Reading life...

It has been 10 years since Hannah Ostrow was in my AP class, but I can still remember some of her essays.  Even as a junior in high school, she wrote with a mature style and knowing sophistication that is rare among young writers.  So it is not a surprise that she devoted this post, her first of many to come on the 650 blog :), to the deep value of reading and writing.

It is often the case that when young people finish an intense educational experience -- high school, college, even graduate school -- they think to themselves, OK… now, NOW, I can read the books that I want to read!  I can remember sitting at the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square a few days after finishing graduate school.  While watching the comings and goings of Cambridge, I made long lists of not just books, but important books, that I planned to read.  This is how Nick Carraway puts it at the beginning of The Great Gatsby.  “.. I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.  I was rather literary in college -- one year I wrote a series of very solemn and very obvious editorials for the Yale News -- and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” 

Of course, life often gets in the way.  Work, family, Netflix, late nights with friends, all of the trappings of being a twentysomething -- and before you know it the only thing you are reading is what appears on your phone while you wait for your drink at Starbucks.  You can’t find that list of books and at some point forget you ever even made one.  Without even realizing it, you’ve relinquished an ideal.   It’s the sound of settling.

In this post, Hannah makes a powerful case that the reading life is one worth fighting for.  Hannah graduated from Parker in 2010, after which she attended Middlebury College in Vermont where she studied Art History and French.  After graduating in 2014, she moved to Madison, WI to start a job at a healthcare software company, where she teaches physicians, other clinicians, and IT staff how to use and configure the software.  “I love getting to work with smart, motivated people every day,” she said.  “And I love Madison. It's so easy to live here.”

Here, Hannah writes about the constancy of books in her life.  “My post is about expectations and inadequacy and finding things that ground you,” she said.

- C.H. 

It took me almost five years to read Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Sea, The Sea. My friend, Michael, lent it to me the year we were graduating high school, and I started it then. I finished it right before college graduation, and then I mailed it back, with a letter, to Michael at his dorm in Rhode Island.

The Sea, The Sea is long but not unreasonable: 502 or 528 pages, depending on the edition. It’s also certainly not canon, as far as Books You Must Read. According to the cover, it won the Booker Prize in 1978, but I couldn’t tell you what the Booker Prize is, or if anything else good came out in 1978.

All of which is to say that I could have stopped reading. There were opportunities where it would’ve been appropriate to give up, like each of the seven times I moved in those five years.

And yet—I really liked the book. And I liked reading it in the timespan that I did. It stuck with me more, because it was with me through more. I took it to Vermont, where I went to college and was so homesick my first semester I thought I might die; and to Chicago, where I was unemployed one blissful summer on my sister’s air mattress; and to Paris, where I spent my junior year in extreme pleasure and extreme pain. When I finally finished the book, I sent it back to Michael with my first apartment as the return address.

In that first apartment, above an Indian restaurant, I remember coming home after long nights of drinking with friends, lying on my bed, and reading a few pages of Iris Murdoch until I fell asleep. It’s a wonder I finished in five.

When I was done with The Sea, The Sea, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, for a job. I have a habit of keeping index cards with my favorite excerpts from things I’ve read, which I file based on theme. My first year in Madison, I read Lorrie Moore’s short story collection, Birds of America. Moore herself taught at the University of Wisconsin—Madison for three decades, and in the collection included a story about a Transylvanian immigrant who moves to Vermont and then to a university town in the Midwest. In the Midwest section of my index cards, I filed this quote:

The flatness of the terrain gave her vertigo, she decided, that was it. The land was windswept; there were no smells. In Vermont, she had felt cradled by mountains. Now, here, she would have to be brave.

I thought I had been brave before! I had lived with strangers and traveled alone and climbed a secret medieval staircase in the Parthenon to see Athens from high above. But adulthood is a game where the ante keeps getting higher, and being brave outside of an institution designed to cradle you would be different, harder.

I spent most of middle and high school trying to find my passion. My sister had theater; I had what? I liked history, and writing, and sometimes playing in the orchestra, but usually not. Nothing felt like mine. I liked books, but my friend, Jocelyn, read more than I could fathom. She often came to school bleary-eyed, because she had been up all night reading. I could never love reading the way she did.

And yet—these days, I spend more hours than I can say just staring at my bookshelves. I love finishing a book, and writing down quotes from the pages I’ve dog-eared, and seeing the way the newly shelved volume changes the look of its neighbors. I love waking up on a Saturday morning in the Wisconsin winter and staying in bed to read.

If it’s not a passion, it’s at least a constant. Like The Sea, The Sea was, my books have always been with me.

You can be a reader even if you don’t read the fastest or the most. You can have a passion that’s just something you’ve been doing for a long time, even if you’re not the best at it. But, here, in this, you’ll have to be brave.