I got away with way too much in high school. I rarely did my homework, but I did well on all the tests, so I was never pressed on the things I didn't turn in. I was a golden child who got straight As and participated in all the interscholastic meets and music competitions. I could fake my way through most class discussions, based on a quick glance at the texts. I'm not sure how I convinced my teachers that I had read all of the assigned literature, when I hadn't, even back in the days before I knew Cliff's Notes existed (I rarely read those, either). I have been telling myself for 30 years that someday I will go back and read all those classics that I was supposed to have read as a much younger woman, but so far, I'm still dragging my feet. One would think that if I expect to be a serious writer that I would devour everything I could get my hands on, but one would be wrong. My reading tastes are as far away from classic fiction as they could be. I'm either gorging on political or scientific articles, or I'm compulsively snacking on the junk food of the literary world, romance novels.
I was a little better about reading my assigned books in college, primarily because I had no choice. The kid who skated through literature classes got it in her fool head to be a humanities major. Not only did I have to read all the books assigned to me, I had to pull them apart and compare them to other works that I was also expected to know intimately. (It was a proud moment when I actually did successfully link a piece of short fiction in my Russian lit class to a passage in Zorba the Greek, to the approval of the professor. I should have been able to do that at the drop of a hat, but that one time stuck in my memory because I had so many gaps in my repertoire that it wasn't as easy as it should have been.) I think more than anything, all the books I half-read for college just left me with a list of books that I have to complete before I die. At the rate I'm reading them, I will have to live to be 120, by necessity.
I discovered a "new" author quite by accident today. She's not really new. She died before I was born. But having learned recently that I really like telling dark (sometimes violently so) short stories, I wonder how I made it this far never reading anything by Flannery O'Connor. I've known of her for years, but I never even pressed myself to find out a single title by her, much less read her work. I am about to make up for that lack. I found a recording of her reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and then I listened to a 35 year old classroom recording of people discussing "Good Country People," and I realize I have found my soul mate. I would say that she is who I want to grow up to be, but I'm already older than she was when she died of lupis in her 30s. I may be exaggerating my talents to say I should pick up where she left off, but it is incumbent upon me at least to try. My modern sensibilities have been shocked slightly by the bald treatment of racial issues in the stories I've found so far, but I'm getting the idea that she would be pleased to shock me. The biographies I'm finding keep using the word "grotesque" to describe the world about which she wrote. I haven't seen that yet. Her characters aren't ugly, what I would consider grotesque. They are just stripped clean of their disguises. I can't wait to read more. She's going to be the first name crossed off of that list of authors that I should have read long, long ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment