Escaping your life to find yourself
by Ashley Mondale, English Teacher
For me, reading is like breathing – a necessity to sustain life. And like breathing, I must do it every day, and not because I’m an English teacher, but because when I don’t have something to read, I am miserable. Reading is a life force, and it is something with which I have had a life-long love affair.
I cannot remember my life before I could read. Perhaps I was like Scout Finch who, according to her brother Jem, was born reading. My mom tells stories of how before I could walk she would hand me a newspaper, magazine or whatever upside down and I would then turn it right side up and “pretend” to read. I loved to climb up on my father’s lap and say, “Deed a book, Daddy,” and he would read to me.
There is something magical about reading. My head, my heart and my soul all are feed by the stories I read. They fill up my body and become a part of my DNA. Through reading I am taken away from where I am and I become someone different. The story possesses me. I escape reality.
There is something about reading that allows me to experience a life other than my own. I read “Jane Eyre” for the first time in elementary school, I would lie in bed at night pretending that I was a servant in the house like Jane and that someone, or something, was moving around in our attic.
In third grade my love for the “Little House” series turned me into a weirdo. I only wanted to wear jumpers with thick tights. I cried when my mom refused to let me wear my hair in two braided pig-tails. I took a little slate to school like the one Laura Ingalls used. I even carried my lunch in a tin pail. I had lots of friends, but looking back now I wonder why they were friends with me – I was a complete freak.
As I grew, my love of reading intensified. Because of what I read, I could leave my little house on my idyllic street and be another person, in another time, in another place. I was Scarlett O’Hara vowing to never go hungry again; I was Elizabeth Bennet realizing that I did love Mr. Darcy; I was Katherine falling in love for the first time in “Forever.” I was everyone, but I was still me – a me that was now a little bit of all the people I read about in my books.
When I went to college, I remember on sitting in a room in the building known as Old Main and listening to my advisers talk about what was required of an English major at Westminster College. My heart pumped with excitement as I thought of all the wonderful things I would read. But then one of my advisers said something strange; “You don’t have to read everything. You just have to read well.” What? Not read everything? What kind of crap was this? Wasn’t the point of this “higher” education to read everything so that I was prepared to teach anything? What the heck?
But during those wonderful four years I did read, more than I had ever read before. New worlds and new people became part of me. I read about Vietnam, a subject too taboo to teach in my high school. I spent a glorious spring semester reading all six Jane Austen novels and becoming a bona fide Janeite. I read feminist literature and learned being a feminist didn’t mean I had to burn my bra (thank God!). I took a class called “Tragedy,” and it ended up being the class where I laughed the most. And I read junk too. It wasn’t just the “classics” that I read; there was some “regular” stuff too (i.e. “Gossip Girl,” Vogue magazine, “Jurassic Park”). I read just for fun when I was stressed or when I thought my head was going to explode while trying to read “Moby Dick.”
The thing I learned the most during my visits with those characters from those places in my novels, short stories and poems was, as my adviser predicted, to read well. I could glean meaning from everything I read. I was adept at cutting through the nonsense that sometimes bogged me down in the past to get to the heart of the matter.
My sister thinks I’m a nerd because I love to read, but it’s okay because I am a nerd – and damn proud of it! Reading is a wonderful experience for me. I know that not everyone is a reader; my sister only reads picture books (which works out all right since she teaches kindergarten). I know students in my classes who absolutely hate to read, and it’s all right. I don’t like math, but I do it because it has value. So does reading. And so my point is this: just give it an honest try.
Reading is a gateway. Knowing how to read well can take you places beyond your wildest dreams. Reading can take you away from your real life problems and your real life situations. You can become someone else. Reading allows you to imagine a new life and try it on for size. You can learn from the past and envision the future. There is no limit as to who you can become, where you can go or what you can achieve when you read.
Sure, you may not ever like a novel you read school, but I can guarantee this: there is a perfect piece of literature out there for you. Be brave. Walk into Barnes & Noble or Borders or even our library and look around. There is a book somewhere for you that will speak to your soul in a way nothing else in your entire life ever has. And how great is that?
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