Beyond Book Reports

It occurred to me this morning I’ve been neglecting books. Not that I haven’t been reading them. I have. Not at the clip I should be, but what can you do? The truth is I find it hard to write about books. Most of the time, I feel like I’m back in second grade, writing a book report. I doubt any teacher actually enjoys reading those, so why would anyone clicking into a blog want to spend ten minutes reading the adult version? That is a self-censoring thought. And a stupid one at that. How many decisions are made every day based on reviews? I’d guess a lot.

Books affect people in different ways. The reading process is very much a personal experience. How I feel about a book is going to be different than the next person to read the same work. Which makes it easy to fall back on the cookie-cutter format we learned as kids. This dry and emotionless approach is counter to how we are taught to discuss other aspects of art and literature.

Discussing art does have technical aspects. Anyone who’s made it through even on art history class can attest to that. The use of light, angles, colors, materials, etc. will always be brought up. But ultimately, by the end, we get down to what the piece evoked in you. How did it make you feel? Stories are discussed in terms of language, symbolism, and even significance. Not significance to the reader but to the historical and to the canon. We are drilled to look for the traditional interpretation of the text instead of our own.

Take Great Expectations. The terror of high school students everywhere. At least Dickens was upfront about it. Steinbeck reeled you in with Of Mice and Men and then smacked you in the face with The Grapes of Wrath. I digress. I think I am probably one of the few people who actually liked Dicken’s style. I’ll forgive his wordiness. The man wanted to get paid after all. I related to Pip, the one-man Victorian version of the Island of Misfit Toys, and his quest to belong and succeed.

There were parts of the books, though, that made me downright uncomfortable. All of them involving Miss Havisham. If a discussion like that had come up, I might have dismissed it as a general dislike for a character standing in the way of my boy Pip’s happiness. This assessment wasn’t inaccurate. She was an obstacle put in the protagonist’s way.

In the 1999 film adaptation of Great Expectations, Anne Bancroft played the character. A stunning, emotional performance that made me feel sympathy for the lonely, jaded woman. She was sixty-eight at the movie’s release. Not a big deal, right? She’s what you pictured reading it all those years ago.

Except Miss Havisham was in her mid-thirties.

In scholastic pursuits, Miss Havisham is a tragic character warped by bitterness and redeemed through Pip’s goodwill. She is very much in contrast with the young protagonist. The actual moral of the Havisham story: whether it’s 1860 or 2019, being unmarried and in your thirties gets you universal shade and not much else.

Alright, maybe that was above high school book discussion, but only just. I wouldn’t trade the lessons of literary analysis over the years, but it’s not everything. Sometimes- no, most of the time, where the story takes you personally is where the meat of the significance is.

This is me taking the really long way around saying, I am going to try to let go of the book report fall back. Until next time Nerd Girls!