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Volume aaa, Number 7 |
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The importance of reading fiction
LARA JACOBS
COLUMNIST
One night this week I was at Hatch burning much more than the midnight oil, when I looked at the pile of textbooks spread on the table before me, covering subjects ranging from Russian nationalism to the History of the Symphony, and wondered when was the last time that I actually read something for fun-something not on a required reading list. When had I last read fiction? Previously devouring everything from Jack Kerouac to Jane Austen, at Bowdoin I spend so much time studying (my vision has actually deteriorated due to eye strain), that when I finally have a free moment, I am apt to choose thirty minutes of sleep over a story of John Cheever's.
Thus, one thing I miss most since coming to college isn't sunny weather or home cooking, but the daily reading of fiction. Curled up in my favorite chair, soft, green, and velvet, I spent hours roaming the prairie with Laura Ingles Wilder or sitting with Pip in Miss Havisham's parlor. I traveled from my hammock set underneath a maple tree to Harry's Hogwarts and King Arthur's Camelot, always conscious of the power for transformation and for crossing the boundaries stories hold.
Ultimately, however, fiction provided me with more than an escape-my favorite heroes and heroines inspired me and gave me courage in my own life; there was no one who did this more than Nancy Drew. Nancy, with her unflappable confidence and always-present courage, never worried about what to wear the first day of fifth grade or whom to sit with at lunch. Confronting robbers, kidnappers or jewel thieves with surprising regularity, she never backed down or was intimidated. Nancy always saved herself and there was no message more powerful or more necessary for a girl entering middle school.
Suddenly, while sitting in the library surrounded by note cards for my upcoming midterm, Nancy Drew and reading in my rope hammock seemed little more than a distant memory. It was at this moment that I realized that there is something off balance with our lives if we don't have time for daily doses of fiction, for imagined realities that often contain more truth than the world outside our doors.
Later that night, or early next morning depending on how you look at it, while setting my alarm to wake me up all too soon, my eyes fell on that same book of short stories I'd been meaning to read. So as not to wake up my roommate, I crawled under the covers armed with a flashlight and read for the first time in weeks. Perhaps Nancy Drew isn't lost after all.