What have you read? What has it done to you?

Earlier this semester, I was struggling with what to assign my American Literature students for their required research essay. 

The class was small — just six students — and made up of young adults I had taught in multiple other classes. So I knew them well and recognized they had all written many research essays already. 

I also knew they were exhausted from the school grind: their current courses, the challenges of deciding what to do post-graduation, the endless scholarship applications, and the stress of the pandemic. 

So I decided to take a slightly different approach with the assignment. Here is the prompt I gave them: 

Research Essay 

You are an editor of a future (2060?) Norton Anthology of American Literature series. The section for which you are responsible is entitled, “Literary Influences of a Young (Your Name Here).” 

What material would you include as part of your own influences? Would they include a selection by one or more children’s authors, such as Dr. Seuss and Beverly Cleary? By popular writers, such as J.K. Rowling and Stephen King? Maybe something by one or more of the writers we have explored this semester, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ambrose Bierce? 

Remember, by 2060, the definition of what is considered “literature” may have grown even more expansive, and is more likely to include movies, websites, and social-media posts. However, traditional books, short stories, and poetry will still play a role. 

Try to focus on individual works: Star Wars: The Force Awakens as opposed to the entire Star Wars saga, or “The Cask of Amontillado” instead of all short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 

You will need to cite your sources, either in APA or MLA format. You may — and should — reference them through paraphrase, summary, and direct quotations in the body of your paper. The most important aspect of the paper is why. Why did you choose each work? What did you learn from it? What made it so pivotal in your development? 

My hope — fingers crossed! — is that this will be fun, a look back during the tail end of your senior year at material that you enjoyed and that left a mark on you. 

This should be 5-7 pages in a light, conversational style. A minimum of three influences (unless you make a good case for fewer). Fan-gushing is permitted and even encouraged.

 

Eventually, I relaxed the citation requirements to allow students to write more freely about books and writers without worrying about particular editions or volumes. (Anybody who wants the original assignment for in- or out-of-class use, here it is.) 

Students did a terrific job, and they presented portions of their papers for our final class. It was fun to learn what they had read and experienced and the impact it had on them. 

As I sometimes do, I wrote the assignment along with them, adapting it to focus more on my reading habits as an adult, trying to cover one big literary find for each decade of my grown-up life. (I combined my 40s and 50s, since I'm still in the early years of the latter.) 

I'm sharing my response here. It's still pretty drafty, but so be it. 

 My Reading Preferences

I’ve heard it said that reading isn’t the same after sixteen. Up to that age, you absorb everything with no filter, so it goes in raw, unrefined, and stays with you for a long, long time. After sixteen, your reading defenses are engaged. You’ve gained some experience, you know what you like and don’t like, and you know what society — classmates, teachers, relatives, college admissions personnel — expects you to like and not like. So most reading material after age sixteen has a purpose beyond entertainment; part of its goal is to demonstrate the kind of person you are to the people who see you reading it. Maybe more significantly, much of what you read after sixteen is not primarily of your own choosing. It includes material assigned for class, to learn how to ace a certain test, to duct-tape a leaky water heater, lower a baby’s temperature, or care for an ailing parent. 

My earliest pre-sixteen literary experiences are Mother Goose rhymes and Grimms’ fairy tales, read to me by my mom or a favorite aunt. One of the earliest books I remember reading on my own was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, which contained most of the elements of fantastic fiction that I enjoy to this day — a plucky hero, a long quest, magic, frights, and a happy ending that leads back home. In retrospect, I’m sure my memories of the book are all mixed up with the MGM movie (where Dorothy’s silver slippers became ruby slippers, and where Oz wasn’t a real place, but just a little girl’s dream). Regardless, it started me down a road that eventually led to comic books by the thousands, the Hardy Boys, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien and so many others. Sometimes, on a hot summer’s day or a cold winter’s night, when my other tasks have been completed (or are far enough away, deadline-wise, that I can afford to procrastinate), I find comfort in revisiting these old friends and finding out they are right where I left them — ferreting out clues, swinging through jungles, burying enemies alive, and so forth. 

But my goal in this paper is not to address old friends, as gracious and accommodating as they are. Instead, I want to consider three books or writers that have impacted me as an adult, if only to illustrate that reading can still be the same after sixteen, that it can be a lifelong joy and pursuit. If we stay nimble of mind and open to new influences, we can reap the rewards of reading for a lifetime. 

