Ashley's Response to "Toward Becoming an Authentic Reader"

Chewed and Digested: “ Towards Becoming an Authentic Reader”

Literature is food for my soul – I am never so happy as when I am curled up with a good book (Shakespeare, Keats, Fitzgerald, one of the Brontes, etc.) for hours. There was no doubt or question in my mind that I was destined to become an English major coming into the university. When one starts to read literary criticism for fun, that’s when one starts to get an idea of where one’s life is headed.
But let me say that my rather voracious appetite for reading never really kicked in until my freshman year of high school. Let me restate that: my appetite for intelligent reading didn’t kick in until high school. I read…things…but not the kind of things that required many brain cells. But, I had stumbled across Les Miserables by Victor Hugo in the eighth grade, and discovered a love for literary classics. So, in freshman year, I decided to become ambitious, and picked up Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Of course upon reading it, the heavens opened and all became clear as I understood every line Shakespeare penned, never needing to aid of footnotes for clarification since I was speaking in the Elizabethan dialect fluently already. Alas, such was not the case. I understood almost none of what occurred in Macbeth, let alone what the characters were saying or the general meaning of the work. But I was intrigued – there was something to this Shakespeare character that was inscrutable but fascinating; I wanted to understand.

And so, I picked up some others of his: Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and finally Hamlet. It was when I read Hamlet that I finally came to understand some piece of Shakespeare, and I loved what I came to see. I saw that there was a depth, a level of contemplation as well as fast-paced action that was absolutely gripping. It’s now my favorite play of his.

The rest is history. The next few years of high school I couldn’t get enough, I was constantly at the library, my teachers’ classrooms, the book store, my friends’ bookcases, assessing what there was that I felt must come to know, and I ran through as many things as I could get my hands on.

What Richard Cracroft (with his wonderful witty-phrases-with-dashes) says is so true – there are few things so important as reading, and I have come to know this. In my own life, becoming an “authentic reader” of literature parallels my becoming an “authentic reader” of the scriptures. Becoming better at reading the one vastly improved my capacity to understand the other. Reading literature I consider to be among the most important things I do. And my goal has always been this: to reconcile the things of man with the things of God, and use learning (through reading) as a means to draw closer to the Divine. There are books that are not worth reading. There are also books that are, but will contain some material that one wouldn’t find necessarily appropriate in the Celestial realm of heaven. That’s when the reader’s job becomes tricky – one must sift through the book’s contents to pull out the gems without carrying around the muck. It’s ridiculous to think that one can and should read only books appropriate to carry into the temple – literature is meant to be a thing of imperfection, for it is the ultimate representation of man himself. Let’s face it: man is imperfect, and always will be. It’s simply a fact of life. The best we can do is to “aim Celestially” as Cracroft puts it, for “we’ll get much further than if we had aimed low and comfortably.” Translation: try your best. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?