{ all that you have is your soul. }

[delga]

I was looking up my semester two texts so that I could order them and I am suddenly irrationallyexcited about Children's lit. Check out my awesome booklist:

» Alice in Wonderland
» Wind in the Willows
» The Secret Garden
» Tom’s Midnight Garden
» Uncle Tom’s Cabin
» Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
» Wolf
» Northern Lights

Of those I've read a grand total of...one. Pullman. (The Dark Materials Trilogy is an amazing piece of children's literature. I studied Northern Lights when I was 12. You know how people flip out over the Harry Potter series? That's how I was when I was waiting for The Amber Spyglass. I got it for Christmas a year later. I love that book. It's beautiful and actually works as a piece of crossover fiction. It's so much more than Harry Potter, seriously.) Actually, I'm lying. I've read Wind in the Willows in some form, and I read The Secret Garden when I was 7. I recognise Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry but I associate that title with an African folk tale that tries to explain why thunder and lightning occur; we had that book in our primary school library. Of course, I know the others, but I never read them, and to be honest I never had the yen. I mean, I'm excited now but I wasn't the girl who grew up with these books, the way that a lot of my friends were. I grew up with Enid Blyton (!!!) and The Famous Five. I was reading Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys at 7, I was reading mythology inside out through most of my lower school career. In secondary school I went through a series of mid-classics - Little Women, Pollyanna, Jane Eyre, The Three Musketeers - and other stuff that I really can't remember right now. I have a record of it at home in my homework diaries. I used to lst what I'd read and what I was reading.

I really, really used the local library when I turned 14. I mean, up until then I'd been reading teen fiction, bildungsroman abound. After I read Lord of the Flies, I read Sheila Kohler's Cracks which is a terrifying and wonderful novella that's almost a female version of Golding's novel. I read From Caucasia With Love (of course) and My Sister From The Black Lagoon. The year I got the Dixie Chick's album Home, I remember reading the most surreal book which covered Moebius strips and dream realities. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint was a gift from someone; a tutor lent me The Lovely Bones and Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day. The same tutor lent me a modern day retelling of Nbokov's Lolita and thus began that fascination. I wish I could remember what that book was called. Roger Fish-- something. I also read a selection of Jewish history related novels - The Nose and Ma Polinski's Pockets. At school, from 11-16, I was reading The Hobbit, Northern Lights, Three Men in a Boat (WOW), Lord of the Flies and Shakespeare - Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsumemr Night's Dream. I can't even properly remember everything that I read when I was in secondary school. There's so much, and so little of it related to 17-19th century canon. (For A-levels, I read Enduring Love, Faustus, more Shakespeare, and I also read all of Harry Potter canon, not to mention a list of other books that I zoomed through during that time. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, The Pianist and quite a bit of PD James, too. Don't even get me started on poetry.)

I've always been reading, and I've always been told that I've been reading the wrong things which is why I get so annoyed with people over the canon. On the one hand, I'm ashamed that I don't really like canonical texts, or rather, that I don't bother with them because I know andfeel that I should make an effort. I believe that you can't judge something you haven't tried. But I also feel that I know so much more about how stories are told and why they're told than people who've just read the canon. I have always read mythology, but I've also always known about folk tales and their importance, and their construction. Every basic story comes from being however old and knowing Little Red Riding Hood. I learned fairytales through nursery school - my parents learned them the same time that I did, which is why my sister had a better foundation for those things than I did. But I don't grudge that because does my sister know the story of why the baboon has a red backside? Nope. I do, though. Does she remember the story about the stupid girl who took butter home on her head? No. Does she know the story of how a little old woman outwitted a large and terrifying tiger? No, she doesn't know these stories and she doesn't have the memories that go with them, mostly ones of my paternal grandparents. (She also doesn't remember Aesop's Fables, which is basically a show of how PATHETIC school teaching is these days. We used to get them in assembly. I can link Aesop to a handful of African folk tales for crap's sake.)

This is not a post about what I can do. It's just a post which laments the necessity of having to chose what to read. If I could read faster, I'd read more and more widely. But we have to be selective. I wish that selection wasn't dictated solely by canon, and I wish that I could read in more languages because that would open my range considerably. I wish everyone knew who Anansi the spider was, and I wish more people could pronounce Persephone. I wish more people could tell me the story of the Ramayan or why Thor had to dress up as a woman that one time. These are good stories, and they tell us something about people. They tell us that we're the same, and that we came from the same place and that even without microscopes and technology, we weren't deterred. We still wanted to be able to know and to explain things. We still wanted to know.

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I'll be more excited about my 20th century reader class when I have the texts:

» The Aspern Papers
» Melanctha (part of Three Lives)
» Native Son
» Farewell My Lovely
» Paris is Burning (film)
» Spermkit

(Un)Fortunately, a large part of this double unit is made up of external reading. Brain-crunching stuff. I'm pleased, but I am also anticipating my head hurting like a bitch. Srsly.

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One day I will delete all the music I own that is not Tracy Chapman. The woman knows what I'm thinking. She knows.