I\u2019ve come across a problem over and over again that really embarrasses me as a English major and philosophy major and writer and avid reader and student for a long time who has been told that I\u2019m quite good at those things, and it\u2019s that sometimes I don\u2019t know what the hell I\u2019m reading.<\/p>\n
For the past half decade of my life (in other words, when I stopped reading YA novels) I\u2019ve been wondering about the fuss around certain canonical writers, like James Joyce and Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf, so I made a list of books I wanted to read for 2019. I started out with Woolf, reading Mrs. Dalloway, which is an entire novel dedicated to a single day in a woman\u2019s life as she plans a party. It\u2019s a very interior, psychological look into the details of everyday life, and the prose is dense and concentrated and shimmering with poetry\u2014 so much that it\u2019s almost blinding to read. It\u2019s like taking a shot of thick, concentrated tonic until you\u2019re so intellectually inebriated that you literally cannot think, much less follow Mrs. Dalloway as she flits between dreaming about her lost hopes and which flower arrangement looks better.<\/p>\n
Of course it\u2019s brilliant, but kind of excruciating to read. It makes me wonder what was so wrong about reading trashy YA. And it\u2019s not just Mrs. Dalloway that I\u2019ve experienced this pain, it\u2019s Ray Bradbury\u2019s Fahrenheit 541, it\u2019s Joseph Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness, it\u2019s Kurt Vonnegut and Daniel Defoe and at times even F Scott Fitzgerald\u2014 and I\u2019m told that these are the greats, these are the masters of the English language and their work is the stunning epitome of writing at its finest\u2014 and I feel so so stupid.<\/p>\n
I used to think that good writing was supposed to be kind of allusive, like it had to be mysterious and hard to understand in order to be meaningful, as though the lack of coherence or the superfluous language was what created this illusion of meaning. It\u2019s like instead of saying \u201cthis is a gray crayon\u201d, you say, \u201cI twirl between my fingers the truncated trunk of an elephant, gas of overcast clouds in cylinders, the cigarette, intoxicating the youth with their ability to draw, to live, to create.\u201d Did you know I was talking about a crayon? NO! That\u2019s just bad writing!<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m not saying that Virginia Woolf is a bad writer. She\u2019s amazing. Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s amazing. Ray Bradbury is (belches) amazing. I just wasn\u2019t trying hard enough. I need to read with a pen in hand, a book that I can write in the margins, possibly a few people to discuss it with for that good ol\u2019 intellectual discourse. I need to put in more effort, more labor to reap the benefits of such masterful works. But how much effort, how much labor, how much highbrow diction and intertextuality and obscure allusions and plots buried so deep within poetic language that it\u2019s barely there\u2014 how much before it takes the pleasure out of reading? Before I can write it off as being pretentious? Before I stop feeling like I\u2019m stupid?<\/p>\n
And maybe this entire essay is just me musing about my own stupidity\u2014 maybe genius works, in some way, by the power dynamic of the master showing off and the reader shaking his head in obedient confusion, like \u201coh yeah, you are a really good writer, because… I have no idea what the hell you\u2019re saying!\u201d Maybe it\u2019s a failure of the education system to teach us to be better readers, maybe it\u2019s a failure of the culture of the twenty-first century to want things fast and to want them NOW, even our literature, or maybe we\u2019re all just a bunch of foundering idiots\u2014 or maybe it\u2019s just me\u2014 but in the meantime, I really do want to know what all the fuss is about with this godforsaken book. I got my pen. Got my copy that has decent sized margins. I just gotta keep reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve come across a problem over and over again that really embarrasses me as a English major and philosophy major and writer and avid reader and student for a long time who has been told that I\u2019m quite good at those things, and it\u2019s that sometimes I don\u2019t know what the hell I\u2019m reading. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2194,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2194"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10221,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197\/revisions\/10221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}