When I think of English classes, I often think it’s a
miracle that I still love reading. So many of the stories we read made me wish
I could return to a state of illiteracy. But the thing about being literate is
that you can’t go back – unless, of course, you crash a sled into a tree.
In elementary school we read inane stories out of reading
textbooks and answered comprehension questions at the end (i.e. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?). They were written to educate us without causing us
to enjoy ourselves too much. If it weren't for Harry Potter and the
American Girls, I probably would have given up on reading and became an
ignorant hooligan.
Some of the stories were intended to plant the seed of entrepreneurship in our impressionable young minds. One was a play about a
young fellow who realizes that the price of toothpaste is too high, so he makes
it from scratch with baking soda and peppermint oil. Other people also agree
that toothpaste is too expensive, so they start buying jars of his homemade
toothpaste. He turns his passion for cheap toothpaste into a toothpaste dynasty
and becomes a millionaire.
I just thought to look up the story and it seems that it was a children’s book that must have been very loosely adapted for our workbooks. They
cut out his female business partner, the lessons about gender, racism, and the true
meaning of friendship, and the mathematical problems they must solve to become
millionaires. It’s like they cut out all the potentially good parts from our
textbook to focus on the logistics of making toothpaste.
One Amazon reviewer says this is the most important book he ever read. Well.
In high school, Ethan
Frome was on our list of required reading. I feel like Edith Wharton
personally ruined my life in a number of ways. She’s a woman writer and I want
to like her because of that, but I resent that I had to sit through the mundane
details of various miserable lives ending with a botched suicide. The title
character and his love interest try to kill themselves by crashing a sled into a
tree, but instead they just become horribly, horribly mangled. Sledicide is on
par with leaping out a four story window or trying to overdose on children’s
aspirin. Oh, Ethan and your half-brained schemes!
I reluctantly finished the book. Then I hurled it against the
wall of my bedroom. If I have to pay a fine, so be it, I thought. I hate all
these people.
One of the great things about life after school is that no
one can make me read anything I don’t want to read. I was starting to get itchy
about required reading at the end of college. In my last playwriting class, we
were supposed to read plays and take an aspect of that play to write a scene. I
mercilessly parodied the plays I didn’t like. As far as I’m concerned, a story
that I think is awful only benefits me if I can make fun of it. My professor
would ask, What did you think of this play? And I would say, I don’t like it. She
would say, I don't care if you liked it, what did you learn?
Nothing! I learned nothing! I refuse to learn anything from this
text, I cried indignantly. Then I stood up and flipped my desk.
