Burning Books and Burnout

This weekend, something amazing happened to me. It was a totally unexpected and very much welcomed experience. It was, dare I say it, magical.

For the first time in at least 4 years, I stayed up late reading because I could not put the book down. I was enjoying it so much that I didn't want to stop until I could barely keep my eyelids from snapping shut. And when I dreamed, I dreamed about that book.

It's been a while since I've read for pleasure. Unfortunately, the way that education works today, at least in classes about literature, goes like this: you are told to read a book, you read the book, and then you spend several weeks dissecting every aspect of the book until it is a shell of its former self, barely recognizable, not unlike dissecting a frog or a fetal pig in biology. Only sadder, because maybe you liked the frog before you had to tear it up and inspect its insides with a magnifying glass while your teacher told you what you should be seeing.

Don't get me wrong: I love English Lit classes. I really did. But I'd be lying if I said that taking advanced English classes in high school and college didn't impact the way that I perceive the idea of "reading for pleasure."

In AP English senior year of high school, we read a lot of books, short stories, and poems. Some of them were actually really great books. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Of Mice and Men and All the King's Men and Medea. Of course, I enjoyed Hamlet and Macbeth, two of my favorite Shakespeare plays even to this day. But there were many books we read that I absolutely, 1000% did not enjoy. On the top of that list sits Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Heart of Darkness is a brilliant story that parallels delving into the human psyche with travelling deep into uncolonized Africa. I grew to hate that book. I grew to hate it so very much. We talked about it all semester long. Every single time we finished writing an essay and thought, "Ok, great, NOW we get to move on to something else," our teacher would hand out a new book, tell us to read it, and then write an essay comparing it to Heart of Darkness.

There was much darkness in the hearts of the students on those days.

But I'm getting beside the point.

Because even in high school, in the middle of the painful analysis and over-analysis and hyper-analysis of these books, I still had time to read what I wanted to read. And I did. And it sort of balanced things out. For every book we discussed in school, I was reading two or three others that I didn't have to write papers on, but could instead just enjoy.

That all stopped when I went to college.

The first two years that I was at UNC, I straight up didn't have time to read for pleasure. I was still adjusting to the workload, the pressure, the classes, etc. But I was still reading during the summers.

Then I declared my English major, and any desire to read anything that didn't have a grade riding on it went out the window. All I did was read. All the time. There was one semester when I had 23 books. 23 novels. Most students get 5 or 6 books for school, and I had 23. I was taking lots of English classes and reading lots of books and analyzing lots of plots, and I could not bring myself to read anything else that was more than a blog post or a Facebook status or a tweet.

Of course, each of these teachers thought that their class was the most important and didn't consider that there might be a student taking 4 English classes in the same semester who had 200 pages of reading for each of those other classes due in addition to their own. Short stories and plays and classic novels and memoirs and "Shakespeare and his Contemporaries" and "Medieval Literature, Chaucer to Pope," and "Southern Women Writers," and "The Great American Novel," and "Play Analysis," and so many others. I did, of course, supplement these heavily literature-based classes with classes more focused on digital literacy. The DL classes also had a lot of reading, but less analysis and fewer papers.

Because of these English classes, and by extension the other classes I took at UNC, I lost any desire to look at words outside of school, even over the summer. Reading felt like work, like school, like a chore. I straight up didn't want to do it.

And that's sad. I love reading. I really do. I love stories. I love character development. I love finding another world in the pages of a book and losing yourself there for days at a time. I love when someone else's words work their way into my head so that even when I'm sleeping, they're there, floating around.

I was a voracious reader as a younger student. I tore through books. I stayed up late into the night reading. I have fond memories of my parents reading the Harry Potter series to my brother and me on the bed when we were younger, doing all the accents. I really, truly loved to read. And I lost that over the course of 4 years.

I still loved books, but I couldn't bring myself to enjoy them anymore.

People frown on burning books, but why don't they frown on students burning out on reading?

There is a happy ending to this somewhat depressing post, and that is this: for the first time in 4 years, I am reading for pleasure again. And I am absolutely loving it. Working at a public library, with books, and book-lovers, in my face all day, it would be nearly impossible not to.

I started out by reading the first in George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, because I'm a fan of the show. I was fully expecting it to be a thick and troublesome read, not unlike the Lord of the Rings series (or at least The Hobbit). To my delight, I found the book incredibly easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to get sucked into. I took my time reading it (I am certainly slower than I once was), but I loved it.

The next two books I read were random things I pulled off of the shelves while I was waiting for holds to come in, and I enjoyed them, too, quite a bit.

Then I started reading Ender's Game. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card has been on my list of books to read for years. It's a sci-fi classic, a Hugo award winner, and was recently turned into a movie (which I haven't seen-I went into the book totally blind). I tore through this book in approximately 48 hours. I was up until 2:30 am the first night I had it because I just couldn't put it down. I lost myself in the pages, in the story, and only came up for air to go to the bathroom, get water, or shift reading-positions.

I can't say for sure if my adoration of this book has to do with the fact that it's been so long since I really enjoyed a book as much as this one, but, to be honest, I don't really care. It was enjoyable and brilliant and gave me a feeling of open-minded wonderment that I haven't felt in a long time. Sure, it's thrown off my sleep schedule, but I'm OK with that.

I currently have three books to hold me over during Christmas Break, and my rate over last few weeks is anything to go by, I may just have to pick up some more when I'm back in North Carolina.

The point of this post wasn't to bash the education system-it's thanks to all of the classes that I took and all of that analyzing that I have such a passion for words. And that can be traced all the way back to elementary school. My English classes built me up. My teachers gave me the skills to understand language, to string an intelligent sentence together, to look beyond words and find meaning where it might be overlooked. The sheer volume of it all may have turned me off to reading for a while, but I found my way back, as I always knew I would. Words are a part of me, and I know that I won't be satisfied if I'm only ever looking at the words that I write myself.

This post came together because, despite what I just said, I wanted to write something with the words and skills that I've developed thanks to years of personal and guided reading. They're two sides of the same page: if you don't read both sides, you're missing out. Now that I'm turning pages again, you can rest assured that those skills will keep developing with even more instruction, even more practice, and, of course, even more reading for pleasure.