My interest in literature began at a very young age, and for a reason that has had a marked effect on me since; my father read to me, nightly, from infancy. While I may not have had a terrible amount of appreciation for literature at the youngest of ages (a two month old may likely not be said to "appreciate" literature), I did have an appreciation for the sounds and the interaction, to be sure, and for the presence of the less often present of my two parents. I would argue, as would many an expert on early childhood education, that these very early experiences are a large part of what made me the avid reader that I consider myself to be today. Of course, my dad read to me because he valued literature, and thus as I grew, there was a continued emphasis placed on literature in my household. But these earliest encounters, in infancy, surely instilled in me an appreciation for words read from a page, if nothing else, and likely gave me even more: a desire for the cadence of poetry, the loving recitation of well-composed words, a compulsion for sharing passages I myself love; a desire to read aloud.
Thus I began my school years as a reader, and my love for the pastime - and the requirement of school years - was well nourished and encouraged. There were caveats. I love to read what I love to read, of course, and there were some assigned readings in my school years that bored me to tears, that made me desire any activity other than reading, but that were nonetheless required and demanded of me. I hated "Of Mice and Men," for instance, and most things Steinbeck and Dickens. I loved "To Kill A Mockingbird," on the other hand. I am not sure I knew it at the time but, in retrospect, I think I lacked an appreciation for overly masculine novels and works, and wanted to read more from the female perspective. I did, however, love "Catcher in the Rye," and think that this began a trend of liking a fringe type character, and of liking works that explored the coming-of-age of adolescents (something which inspired my presence in this class, of course), even male adolescents.
I chose English as my undergraduate major, having come to the realization that I not only loved to read but had also developed a deep respect for the breadth of subject matter(s) to be learned from literature. I could learn history and religion and geography and social sciences, politics - even science - from good works of literature. I wanted a broad liberal arts education - and almost, in fact, attended St. John's College, where I would have read almost solely, in their Great Books of the Western Tradition program. English was a wise choice for me, but St. John's may not have been. As much as I respect the need for a firm rooting in the Western tradition (and I did receive that as an undergraduate, by choosing to study Chaucer, Homer and Plato), I have found myself so drawn to the works of authors with drastically different experiences, such as Daniyal Mueenuddin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz - and even Toni Morrison or Flannery O'Connor, who wrote from America, and were even female authors, but for whom the American experience was entirely different. The shape of similarities and differences that I had appreciated much and not so much in my earlier reading years began to take greater shape and have greater clarity for me.
I realized something about the nature of my appreciation for literature: I like learning about the similarities of the human condition through learning about the differences of the human experience. I am a humanist, and literature is my scripture (the Bible - and other religious texts - included, as literature).
There is one experience I remember vividly, and it sparked both my interest in learning and my interest in teaching at the time, as well as the general and particular natures of my appreciation for literature. I had been sent to a boarding school, and everything was very new and different. I arrived at my first English class (this was 10th grade), and our teacher began by playing two songs of Billie Holiday's: God Bless The Child and Strange Fruit. At that age, I was becoming very interested in music, as most adolescents were, and we were being told by this teacher that lyrics (still my favorite part of music today) were literary and that they had a place in the classroom; in other words, that they were worthy. We were also, of course, being exposed to a very different experience of American history than the one we ourselves had been having, at that age, in that school, in 1990's America. That was one of the most memorable educational experiences of my life to date, and it inspired both what I love to read and how I imagined myself passing that love on to students. It continues to inspire me now as I finally, after changing careers, enter into a teaching career where I very much hope to bestow on my students an appreciation for literature.
