I have read four novels to date this year. That’s an unusually high number for me to have read in less than seven months because I have always found novels difficult. Difficult not because they were hard to understand, but because they were hard to enjoy, despite my childhood bookishness.
Looking back, I know my small, Catholic high school handled reading assignments well. Each June, the English Department sent students a two-page list of suggested titles and their authors. All the students had to read six books in three months.
During the first two weeks of the fall semester, students were to submit an index card for each book read. In addition to the title and author, the student answered three or four questions including what is quotable from this book, and, why did you like/dislike the book.We were then to independently read one book each month on our own from October through May and to schedule a 10-minute, after-school discussion with our teacher.The school also stoked my desire to be learned.
In 1962, while with my family in Sears — and, yes, Sears had a book department in those days — a display of the newly published “Ship of Fools” by journalist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, made me ask can a best seller be literature?
At the end of my freshman year of college, at a school in which I was a poor fit, I looked forward to reading whatever I wished. I took advantage of the public library and generally spent my evenings with a book opened up before me.
Sometime in August, I broke with my library habit and bought a small paperback: “The Hobbit,” or, “There and Back Again” by J. R. R. Tolkien. Because I read Tolkien with the young man with whom I was falling in love, and, as I later read it aloud to my own children, those experiences told me how important it is to share words.
But the pressures of college, the end of my relationship and the realization that I was a pre-law student because it was what my mother wanted, made me feel that I was at the bottom of a well. I did not sit for the LSAT, nor did I take an accounting course.
I missed reading. Studying literature seemed the best way to discover reading that satisfied. I began graduate courses in English. During my third term, my romantic literature professor walked in with John Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” He said something to the effect that, “We often wonder whether a best-seller can be literature.” He went on to explain how close to a Victorian novel the writing is, but, I had stopped listening. He said what I thought at age 15.
For the next several years, even a few pages of a badly written novel affected my writing for two or three weeks. Much later, inspired by my children’s interest in science fiction and fantasy, and my reading of history, I played with writing a junior novel about the real Arthur. That led me back to graduate school, this time probing the Medieval world through Irish myths.
Strangely, between each semester, the need to return to my own time led me to gulp down two or three novels until classes began again. However, when I finished my degree, novels no longer enchanted me. I turned again to history, along with science. I rarely read fiction more than once or twice a year.
But something changed when I read Hilary Mantel’s short story collection, “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.” I admired her writing and passed the book to my daughter. Then, an acquaintance recommended — no, make that urged me to read — “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout. Strout created a real person and named her Olive.
I again turned to Mantel who brought an historical figure to the page. In Wolf Hall, we see Thomas Cromwell as a thoroughly modern lawyer, capitalist and politician.
One of the courses I taught was called Writing about Religion and Politics in America in which we discussed the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment’s role in the founding of the United States. Were I to teach the same course today, I would include the political and religious difficulties the Tudors endowed both England and America with and that the Founders surely worked to avoid.
Catching an NPR interview with Maggie O’Farrell, I bought her novel, “Hamnet.” While the book is subtitled, “A Novel of the Plague,” I see it as an examination of a marriage and what happens when one of the partners is left confused by what to her is the lack of feeling on the part of her husband. I have returned again to Hilary Mantel and am now reading the sequel to “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies.” When I finish it, I will turn to a writer I feel is rather neglected, Edna O’Brien. Despite a now deceased friend’s many recommendations to read “Country Girls,” I will finally follow his advice.
Many of you will have read these books. If you haven’t, add them to your list.
Susan Wozniak can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.