Raise your hand if you did your assigned summer reading in school. I didn’t. And I love to read!
Last year, a group of my friends got together on Discord with the aim of staying in touch and updating each other on life events and potential meet ups. We all live quite far from one another and hadn’t been in touch for some time so I was excited about this. Then I signed on for the first time and immediate dread and panic got hold of me. I’m not exaggerating. That is literally the physical reaction my body had to the first messages I read.
Assigned reading.
Assigned reading? There were all these messages on starting a book club for the group, the suggested titles, when they hoped to get together online and chat about the books. I physically winced at the idea. ‘I am NOT doing that’, I said to myself. And I let my friends know.
The thing with any kind of assigned reading, be it through book clubs or your English literature class, is that it’s either a group choice or an academic one. It’s not personal. Even if the selection happens to include a book you’ve been wanting to read anyway, you’re being told when to read it. It takes the personal, the discovery, the natural pull towards a book out of the picture.
During class, when it was a book that we were doing a close reading on and actively having discussions about it, I would read the book, I had no choice. Sometimes I got lucky and I enjoyed it and other times it was excruciating to get through. If and when we were left to our own devices and the books weren’t really discussed in class, that book inevitably went unfinished. And books assigned for summer reading was a whole other thing. The best part is that I would be reading all summer. In fact, I’d be up till all hours in the morning reading. Just not the books someone else decided I should spend my time on.
Once, during a high school summer vacation, I was supposed to read Sense and Sensibility. Of all the authors, someone had to go and make homework out of Jane Austen. I read plenty of books, just not that one. I kept putting it off until about a week before school was supposed to start. Grudgingly then, I picked up the book, looked at the number of pages and calculated how many I needed to read each day to be done in time. I started but I never got through the whole book. The studious worrywart in me went to school the first day stressed about the fact that I hadn’t done the assigned reading. I don’t remember what happened. I don’t remember if we ever talked about our summer reading assignment the first day of English Lit class. We probably didn’t. And while I’ve read all of Jane Austen’s other books, being told to read it made me averse to it for a very long time. Actually, I don’t know if I ever got around to reading it. It’s quite possible that the only reason I know the story is that I just ended up watching the different movie and BBC TV series versions of it.
Books find you when you’re ready to read them, when you need to read them. They just somehow know. Your gut somehow knows. It’s like a magnetic pull whether you find each other through your own bookshelves, the library or a bookshop. And if you try to go about it any other way, thinking you should read something just because of x, y and z, you’ll feel that resistance between you and the words on the page.
I’ve had some books for years before I read them and I’ve had some books I find on a whim and start reading the same day. And somehow, the books manage to give me exactly the insight, the adventure, the world that I need at the time. It’s not a coincidence. They just know.
Mariam Sultan 