High School English Redux

High school English was my least favorite subject, bar none. I hated it. I hated it so much that I didn’t even take it senior year, even though you had to have four years to graduate (luckily for me, my children’s theater class–where we went and performed at elementary schools–counted).

Seems weird, right? An author who hated English?

Here’s the thing. I love reading. I loved reading back then. (I set a school record at my elementary school read-a-thon. The librarian was so impressed she took me out for lunch to celebrate.)

What I hated was the fact that we’d have to read these lovely books, and I did like almost everything we read (minus The Great Gatsby), and then we’d have to rip them to shreds. What’s the symbolism of this? Why did the author write that? What does this passage say about life in California in the Great Depression? Would you say that so-and-so is a Christ figure? Why or why not?

It really ruined things for me. I just wanted to read the book. I wanted to enjoy the story. I wanted Huck Finn to successfully get Jim to safety without having to think about what Mark Twain was trying to say about the state of slavery in the country at the time period. I could think Beowulf was a bit of an ass without pondering the links between early Britain and Norse countries. I could enjoy Frankenstein without worrying about Mary Shelley’s success in a male-dominated industry.

But I recently realized that maybe there is value in looking past the story to why the story is what it is. And it happened completely by accident.

On my personal blog (Where Landsquid Fear to Tread, mirrored at Kit Campbell Books), I occasionally host re-reads. Thus far we’ve done a couple of fantasy/science fiction series, one book a month or so, and then I post a write-up and some discussion questions for everyone to think about, and invite people to ask their own questions and thoughts in the comments.

And I realized, last week, as I was putting up the latest, that I am now, for fun, essentially doing what I was supposed to do in high school English. I’m looking at a book for more than just story. Admittedly, I tend to look at things like foreshadowing between books, character development, over-arcing themes–writer things, essentially–over societal impacts and the like, but the point still stands. I am dissecting books, the part I hated the most, for fun.

And I AM having fun.

It’s kind of weird to look back at what I felt was wasted time and realize that it had a use after all.