Journal 2

Last week you evaluated your reading process. This week, I want you to evaluate your relationship to literature. What do you think literature is? Why do you think that a literature course is required in college? Describe your feelings toward literature and your experiences with literature.



I have mixed feelings about literature. I think the idea of reading something and being able to gain a great deal from it intellectually is awesome. However, the idea of reading a 500 page novel with tons of fluff and an amazingly boring plotline is like being in prison to me. By definition, literature is imaginative creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value. To me, literature is a piece of work that has substance and worth. This is why a lot of times I do not mind reading literature. When I'm reading a piece of literature I am expecting to learn something useful from a character's experiences, or to escape my own world and fall into another. I have learned that reading literature and just reading in general helps to build your vocabulary and keep your mind running. I really like that about literature because having a broad vocabulary allows you to express exactly what and how you feel rather than generalizing it. I think it is also really great that it keeps my mind running because when I read I'm constantly thinking about how whatever happens in the story is relative to me and my life. It even helps me to think deeper about what's happening and how it can be symbolic of something else. Reading a piece of literature forces you to think analytically and to truly understand fully what is going on you have to be able to think outside of the box. You can learn so much about life from reading literature, whether it’s how an author uses a metaphor to symbolize something or the growth of a character; much of what is learned in literature can be applied in everyday life. Plus most scholarly people read often and that makes them well rounded. If you are in college, more than likely you are or will be a scholarly person who will have to interact with other scholarly people. Reading a lot of literature will help us to relate to other scholarly people because they might talk about a piece of literature or refer to it. With that said, that is probably why a literature course is required in college. However, I really do dislike literature sometimes because some books can be very very boring and extremely long. If a piece of literature is really long and boring most times, I do not really read too deeply into it and I do not really try to understand it.

*~*Reading*~*

I was about five years old when I started reading. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world because my parents and family members and teacher were just so happy that I could read. So for most of my life I have enjoyed to read. Growing up, I read tons of books. How to Eat Fried Worms, The Boxcar Children, The Babysitters’ Club, Junie B. Jones, and The Princess Diaries; these books were all among my list of books to read growing up. Then I got a little older and read a lot of fictional books by African-American authors. The only time I really read a legit piece of literature was when one of my teachers forced me to do so. As I got older I really did not enjoy reading unless it was something that I had picked for myself. All the books that my middle school teachers, and some high school teachers, assigned just seemed so boring and irrelevant. All that changed my junior year of high school. Allison Bird was my English teacher and she said that her sole purpose in life was to teach students how to get the most of what you read and to love what you read. Mrs. Bird was completely against trash novels. She referred to these books as “mind-candy” and “any student with an intellectual mind was too good to read such trash” she would say. Mrs. Bird would assign us books that had so much meaning to them. We would learn so much about people and life as well as different literary terms. My favorite novel that we read in her class was A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It was a fictional novel that took you along the span of two young boys’ lives together in a small town in Connecticut. So after completing her class I had developed a greater appreciation for literature and I really did not have the desire to read anything without substance. The rest of that year I read more than I have probably ever read in a period time. I would read before I went to bed, whenever I was traveling, getting my hair done, and basically just any and every time that I would be sitting idle. I would get so involved in whatever book I was reading that a lot of times it was hard for me to just stop reading it so I would finish a book in like a day or two. I get the most out of what I read when I can just sit down and completely focus on what I’m reading. Lately I have been reading a lot of non-fictional books and some books that are classified as classic literature. I think I enjoy those books the most because I gain so much from them. The non-fictional books that I read are always like self-empowering books and the fictional literature books I have read lately all have to do with the main character growing in more ways than one. I like books like these because it really feeds into what I want out my own life and they allow me to view different situations in ways that I had never thought of.