The first piece of “literature” that I read was a novelization of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, that I got in my school library. I must’ve been in the fourth grade and before then I only read books for children. I had always read above my grade level—I remember taking our yearly literacy tests and always being at a high school reading level even in elementary school—but A Doll’s House marked a turning point in my reading endeavors. I knew that I wasn’t grasping all that Ibsen had written, but even then I knew that it contained something special. I remember being enthralled by the language in the book; its words flowed like cool water down a mountain stream and made my heart race as I read it. (Years had passed in between the time I first read the book and finding out that Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright writing in Danish.) At that time in my life I don’t think I had the maturity to do a “higher level” of reading (i.e., recognizing themes and focusing on character development); I was reading purely for plot and pleasure, and even this was enough to captivate me and keep me wanting to read more. I think of that moment now, the pure joy that I had as my eyes raced on the page, and I remind myself that that is why I read; that, ultimately, is the reason I write—to try to recreate that same burst of joy that I felt (and still feel) reading today.
My teacher at the time, Mrs. Simmons, approached me one day when she saw the book laying on my side of the table. “What do you know about Henrik Ibsen?”
At the time, I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t care too much about who wrote the book I was reading; in fact, the thought had never occurred to me that someone had to take the time to actually write what I was reading. I had this odd idea that books were mass produced by computers or some other kind of technology. The first time that I realized that books were written by actual people was ironically in that same year. A girl named Eleanor who was in my class was writing a novel in a composition book. Filled with her words and images of her own imagination, I went home that day and started writing a novel of my own—a Revolutionary War romance story, its two protagonists being an enslaved woman and a British soldier.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I picked it up because the cover looked cool.”
And that was the truth. It was an old-timey image of three rag dolls—two sitting side-by-side with each other, their backs against an old wooden dollhouse, and one standing in front of the two. They all wore dresses of plaid or stripes.
Upon reflecting, I would have fully expected her to give me an interminable lecture on Henrik Ibsen’s importance to 20th century literature and a list of reasons why we still read his work today. She didn’t. Instead she walked off with a small chuckle and went to tend to the other children. I can’t know for sure, but I’ve always gotten the feeling that there was more that she wanted to say. The unbelief of a little boy reading—on his own free will—one of the greatest and most influential pieces of modern literature had shown in her cadence and countenance.
Almost a decade later I am still the reader that I’ve always been. I read what I want without paying any mind to what anyone has to say. And because of this I have allowed myself to be taken in entirely new worlds by writers from here and abroad. William Faulkner has taken me to the deep South during the Antebellum Period; Virginia Woolf has taken me to affluent neighborhoods of interwar London. Reading, I’ve come to accept, is inextricably a part of who I am.
