After reading this, I rabidly went through pretty much everything Steinbeck wrote, starting with his shorter novels (the Pearl, of Mice and Men) and moving into his collections of short stories (Tortilla Flats) and his novels about the Monterey Bay (Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday). A year later, I branched out drastically into the world of science fiction, reading Asimov and Phillip K. Dick as though they had the secrets of the universe woven in between their lines of prose, and if I could only red enough of them then all would be made clear. I guess I still think this is true to some degree; every story has elements that every human being can relate to, and each time I begin a new story I am hoping to pick out those elements and add them to the mosaic of my own understanding of human beings and the way(s) we are.
Something happened, though, when I got to college. Not only did reading take a back seat to many of the other elements of college life, but I found that it was simply impossible to actually keep up with the amount of reading expected in each of my classes. I could have read everything I needed to for anyone or even two classes, but not for a full course load. At this point, reading stopped becoming an endeavor as necessary as breathing and started to fell like a chore. I stopped reading for fun, and only read what I absolutely had to in order to pass a test or join in classroom discussions. My love for stories had taken a back seat to the point that it became completely ignored, dusty and forgotten. To be fair, the story of my own life became a lot more interesting than it had been in high school, and I felt the weight of authorship quite heavily as the choices I made became real, but I had forgotten that reading could be an escape from all of this.
Every time I would see the...
I would stare at the book, and the white clapboard house that adorned the cover would stare back at me from its New England whaling village windows sullenly, the neglect it felt obvious even to my now-calloused eyes. Eventually I turned the book over, so the windows couldn't watch me as I went about all of my other business now so much more important than reading.
It is strange that college, the one institution if there is any that is supposed to inspire a life of learning and absorbing information about the world, should have caused such a reversal in me. It is still true that I do not enjoy the way many books are taught (it is not the books themselves, but rather the teachers and their state-imposed lesson plans), but I cannot actually lay the blame for my departure form reading at the feet of educational institutions. I have become to wrapped up in my own story to be able to devote the time to anyone else's. But as the months pass by, I am beginning to realize that my own story only really matters in the context of all the stories that came before and that are going on around me, whether they are the stories of living, breathing people or those that breathe out of the countless works of fiction sitting in a used book store waiting to be picked up again. It is only as a thread in the tapestry of human understanding tat any life has any real meaning, and our authors are the best weavers we have. Maybe I should try reading some Steinbeck again...
