The Literary Blog Hop doesn't seem to fade and it's good news. Hop on if you feel like participating. This week, the question is:
How did you find your way to reading literary fiction and nonfiction?
I (kind of) answered this already with my mesmerizing story of how insomnia got me into Dante's Inferno, but I guess it's quite narrow and precise to describe the whole scope of my literary upbringing. I mean, it was the start, but I did not change into a Literary Bushido Freak overnight. So here's my tale.
My mother is an elementary school teacher (or should I say was). First grade. She also happened to be a voracious reader of romance novels. For her, it was important that her kids read. My sister got into it for a while. My parents bought her plenty of those R.L Stine Goosebumps novels, about twenty or thirty of them. She read them all, but it was the last thing she read before her Harry-Potter-Is-The-New-Tolstoy moment of clarity.
As far as I remember, I always read, but I took a moment before taking it seriously. Even after I read the Divine Comedy, I took a while before adopting a fearless attitude towards reading. It's in college, where they force fed books to everybody, that I started thinking some of the classics were not that bad. Like Candide, from Voltaire, who I thought could be an amazing action movie if it received the Baz-Lurhman-Romeo-And-Juliet treatment.
Some books were good, some were bad, but it's the books I didn't have a chance to read, because the teachers I had left it out of their curriculum, that triggered the itch. The Stranger, by Albert Camus being the very first. I wanted to read every book that were in every teacher's classes because it beat the hell out of the other classes. These were also the years were Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings got the annual treatment on the big screen. The books were probably the first literary works that I bought with my own money. I own some of the last publications of Tolkien without Viggo Mortensen's face on the cover.
That's it. From there, my love for literary fiction snowballed when I hit University and got into Comparative Literature program. My love for American fiction came from one of my teachers, Eric Savoy, an expert on Henry James and the 19th century American novel. He's also the first teacher who had the balls to make us read Stephen King in a program that calls itself "high end literary studies". There was a perspective to this reading (and mostly, a thematic) but it was awesome. Here's where I am now, obsessed by the American Literary.
