World Book Day

by Marissa Matton

In honor of yesterday being World Book Day, I thought I would share some of my favorite books.

The other week in one of my classes, we talked about the low expectations we have of assigned reading. Typically if we’re “forced” to read something, we’ve already made up our minds about it not being enjoyable before we even get past the title page. I’ll admit to having fallen victim to this logic quite a few times over the years. That negative train of thought has also been proven wrong, however.

I first read my favorite book, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in high school as assigned summer reading before my senior year. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the book, but I was nearly immediately taken with the tale of mortality and ethics. As part of that assigned reading, I also read The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I’ve had to read the novel in two courses since then, and each time I was drawn into Edna’s search for independence.

While I haven’t always been as lucky with my assigned reading, these two books have stayed with me as favorites years later, despite the fact that neither fall under my favorite genre of literature. From the moment I finished reading my first Nancy Drew novel, I devoured any mysteries I could come across. I came across And Then There Were None in middle school and immediately fell in love with Agatha Christie’s writing. The classic whodunnit helped fuel my passion for solving fictional crimes. I learned to pick apart scenes, searching for clues and piecing them together to deduct who committed the crimes.

Some people don’t enjoy rereading books, but I find comfort in picking up something familiar. If I were in a novel, my great character flaw would be my faulty memory. When I’m enjoying a book, I hate to have to put it down–partly because of the fact that I’m enjoying it, but mostly because of how probable it is I’ll have forgotten something important before picking it back up.

With the end of the semester approaching, I’m eager to tackle my ‘to-read’ list. After getting through the piles–yes piles–of books I’ve been pushing aside over the past few months, one of my goals is to finish reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I started the novel a couple of years ago, and while I enjoyed it, I wasn’t able to devote enough time to it.

I’m eager to hear some of your favorite books. What is it about them that stuck with you? Alternately, which books are on your to-read list?

What motivates us to read?

by Marissa Matton

After reading Leonce Gaiter’s post “Why men opt out of the (women’s) fiction world,” I started to consider the different motivations people have for reading.

Everyone reads for different reasons–whether it be because they enjoy it or because they have to. As a student, it seems like I fall into the latter category more often. Having a lot of my time devoted to assigned reading just makes the time I do get to spend reading for pleasure all the more important.

Reading has always been a favorite pastime of mine. There is nothing I enjoy more than being able to escape into a good book. Reading as a means of “escape” is something Leonce and I both agree on. How we are drawn into the books is where our agreement ends, however. In order to really enjoy a book, I need to feel some sort of connection–with a character, situation, location, something. Leonce, on the other hand, doesn’t “approach fiction to re-visit this world”.

I can understand that–I certainly don’t want to read about my own life over and over again. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy drawing connections between my life and what I read. Leonce uses the example of Harry Potter. I grew up with Harry and co. Despite how much I may have wanted that to be my life, I didn’t belong to Harry’s magical world. Dragons, potions, and spells have weren’t relatable, but I could connect with Hermoine’s bookish personality, which made it all the easier to feel like I was part of the book.

Leonce calls for “worlds recreated and re-imagined, instead of rehashed”. I can see the risk of relatable worlds feeling ‘rehashed’, but I don’t think a ‘recreated world’ has to be exclusive from familiarity. Familiarity in literature is the greatest strength of the Changing Lives Through Literature program. When students are able to relate lessons in the stories to their own lives, they begin on the path of change.

When I started to think about my reading habits, I had to break the down between my two motivations. Like I said, as a student, a lot of my current reading is assigned rather than chosen. I think because I’m not actively deciding those pieces of literature are worthy of my time, it’s necessary for me to find some way to situate myself into the stories. Otherwise, I’m more likely to view the reading as forced upon me.

I don’t know if this variation in opinion is because of gender, like Leonce claims, or some other difference between us, but I am curious. So, I turn this conversation over to you now. What motivates you to read? Would you rather read about something you know or ditch this world all together? Perhaps a combination of the two?