it just makes me think that so much of what is thrown at us at a young age in a small amount of time—just so we can pass tests and move on to the next grade—is ill-timed and all wrong. it took me until my thirties to want to start reading the classics again, just because i felt like they'd been force-fed to me years earlier. i expected to hate them.
i'm happy to have gotten over that mental block, and so happy to know how many truly magnificent books are out there from which i can learn. but i do hope that English teachers have changed their MO over the last fifteen years. i'm not saying they should teach the Twilight series in American Lit. but there's no sense teaching books that require some years of living real life to fully appreciate.
mbm
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