English Lit.

I recently got one of those forwarded messages from a friend. The ones that you are supposed to read, modify and forward to other people. Except this was not really a message but a facebook note in which I was tagged. It was about a list of 100 books made by BBC. The broadcaster supposedly alleged most people only have read an average of 6 of the books included. I was supposed to go through the list, bold the books I have read in their entirety and italicize the ones I only started reading but did not finish, or read only an excerpt. Then I was to create my own note with the list and tag the friend who sent me the message along with other “book nerds” explaining the process so that it could all be publicized and compared.

When I received the note I immediately felt ashamed because I already knew that I was about to confront one of my biggest insecurities – my literary command, and that I was thrown into a game that I could not win. It is not that I consider myself stupid or incapable of playing this game and in fact, if what BBC says about this list is correct then I am above the level of the average reader (at least in England), but I still feel panicky when I see myself forced to discuss this topic in public.

I will not make my own note for my Facebook acquaintances to see and I will not tag anyone in it, but if I did, this is what it would look like:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Embarrassing: Only 10 out of 100. But my interest in literature only began earlier this year. Only seven of the books that are in the list I have read for pleasure and 5 of them I read in 2010. The rest were books that I had to read in high school as part of a curriculum, I had trouble understanding them and therefore I did not enjoy them. When I was in high school, I did not speak English fluently until the very last year, and even throughout college I always struggled with composition and grammar and reading was never a pleasant experience. Reading was an endeavor and I was so ambitious with my art-related projects that anything that consumed time and energy was disregarded by default if it was not directly related. I hated fiction because I thought it was a waste of time. High school thought me that books were not meant for me.

When I was a young boy however, I used to like when my mother read to me, and it seems like she always had a book in her hand when we went on trips. She would read quite passionately in the car while my father was driving and my brothers would beg her to shut up. I liked it though and later I would ask her to read for me. She read the Perfume to me when I was 12, fragments of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and articles from magazines with feminist undertones but all in Spanish. I thought that maybe it was because of the language that I could not read books in English, and of course that was true most of my life, but then when I was in college and my English vocabulary had diversified to a level that was perhaps better than my Spanish, I realized that it was not the language, but that I had a tired interest in staring at text and I could not bring myself to do it for pleasure. When I listened to my mother read aloud I could look far away or play with the grass if we were outdoors, or leisurely remove my cuticles if we were in her room. In short, I liked not actually having to read but enjoyed listening to stories. Recently I began to listen to audio books while I paint, and now when I look at certain sections of my paintings they remind me of stories that someone volunteered to record on archive.org. Casa Gutierrez will always remind me of Dracula. A painting of the same building entitled Casa Gutierrez, Capilla, will always remind me of Dostoyevsky. And in the same way a more recent painting of Celia Cruz will remind me of Emily Brönte.

Maybe in the United States does spoil the immigrant, and maybe the disenfranchisement comes from somewhere unexpected. When I was in those English literature classes in high school I obviously had a major disadvantage, but by the time I was in college I was convinced that I could get away with not knowing the major and more essential literary works because I had the excuse of the language barrier. Of course I can't blame my high school teachers for letting me get away with certain amount of ignorance because after all, they had thirty-something students in their class and they could not have gone out of their way to help me. I was a lost case, and at some point I was also convinced of it. My high school did not have an ESOL program because it was a magnet school, because you can't be talented and be an immigrant at the same time. How is that for affirmative action? but anyways I made it. I did. And now I have nothing to complain about, just some catching up to do.

Notes:

Jane Eyre was bolded on March 9th, 2011

Great Expectations was bolded on March 11th, 2011