Taking Book Suggestions, Or: Why I Am So Dumb

It’s taken me a couple of decades to admit, but I’m a terrible reader.  Sure, I review books for fun and for publication, sometimes, but this is beside the point.  I’m excruciatingly slow at it.  I have to do all the voices in my head.  I am a few neurons short of moving my lips when I read. And I never developed the skill of deciphering a dense block of text. Unless something is incredibly readable or compelling, I just can’t effing finish it without skimming.

It came to me on a bus, when attempting a paragraph of Gender Trouble, which I was convinced would make me smarter and au-so-po-mo. I couldn’t do it.  Even though I was pretty sure I agreed with everything she was saying, Judith Butler’s notoriously sticky academic writing was like middle English to my brain.  I was filled with shame. I finally admitted to myself: It’s not that the books I couldn’t finish were dumb and outdated.  It’s that they were too hard for me.

Here I was, a reasonably clever girl who always did well on her SAT tests and reading comprehension stuffs, but I couldn’t get through Butler.  Or, more surprisingly: Chaucer.  Spenser. Milton. Marlowe. Pope.  Blake. Multiple women named George.  Any of the Brontes. Mary Shelley. Dickens.* Defoe. Joyce. Or even (as I’ve shamefully demonstrated) Jane Effing Austen. What was the deal?

Ah, yes.  Them SAT and NY Regents tests were multiple choice. Which means that you pass them by figuring out the psychology of the questioner and guessing what they probably want you to pick.  It’s a measure of your intuition and aptitude at statistics–a lot like Trivial Pursuit. I’ll not be modest on this account: I was a phenomenal test taker.**  Being clever and intuitive, however, doesn’t make you able to read books.

The ability to sustain focus for long periods of time and to cull meaning out of dense, complicated sentences is a skill.  It’s not something you’re born with (though some, admittedly, seem more naturally apt). As a kid who stopped voluntarily doing homework of any kind at age 12, it seems I missed the window on this skill.  It never occurred to me, before age 29, that this was the purpose of homework assignments: to practice focus and sustained study. Who knew?

In light of this, I’m even more ashamed. Here I was, always strangely proud of having swindled the SUNY system out of an English degree having read all of 4 books all the way through, and I was the one who lost out. At least I got the degree concentration in Rhetoric, because Frank knows how much Rhetorical spin I used to write papers about all those classics I knew nothing about. How much more would I have gotten out of this expensive education had I actually put the work in? WTF, brain?

Well, it’s time to find out.  My life as a Faker is a wonderful and complicated one, but I’d like to un-Fake this part. I’d like to build a curriculum of essential books to validate my BA. And read them.  All the way through.

Anyone have any suggestions to start with?***

*Except A Tale of Two Cities, which I read last year and liked very much, thanks. ALSO, you might notice I don’t mention Shakespeare.  Because I’ve watched many dozens of plays and read a few of them and I’m classing it differently because generally these were read out loud as plays should be.
**Likewise, you don’t want to mess with me on the Trivial Pursuit board.
***OH!  I did read Beowulf.  I liked it a lot, especially Grendel’s mom.  She was badass. But this means we can skip the Saxons.

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