Over parents weekend, in an off-hand conversation about the KAC, I told my parents I bike or walk approximately six miles every time I’m in the KAC. They were astonished. When I explained to them that I simply biked until my reading homework was done, they were confused. “How long does that take you?” they asked. I thought about it, “Anywhere between an hour and three hours for one class.”
What shocked me—and my family—even further upon reflection was that this time wasn’t spent reading for comprehension or analysis, but simply to complete the readings.
My beloved advisor Professor Ted Mason, who taught the first English class that I’ve ever received a “B” in, once said that everyone should read any book three times. The first should be purely for plot and characters, the second for a more analytical approach and the third should be with pencil or pen in hand.
Personally, I like this theory. In high school, I had never annotated a book. In fact, I still consider it sacrilege to write with pen in any book, even a textbook. It wasn’t until second semester of my first year at Kenyon that I forced myself to take notes in my book because I prefer to just read for the story.
However, in reality, Professor Mason’s suggestion is a bit harder to do here at Kenyon—I barely have time to read a book once, much less three times.
I’ve always prefered reading for fun first, then going back to do the analytical work. For example, I first read James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man when I was thirteen. Although I enjoyed the prose, I ultimately was very confused. When I came back to it as an eighteen year old with a teacher guiding my investigation, I appreciated the novel much more fully, and at the age of twenty, I was finally able to engage both my professors and peers’ interpretations with my own thoughts and opinions.
Being an English major here at Kenyon has taken a lot of the fun out of reading for me—and I’m not even talking about “fun reading” such as Meg Cabot or Sarah Dessen. I used to love reading for school, probably because for the majority of my life, I wasn’t assigned school-reading.
My Montessori education background means that reading was something I pursued on my own, whether from the school library or from the bountiful personal collection of Mrs. Bradfield, my fourth, fifth and sixth grade teacher. I wasn’t graded on the quality of my analytical understanding until high school. Even then it was easy to engage in and enjoy my homework, often because these were books I’d read before and would most likely read again.
Essentially, I can’t enjoy reading anymore. Reading is no longer about the process, it’s about the product—being able to speak and write about a text proficiently rather than appreciating and delving deeply into the text at hand. I average about two-and-a-half novels a week, and that doesn’t include the textbook reading. That means I am guilty of occasionally skimming or skipping readings entirely, depending on importance.
Prior to college, I could average two novels a week and I remember their plot, characters and details with great ease. Now, if you asked me whether I’d ever read Their Eyes Are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, I could say yes, but I’d struggle to tell you the names of any characters, I could only recall the plot point of flooding and I certainly would struggle to say whether I genuinely enjoyed the novel. That’s because I read the novel in approximately six hours, probably in a coffee-induced haze, and only discussed the book for a total of 150 minutes before rushing onto the next novel. I miss enjoying the books that I read, even the ones that are required, like I did in high school. When I picked my major, I imagined hours pouring over words that I would grow to love and understand and interpret and adore.
Instead, I spend more and more time increasingly frustrated by the sheer amount of pages I have to get through and discouraged by my inability to contribute meaningfully to class conversations due to my own exhaustion. I want to be a good English major and I am determined to be so, but Kenyon makes it hard to maintain the same level of love for novels that I came into school with.
This is not to bash Kenyon’s English program—I’ve had incredible classes and professors. I think this frustration is pretty typical for lots of collegiate students because after spending hours on your major, it’s hard to find the passion you first felt for that major. However, I think most students also have these really influential classes and professors that awaken that passion just when students think it’s about to be snuffed out completely. For example, Writing Medieval Women with Professor Rosemary O’Neill totally reinvigorated my love for all literature, but particularly for literature I’d never seen or heard of before.
I want to love reading again—I want to appreciate a story for what it is, rather than rushing from one novel to the next in the hopes of getting all my homework done. I want to appreciate the craft of writing without nitpicking the nuances of a particular author’s tone and style, pencil in hand. I want to read just to read, not to complete the reading itself, even if that novel is assigned for homework.
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