Writers Unbound

Answer to this week’s question from Booking Through Thursday:

The question:

What was the most unusual (for you) book you ever read? Either because the book itself was completely from out in left field somewhere, or was a genre you never read, or was the only book available on a long flight… whatever? What (not counting school textbooks, though literature read for classes counts) was furthest outside your usual comfort zone/familiar territory?

And, did you like it? Did it stretch your boundaries? Did you shut it with a shudder the instant you were done? Did it make you think? Have nightmares? Kick off a new obsession?

And my answer:
I grew up reading “safe” (picked out for our library by my parents) books through my early teen years, then I branched out. Into classics. Poetry. Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Sir Walter Scott, Rabindranath Tagore, Emily Dickinson. And I have a fierce preference for happy books, books that tell a story, that make some sort of sense, that leave me feeling better than when I started. My basic book philosophy is this: there’s enough unpleasant stuff really happening in the world. When I venture into the make-believe of fiction, I want it to be better than the real world.

My freshman year in college, first writing class. I loved my teacher, and took him for as many courses as I could over the next four years. But I did not love the book he assigned. We read through what he selected from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and I hated all of them.
From the carefully chosen library of my childhood to the discreet classic works I read to the vague and subtle references of poetry… in I stepped to Ovid’s world, where sex was described in perfect clarity and discretion was the real myth. Then, of course, I got to sit and squirm through the class discussions.

I did shut it with a shudder the instant I was done, and then sold it back to the university bookstore for a very small fraction of what it originally cost. I was happy with the exchange, and though I still don’t want to venture back into Ovid’s world, that class was the mark of a change in my reading choices. I learned to cope with (and even discuss) things outside my comfort level; I learned to look for what I could learn in every book; and I learned to set my own standards for what I would read, assigned or not. Later in college, I had assignments that I did not complete due to the content of the material. But I had learned through that first class how to determine what was part of a cultural context (pleasant, moral, or not) and what was just crass. I still apply those standards to what I read today. And I still have a preference for happy books.