On Learning to Read

This post is a working document for a project I'm doing for my mom. She's leading me and a few other people though a writing exercise inspired by Sherman Alexie, who wrote The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me. Go ahead, click over and read that first. 


I cannot believe that I am doing a writing exercise for my mom. Many years ago, the though of this would have driven me to a stubborn rage.

---






I'm a reader. A proud reader of printed books, which line my bookshelves with pride in 2012, even while the mechanisms of self-expression and identity have seemingly moved on to more electronic forms for the vast majority of people. I cling to the printed word.

I don’t remember the formative moment that I came to read books. I was probably a young kid in Berkeley, taught by my mom or by Willie Mae Ellington, who took care of me and my brother Brandon when my mom was working. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Dad.

I must remember other books from this period, but the only one that stands out is Danny, Champion of the World. I distinctly remember my mom reading this book to us, especially poignant because our single mom was reading to us about a boy and his dad alone in the world, tweaking authority. I still love that book.

Reading at school was another matter. Over all the years of school that I went through, it would be difficult to say I was a good student. I had promise, intelligence, creativity perhaps, but I was not a good student. Instead I was: unfocused, undisciplined and confrontational. Confronting a teacher or a text that was hard for me to understand caused me to protest or at least reject the underlying value of the book. Teachers aligned themselves against me by assigning hard to read books, and good students who embraced these books were idiots. Everyone was against me, and so were my report cards.

Books I remember from school: April Morning, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men,  Great Expectations, Lord of the Flies (I actually liked this one), and something by Louise Erdrich. Few of these books connected with me. I fought with these teachers, struggled to understand these texts, struggled even more to write critical papers and turn them in. The teachers won, I got C's and sometimes D's. My english-teacher Mom tried to help but couldn't.

And yet my family read everything. Sitting around the kitchen table my Mom, Brandon and I would read the San Francisco Chronicle, the Berkeley Voice, pamphlets, mail and boxes of cereal. It gave us something to do when we didn't want to talk. I remember going on winter vacation to Yosemite and spending the hours after our dinner at the convenience store reading end of year wrap-ups in Rolling Stone and other magazines. Why did we spend so much time with the printed word?

And then finally I found a novel that spoke to me.

I read The Catcher in the Rye a little later than many of my peers. It wasn't assigned to me in Junior High or High School. Instead it came to me around my 18th year via Becky Gross (coincidentally a Junior High English teacher, but at the time my dreamy former summer camp counselor). She must have wanted me to read something good, or seen a little of the anti-establishment anger coming out of me. I imagine she thought I would relate to the main character.

I read Catcher first when I was away at the first year of University, up in lonely and wet Eugene, Oregon. It captured my rebellious state of mind perfectly. It added the word phony to my vocabulary.

The Catcher in the Rye also planted the first seeds of romantic New York City in my mind, which had previously only been exposed to the cynical decaying New York of Taxi Driver and the old Late Night with David Letterman.  Holden Caulfield took me to an older New York: the lake in Central Park, the Museum of Natural History and the glamorous, lonely Upper East Side. I was to later chase these images when I lived in New York City, and spent a fair bit of time strolling up and down Manhattan on my way to and from work.

I was not the first angry person to relate to Holden Caulfield, but like many of them I recognized through him the power of a fictional character to put words and ideas to the feelings that I didn't know how to. Isn't that what the best novels do for readers?

And so from there I found that I could learn more about myself and the world by reading books that I wanted to read. Throughout college I sought out courses that had novels I was interested in, and I read books on the side for myself. After college I found that reading took on even more importance to me as a way to sort through the challenges of life. Books that I am reading now: a book about Zen, and Kafka By the Shore by Haruki Murakami.