The first book on my adult list is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. I first encountered it in an advanced writing class at Mount Union College. Over the years, Zinsser released several revisions, but the gist remained the same: Writing was a worthwhile endeavor, but no piece of writing was ever truly “finished,” and writing was never something that one could master. It could only be practiced and refined. Zinsser preached clarity above all, and his chapter on revising with brackets, placing them around all [the extra] words that don’t belong [in a draft] stuck [with me]. I began to practice what he preached, although never well enough. I still think of Zinsser’s advice every time I revise. When in doubt, I remove the word or words. It improves the work far more often than it ruins it. 

Zinsser also advocated writing as a key component of learning. He believed people never know what they think about a particular topic until they write about it, a principle I still adhere to and have shared with many students. You have to move the fingers on the keyboard or the pen across the page, and when you are finished, you can look back and formulate a position. 

Revisiting Zinsser for this paper has been like reuniting with an old friend. You plan to meet just for lunch to catch up, but instead find yourselves talking until late at night because you are in such pleasant company. 

I have a more complicated relationship with the second book on my list, Choice Theory (1999) by William Glasser. The author believes that nobody can control other people’s decisions, that the best we can do is to provide others with accurate and reliable information so they can make their own choices. “Control,” to the author, is a myth, insofar as it relates to others; the only person’s behavior I can control is my own. I discovered this book as part of research I was doing for a graduate class at Ashland University, and it was a revelation. Prior to reading it, I believed I could control given situations, especially classroom situations, through meticulous planning and careful delineation of rules. Glasser taught me that my goal was an impossibility. When dealing with a multiplicity of attitudes and people, the best I could hope to do is make my position and my rationale known and hope that others would see their way clear to follow my advice. 

Glasser’s book also reinforced the importance of not blindly following any particular life philosophy in all its particulars. While the idea of personal choice and personal autonomy are great motivators, some of Glasser’s other hypotheses and suggestions — for example, that all mental illness is somehow attributable to unhealthy current relationships, as opposed to past or ongoing trauma or atypical brain chemistry — are controversial and run counter to established psychological models. So while I believe wholeheartedly in some aspects of Glasser’s theory, other parts are problematic and even hurtful. 

My final selection isn’t one book, but the entire output of a particular author, Harlan Coben. I was introduced to Coben through a reference in Stephen King’s novel, The Outsider, where a character accused of a horrific murder gave as an alibi a trip to hear Coben speak. The reference piqued my interest in Coben, so during the Long Year of Quarantine I sought out one of his books, Tell No One (2001). It has a typical Coben plot: The main character’s happiness is threatened by some person or event from the past. It could be a missing sibling, a hidden crime, or some embarrassing personal secret. Coben’s books are driven by short, punchy dialogue and multiple twists and turns, sometimes stretching credibility. They also contain some wry observations about modern life, the American dream, and appearances versus reality. Think Death of a Salesman crossed with Die Hard. 

While some of the technology in Tell No One is predictably dated (longish sections talking about the marvels of email for audiences that may not have known much about it), the human interactions still ring true. The novel inspired me to pick up several other Coben novels — The Woods, Don’t Let Go, The Stranger, Stay Close, The Innocent, Just One Look and, most recently, Home. Every book has that same basic jumping-off point, but with fresh or original results. 

A key part of my Coben enjoyment is that my wife and I have been reading his books together. Reading together is a habit we cultivated decades ago but had stopped until pandemic boredom made us start again. Since last year, we have read 49 novels (I keep a list) by a variety of writers, including Sandra Brown, David Baldacci, James Patterson, and Stephen King. But the Coben books are our favorites, and fortunately he is prolific enough to keep us reading for the rest of this year, at least, before we catch up. Reading along with a partner is a great way to experience a book; the conversations are rich and meaningful, and no test at the end ruins the fun. 

I don’t know if Coben’s books will stand the test of time for me — and the fact that I’m already so fuzzy on most of his plots indicates that they are fairly interchangeable — but for now they’re giving us something to occupy our time by whisking us away from the troubles of the world, much like that cyclone first picked up Dorothy and dropped her in Oz, those many years ago. And maybe that’s enough. 

If you think about it, readers are real-life Dorothy Gales, waiting for a whirl of words to transport us somewhere else, a place where we can make sense of the real world by looking at it through somebody else’s eyes, at least for a little while. After you turn sixteen, you might be able to see the trick up the magician’s sleeve, but it’s still magical enough to enchant and delight. May all your reading experiences do the same. 

CS :)

May 2021