On the pleasure of reading

Here's an honest description of my (degrading) reading habits from elementary school through present day:

Elementary school: I would pour my heart and soul into reading famous short stories, memorizing poems by heart and reading out loud in class (albeit this was in Belarus). Whenever I came across something that had to be read, I would do it from first word to last. Reading assignments to me would mean read every single word and understand it. Obviously they were all simple, but that doesn't matter. I did not do any reading for fun as we had enough to read in school and I had better things to do like run around throwing rocks at random things.

Junior High School: Assignments became a bit tougher but my reading skills improved tremendously and I could devour books in days reading every word and retaining a lot of required information. We had less assignments to memorize passages or poems so that part of my brain kind of stopped working. I started reading for pleasure - fun stuff at first like treasure island, 20,000 leagues under the sea and so forth. I slowly matured to the Count of Monte Cristo and darker, more classical works. Of course I did have the occasional burst of energy reading through 50 goosebumps stories.

High School: This was my prime. English classes actually pushed you to make intelligent arguments about classic literature (Most of Shakespeare, random plays like Our Town, The Odyssey and so forth) and hold discussions tying works and themes together. Of course the pinnacle of it all was my AP English class where I got introduced in a very rigorous way to Crime and Punishment, Jude the Obscure, T.S. Eliot, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, etc. Each work was heavily analyzed and discussed in class. Opinions were shared among peers, some being completely insane (as in, tied together by spit - arguments that are held extremely loosely but are not logically "wrong"), others being plain wrong and lacking any comprehension of the material and of course some extremely insightful comments that even surprised the teacher (Ms. Kauffman!) I probably did the most pleasure reading at that point - I got through books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, American Tragedy, a whole bunch of sci-fi like the Wheel of Time series, Forgotten Realms books and short Shadowrun novels. It was a great time! I read quicker but I did absorb less information per book than previously. I think it's because the books were becoming more complex and had more pages!

College: Sigh...this is where it all kind of went downhill. Being a biology major leaves very little time to pleasure read and none of my classes required reading full length books. This made me lazy. I faked one of my freshmen writing seminars by writing a comparison essay between The Odyssey and The Aeneid only having read the Odyssey in High School. Pulled off an A- through clever use of spark notes and random quotations from the Aeneid itself. I began reading more online news and articles. Because most of them were longer than they needed to be, I learned to skim read. I could absorb pages worth of text in seconds by glancing through the paragraphs quickly. This habit did not help in actual reading. Over the summers I would try and pick up an actual book - Blink, Atlas Shrugged, Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, The Idiot - and I would read it and understand it but retain very little because I skim read. That is not a proper way to treat a novel. An online blog post, maybe.

I am now trying to fix this. Using my trusty Sony Reader, I've read Mort, more Sherlock Holmes, Then We Came to the End, Breakfast of Champions, and The Golden Compass. I did this slowly and carefully, trying not to skip passages and read entire sentences.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I'm returning to my high school days, actually enjoying reading. Although it's now hard to discuss and analyze books since there is no more Ms. Kauffman to ask thoughtful questions =)

Go forth and read!