Books From My Past

There are a lot of books that I read as a high school student that I've decided to back to, now, as an adult. As a high school student I read for a couple of primary reasons. First, and probably foremost, was the need for entertainment. I grew up in a house with no cable. We had a TV, we watched lots of movies, but the constant flow of media into my life was stymied when my mom cut off the tap when I was in kindergarten. Then, as the Internet began to get huge, as a senior, my dad fought tooth and nail to keep it out of the house. (My parents now have cable and Internet). Second I read to escape the brutal reality of high school itself. I was not popular and I had some social failings that I attempted to compensate for with theatre and choir involvement. But nearly everyday of high school was a renewed focus on my failings and insecurities and like all boys who are just over weight and chose to play soccer rather than football--and irregardless of skill or passion--I always felt as though I lived in the shadows of more successful students. So I read. I read everything I could find and I read all the time. Lewis, and Sinclair, Hemingway, I tried Dickens and Hugo, Mailer, Vonnegut, in addition to the assigned reading for English classes which I also took extreme pleasure in. Reading was never a chore or an assignment for me, as a rule, it was fun and it was escape and it was never, ever school. But much of what I read was beyond me, outside the realm of my vernacular and lexicon and now, as an adult, I'm taking time to re-read much of that literature that shaped my formative years.

I'm starting with Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and the things I didn't see in high school are so apparent to me now. It is everything I love about Hemingway--the sparse language that creates such a rich and complex text, the way all the passages of dialogue have to be read a second time to catch the subtext and double meanings of the characters and their interactions. Hemingway was a brilliant writer and took a great deal of risks, in his time, while his peers allowed themselves to be engrossed in language and description, Hemingway paired it all down to the simplest writing devices he could and the result is a legacy of story telling and narrative that has informed the collective consciousness of the writers who come after. I intend to write more about A Farewell to Arms after I've finished, but let me say it is a fantastic novel.

On deck is Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead, a novel I read as either a junior or sophomore and I am eager read it again. It is one of the novels that shaped the American reaction to World War II and deserves another look, besides Mailer being an integral part, in my opinion, of the modern American cannon. So, more on that, once I've read it, of course.