'We Read and Read and Read'

“When you are young, you own what you read. You do not calibrate against what other people are reading or thinking. So a good book becomes ‘your’ book.” 

There’s much to be said for independent, non-aligned, pleasure-driven reading – no teacher, no curriculum, no canon, no “career-planning,” just the bliss of discovering books on your own, trusting instinct and serendipity. The passage above is from “Classics Equips a Civilized Person for Any Task: An Interview with Caroline Alexander” in the Fall 2017 issue of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. Alexander first read The Iliad as a teenager, published The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War in 2009 and her translation of the epic in 2015. Not everyone can endure American public education and come out a reader as Alexander (b. 1956) did:

 

“I had the very good fortune, I believe, of going to one of the worst high schools I could have gone to [in Tallahassee, Fla.]. We were taught very little. Essentially, I had lots of free time for reading, so I read The Iliad absolutely on my own terms at age fourteen. It became my book.”

 

The hunger for print has been largely stamped out in schools. Most teachers, of course, have never read Homer or much of anything else. I know from friends with young children that a “bookworm” is commonly distrusted and mocked, probably more so than in the past. In grade school a girl – Beth Ann Daniels – and I were the designated readers. Pearl Road Elementary had a small library on the second floor with books arranged on shelves to the ceiling. Beth Ann and I competed to read everything. It was neither encouraged nor discouraged by the teacher or other students. We were just kids doing what we liked and happy to know someone else who shared our enthusiasm. My family was almost bookless but early on I discovered the public library and began to haunt the bookstores of Cleveland. I have no theories about encouraging children to read except to read yourself. We think of kids as being rebellious, and they are, but they also model what they see us doing, the good and the bad. Here, Alexander describes living with her mother and younger sister:

 

“I lived entirely in books with no sense of this being a retreat from the world or odd. I think the greatest thing my mother did was to normalize anything we did so that we were never, in our home, regarded as bookworms. It was just what we did. We read and read and read.”