![]() This aligned with how I absorbed pop culture more generally-which is to say, like a pompous tool. The idea of a canon was almost erotic to me a complete system of knowledge that existed for me to consume and be consumed by. These syllabi show an obsessive but incoherent course of self-study, cobbled together from best-of-all-time lists, teacher recommendations, whatever caught my eye at the bookstore, and a bottomless hunger to know. This seemed a skill worth sticking with.Ī yellow legal pad records my summer reading between 2008, when I finished eleventh grade, and 2013, when I graduated college. But I was also starting to pick out the contours of what made books objectively good. (Though even then, if you’re a girl asking older male authority figures for book suggestions, you won’t get away unscathed-you’ll get Lolita and a hand on your leg.) If you told me to read it, I would if you said it was great literature, I’d probably believe you if you assigned me a five-paragraph essay on it, I’d write you ten for extra credit. I was also attracted to discipline and was easily trusting, and I’m lucky book list was the soft place where those things converged. I wanted to be a highly quotable jackass. The way Gregor Samsa kicked his sorry bug legs in the air. Alfred Prufrock got about not wanting to go to a party, which is exactly how bitchy I get about not wanting to go to parties. Not that I made this connection at the time-I loved depressive white people. Amy Tan was my only evidence that some writers of color were kept inside the locked room-they just weren’t let out to frolic with the depressive white people on the syllabus. A teacher once gave me a copy of The Joy Luck Club for fun, and it had obviously never been opened. The books often had creased covers and edges rubbed soft, but their insides were barely touched. ![]() ![]() Texts didn’t seem chosen so much as ordained, random acts of literature I trusted were part of a grander plan. The course books were kept in a locked back room that I rarely saw teachers visit. I had no doubt, if we all got dropped on an abandoned island, whom the group would turn on first. Lord of the Flies intuitively made sense to me. Kids mimicked this impulse to regulate and practiced it on the small visible minority. The borders of our neighborhood, a suburb north of Toronto, were so well pruned-high net worth, low crime, always voted Conservative-that policing was often closer to theater. This was years before weed was legal in Canada, but calling the cops was just a flex. Coming back from lunch period, I’d sometimes climb the front steps past flashing blue and red lights. Like Holden Caulfield, they got kicked out of school, albeit not for flunking math-their parents hired private tutors for that-but for smoking weed. We were public-school kids and not prep-school ones, but The Catcher in the Rye must have hit home for some of my peers, white and upper middle class and angry their lives had denied them some essential realness. We peered into stories like windows, not mirrors: Look at these people and their odd, brutal lives that are nothing like yours. Never anything later than the ’50s, as if literature had expired along with Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. We were assigned two books a year, one of them a Shakespeare play and the other short, cynical, and 20th century. ![]() High school English didn’t ask much of us.
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