HGM

As a young lass, I always found reading incredibly interesting. The first few books I read were the "Magic Treehouse" ones, where I could imagine myself participating in the grand adventures the characters undertook. When I started first grade, I thought that my love of reading and desire to read would diminish as I found my day filled up with "Bunny Books", simple equations, and recess. In fact, the exact opposite happened. Whenever I finished my in-class work, I would crack open the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of kiddie literature. As I moved up through that elementary school system, I couldn't count on two hands the number of times in a week my teachers would ask me to, please, just this once, take that book out from under my desk. Sometimes I listened. Looking back, it seemed that I was being a rather insolent youngster, but nevertheless I am somewhat glad that I refused to put those books down- had I done so, I imagine it would have been quite difficult to pick them back up. The French teacher in particular had a knack for noticing when I had a book under my desk. Sometimes she would ask me to put it away, other times just sigh and move on. I always felt bad, but never stopped. In retrospect, I should not have put my teachers in such situations. I never meant to implicate any others in my "wrongdoings". My parents and teachers (when I wasn't disrupting their classes) always fostered my love of reading, heaping praise upon me whenever I completed a relatively difficult book. Because I was so engrossed in reading, it never struck me look at a story beneath the surface. Upon entering middle and high school, I was suddenly expected to look for themes, static characters, allegories. I had never done anything like that before, almost always taking the stories I read at face value. And while this analysis certainly added to my understanding of a story, it also took something away from it. It's difficult to articulate, but something is lost when you read a book in school and examine every fiber of its being- suddenly, your interpretations are wrong, your understanding doesn't have quite enough depth to it, and you spend weeks or months on a single story. This method has ruined many the book for me. After deconstructing every last sentence of a book, it can be difficult to put it back together. That's probably why I read so much out of school. Because when I read a book that I've chosen, I'm responsible only to myself to understand and interpret it. And sometimes, that may leave me short of below-the-surface details, but I'm okay with that. And this is not to say that I despise reading and analyzing books in school, because that is simply not the case. I enjoy other people's input and ideas, and I don't mind analyzing certain aspects of a story. When a class tends towards the over-analytical, though, it can often ruin the usually wonderful experience of reading a book. When a chapter is split into hundreds of different sentence fragments, it can be tough to look beyond the diction and syntax. Most of the time, a book is better than the sum of its parts. And sometimes English classes tend to neglect the sum of the parts.