[Rachel] Reading Biography

Reading is a shady affair.

It is a shape-shifter that darts about my life as a growing, thinking reader; first creating the careless innocence of my childhood, then entertaining the ego and fantasies of my adolescence and now, disrupting and reinventing my notions of realities.

I wish I could only say that reading is wonderful and enlightening and uplifting, that it fed my soul and enriched my intellect. But reading also has proven to have the potential to grab me aside and hiss in the most sinister of voices that knowledge, the pursuit of it, leads to a shut door (Flowers for Algernon by David Keyes). And yet a story I read can also have the effect of consuming my thoughts for days (Love in the Time of Cholera and A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez), and a fictional character I identified with be at the top of my “To be before I die” list (Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston).

Reading, when I was much younger, fed my hunger for adventure (The Famous Five and The Secret Seven Series by Enid Blyton), romance (SVH by Francine Pascal; Danielle Steele), mindless girl-on-girl politics (Baby Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin), mystery and fear (Goosebumps Series by R.L. Stine; Christopher Pike; Russell Lee; Agatha Christie; Bram Stoker; Brothers Grimm; Sherlock Holmes to name a few). It also created curious realities for me to escape to (who else but Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger, Matilda, Witches, The Twits, BFG etc), and soothed the teenage angst of my then more immediate reality (Chicken Soup for…well, every type of soul by Jack Canfield and others). Reading not only grew up with me, it brought me up.

And yet, reading is not all fiction and doesn’t always dally with our fantastical worlds. It too comes in the form of enduring theory and didactics and beguiling rhetoric.

Reading, as I have grown to believe, can be a rough assault on your deep-rooted beliefs and steadfast perceptions (Fiction: Sula and Beloved by Toni Morrison, God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Non-Fiction: Baudrillard, Nietzsche; Butler); it can be the reason you falter in the middle of a heated debate with friends. It can make you doubt yourself and what you think you know.

Reading has been my best of companions and my worst enemy. It has been the masonry of my ideas and perceptions, and also the wrecking ball of my realities.

So I say tread carefully into this pastime. Know what you are about to read before you read it, and then hold on tight to the reigns of your reality before you plunge into the that next book.

Hence, my one crucial approach to Literature discussions in class is/will be to encourage and practice critical interaction with as opposed to passive soaking-in of texts, and to develop sound opinions and voices in my students.