#at least i had a blast in my sci-fi class this semester

[soutsuji]

There's an English class on Golden Age detective fiction being offered next semester but the prerequisite for it is the intro to literary study class required for all English majors (which I haven't taken because I'm in a hard STEM major and don't have much time for electives, which means that I have to be really picky with my electives and only go for stuff I like AND doesn't have an awful workload) and also even if I did have that prereq, I wouldn't be able to take the class because it's at the same time as one of my major reqs. And also I'll be in two labs next semester and one of them is pure hell so like I literally don't have the time to take more than 13 credit hours (as tempting as it is to keep up my streak of taking 17-18 every semester even though it's been like really pretty bad for my social life and hobbies). Sigh. (Pressing my hand wistfully against the glass) maybe someday they'll offer the class again

[b0rtney]

Why I Do What I Do, Part 2: Every Good Writer Reads

When I was little I read everything I could get my tiny fingers on. I read my way through my elementary school library– the librarian wouldn’t even bother sending me back to class after a certain point, because she knew that if she did I’d be back for another book by the end of the day. I read a lot, and I got fast at it, and I loved it. 

I especially loved the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter. Gail Carson Levine was a staple for me; I never read Ella Enchanted, (because I didn’t know that had a book counterpart yet, I just knew the movie), but I loved Fairest. I can’t remember the title, but I remember a book about a girl who was a genius, but intentionally flunked all her tests so nobody would separate her from her only friend in her grade. I remember a book called Savvy, about a family with inherited preternatural abilities that don’t always work quite right. I read Girl in Blue over and over and over again. I loved Greek mythology and fairy tales and folklore, and I read that whole shelf of the library twice. Until I was twelve I loved every book I came across.

 I can only remember reading one book that I didn’t like– I don’t remember the title, but it was a very slice-of-life novel about a teenage girl and her mom not agreeing on where the girl’s life should go, and bickering about what kind of sweater she should wear– and I hated that book. It took me three years to slog through it. 

Everything else I chose haphazardly and read voraciously. Fantasy, sci-fi, action, school life, home life. I didn’t go to bookstores very much because there weren’t any close by, but when we did I spent hours picking one promising-looking book– because I knew reading was an expensive hobby, and I’ve been a little frugal since I was young.

A lot of it was probably escapism as a coping mechanism, but I just knew I was having a blast even when my neurochemicals didn’t really want to cooperate with me, or when getting out of bed was too much.

When we moved to California, I stopped reading as much, but I still read some in middle school. The Found series was great until I lost one of the books. I read a biblical fiction book, Lineage of Grace, which was an unexpected treat– and it should be mentioned that I first read the Bible in sixth grade, and understood next to none of it. I discovered my two favorite book series of all time in middle school (I think in eighth grade): the Monument 14 series by Emma Laybourne and the Unwind series by Neil Shusterman. Both of them have been my favorites for a long time, and still are. 

In seventh grade, I saw an advertisement for the movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, and I asked my mom if she knew what book it was based on. She said she’d heard of it, but that I probably couldn’t read it because it was very long and very difficult to get through. So, being who I am as a person, that was the book I bought next time I found myself in a book store, and I read Atlas Shrugged in a month or two– I’m still proud of that because there have been several people (all grown businessmen, which grinds my gears even further, personally) who scoffed at me and told me that middle-schoolers can’t read that book, because they couldn’t. It pissed me off so much once that I dragged the offending man into a philosophical discussion of Ayn Rand’s point– I don’t agree with all of her philosophy, but I wanted to piss that man off as much as he had pissed me off. I was an angry seventh-grader, but I digress. 

By high school, with three AP classes each year and accelerated classes as part of my high school’s trimester system, I was reading less and less “traditional” literature in my free time, except for my assigned reading for my English classes. Lucky for me, I loved most of those too. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane Eyre, and everything written by Jane Austen (admittedly, I haven’t read much of her yet, but I’ll get there) were all instant loves. Catcher in the Rye was interesting, if not as much of a favorite as some others. Hamlet was good, if only because I appreciated something (anything) that I could interpret as homosexual or homoerotic (yes, I am talking about Hamlet and Horatio). The only thing I can distinctly remember reading and disliking was Romeo and Juliet– all the characters were a little too short-sighted for my tastes. 

However, I discovered a new reading love in high school– and you may cringe when I say: Fanfiction. I fell in love with fanfiction, and I still love it just as much as Unwind or Pride and Prejudice or The Hobbit. I won’t spend a whole lot of time here talking about fanfiction and why I appreciate it just as much (if not more) than traditional literature, but I may give y’all an update down the road about it, because I am genuinely passionate about treating fanfiction as a genre of literature just like any other written piece. For now though, I will move on.

In college, I spent one semester knocking out all my prerequisites, which meant mostly math and science classes, and one English 201 (my AP classes let me out of 101 and 102). That English class was miserable, probably one of the most miserable classes of my life. Everything we read was misogynistic, at least semi-racist (of course, under the guise of “historical realism,” because we all know people of color were first seen in 1963), and depressing to top it off. Whatever literary, technical merit the works had as representations of the craft of writing was entirely washed out by the abysmal or just plain repulsive subject matter and themes. This English 201 class did teach me, however, that there is a world of difference between being good at writing and being a good writer. I hope to be the latter. 

My last three semesters at my current college have been significantly kinder to me. My major, Creative Writing, means I get to take a lot of literature classes, even if my community college only has one writing class. 

I’ve taken a Shakespearean literature class, and loved it. My teacher opened the class by calling herself a heretic, and that some of her opinions about Shakespeare (he was not an illiterate wool merchant, he had male and female sexual interests, he was a feminist despite him writing “Taming of the Shrew,” and he was absolutely insufferable to be around) are borderline psychotic, as far as some other academics are concerned. So, of course, I love her to death. I followed her to two more classes in subsequent semesters, both being one half of a British Literature sequence from the inception of the English language to modern-day. My favorite works from these classes are Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (again, you’ve gotta love the queer representation, and the hilarity), Austen’s “Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters,” and Mill’s “On Liberty.” 

I took a similar literature sequence for American literature with a different professor, but I took the “Civil War to Contemporary” section before the “First Contact to Civil War.” This professor is another whom I love to death– he majored in English with an emphasis in Queer and Gender Studies, and wrote his dissertation on video games as a form of literature (also, he’s written peer-reviewed academic essays on my favorite video game series, Bioshock). So almost everything between these two semesters of American ltierature had a focus on people of color, indigenous people, genderqueer and nonbinary people, and queer people. We read Passing by Nella Larson, and I met some girls in the class and we got so excited about the book that the professor told us he’d let us come in to talk about it to future semesters. I also loved reading Benito Cereno with the class, mostly for the discussion and the essay I got to write about it. 

This semester, I’m taking a World Literature class, and I’m currently in the second half of that British Literature sequence– which means, after this semester, I will have taken every literature class my community college offers except one– as well as a philosophy class, my final semester of required Spanish, and a creative writing class. 

You have two out of the three pieces of the puzzle of where I’m from now. You know about me as a person, and you know about what I’ve read. I’ll see you here, same time, same place, next week to tell you what I’ve written, and then we can move on to the present. 

I can’t wait to see you guys again. I hope everyone is staying safe, healthy, and happy.