Choosing to read the good books

“Under the pomegranate tree,” I see the slippery red seeds of the pomegranate fruit, rich with antioxidants, a symbol of hope in Christian art, and the favorite spot for reading for the characters in Khaled Hossein’s The Kite Runner. Considering that The Kite Runner was the last work of fiction I read for pleasure (that is, excluding what I am reading for classes), I thought the phrase made an appropriate name for my blog. In his novel, Hossein tells the unforgettable experiences of Amir, a boy growing up in modern Afghanistan. Much of the book’s action focuses on the drastic events surrounding the Taliban’s occupation of Afghanistan and its impact on Amir and his servant and best friend, Hassan. But before the boys face tragedy, loss and separation, they enjoy reading together up on a hill, seated beneath a pomegranate tree. Amir reads to Hassan from the Persian epic, the Shanamah, helping his uneducated friend experience the joys of literature. In America today, we believe that no citizen should be denied an education like Hassan in the novel; thus, every child has access to a free public education where he or she can learn to read. I hope to take a part in this in the near future, after I complete a Masters program in May 2008. But before I play the part of a teacher helping students to bolster their reading and writing skills, I hope to sit beneath my own pomegranate tree and soak up as much literature as possible.

Therefore, I hope to use this blog as a motivational tool for myself and as an outlet for my reflections on what I read, see and experience in my daily life. I have always been an avid reader, yet I have felt that in the past I sometimes read the “fine” books instead of the “great” books available. I have fallen into reading what people have told me to read instead of what I truly wanted to and knew I should be reading, particularly as an aspiring English teacher. In recent years I have chosen bestsellers such as The Nanny Diaries, The Five People You Meet in Heaven and all of Dan Brown’s books over classics and modern/contemporary masterpieces. While I often enjoyed such easy reads and found them interesting, I’ve known that there are so many other great books out there that I still haven’t read: Great Expectations, Moby Dick, Beloved, The Things They Carried and a host of others. When I came across the Thoreau quote, “read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” I knew I’d found my mantra. So, welcome to my own personal reading circle, an independent book club so to speak, and please join in if you wish! I hope to read one book per week, though I realize this is an ambitious goal for a graduate student already overloaded with reading on a daily basis. We’ll see how it goes, and if you have any speed-reading tips please let me know.

My initial book list (in random order):
The Death of a Salesman (Miller)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving)
Beloved, The Bluest Eye (Morrison)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston)
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
The Lord of the Rings (trilogy, Tolkein)
A Room of One's Own (Woolf)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
The Things They Carried (O’Brien)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson)
The Unvanquished (reread, Faulkner)
Persuasion (Austen)