And then something happened: I became an English education major. I did it BECAUSE I loved reading. What could be better, I thought to myself, than to spend a lifetime reading great literature and sharing it with students? And in becoming an English major, my ability to APPRECIATE great literature expanded tremendously, but my ability to ENJOY it decreased. Yes, I did get to read everything Shakespeare ever wrote (thanks to a total of six different Shakespeare courses taken in high school, undergraduate school, and graduate school), and I also found some other literature along the way that I really liked (including a lot of poetry). But mostly, I plodded through a bunch of stuff that I NEEDED to read but didn't necessarily WANT to read. And once I started teaching school, I ended up teaching the same literature over and over again, and any newness and joy in the literature wore off pretty quickly.
I left the classroom eight years ago to take an administrative position, and in that eight years, I haven't read a single piece of fiction. Until the last six weeks.
As I mentioned over several posts back in November, I purchased a Kindle Fire for myself as an early Christmas present. And I decided that, after eight years, it was time for me to start reading again. So I decided to begin with Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked, which is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. My entire family had seen the musical a few weeks before, and I was sufficiently intrigued by the musical to wonder what the book might be like. I assumed that, like almost always, the book would be better than the musical. And so I started reading. I found the novel difficult to get through, though, and I couldn't figure out why. Despite having some familiarity with the story thanks to the musical, I still struggled to focus and maintain my interest. At first I assumed that maybe reading on the Kindle Fire wasn't going to work for me, because after reading a page or two I'd find myself leaving the book to browse the web on the Fire, or to play Doodle Jump or Angry Birds or some other game. Maybe, I thought to myself, I was just too easily distracted.
But then about a week ago, on a whim, I downloaded a different book to my Kindle, and I read the entire book in less than a day. And once I had finished that book, I realized what it was that was making Wicked so difficult for me to read: I hated it.
I HATED it!
Once the thought occurred to me, I knew that was the problem. I absolutely hated the novel Wicked. The storyline was intriguing, but the characters were awful in their development. And the author did a lot of "telling" and not "showing." Instead of showing a scene in which Elphaba and Galinda--these two complete opposites--became friends, the novel just said something like, "And over time, Elphaba and Galinda became friends." That's the laziest writing I've ever heard of! The novel just bored me to death, and I didn't even know it.
Apparently, all of those years of forcing myself to read literature that didn't particularly interest me but that I "needed" to read had broken in me the ability to distinguish what I truly liked from what I disliked. It reminds me a bit of the video below, from the film STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (again, showing my geek nature here). In the scene, Data, a robot, has developed emotions and the sense of taste for the first time. This is pretty much how I felt that day, even to the point that--after I realized I hated the novel Wicked--I read another 20 or so pages of it to see WHY I hated it.
(I can't see the video.)
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