Reading is soooooo hard!

"Sherre Sachar comes from a book-loving family. Her father, Louis, is an award-winning author, and the graduating senior thinks that settling down with a good book should be one of life's great joys. But as she prepares to leave high school and head to Cornell University in the fall, she is tired of reading. The extensive required reading in her high school classes — including Advanced Placement English Literature, where she flew from one classic to another — left her with no time to pick up books she thought would be fun."

My AP English class was one of the best I ever took. They gave us a list of books to read over the summer, everything from "Red Badge of Courage" to "Heart of Darkness" to the (dreadful) "Billy Budd." I had a teacher, Mr. Sampselle, who was dry-witted and hilarious and let us call him "Uncle Dave." I was thrilled to be forced to read the classics, as the lame-o classes I'd taken up until that point had given me "The Odyssey" and "Great Expectations" -- and that was 9th grade. And that was pretty much it until the 12th grade with Sampselle. We had a ball, I learned a lot, and yeah, I read a lot. It's Advanced Placement.

My big whine is that I wasn't forced to read more classics. Yeah, I might have picked them up on my own, but fact is I needed some guidance with the bigger picture in several books, and having a class to help me through "King Lear" was beneficial. I just wish I'd taken classes where they led us through some of the other greats, because in the end I feel like I got short-shrifted. My friend Julia was reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" and a book about the history of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 6th grade, and I tried to tag along. That was about the sum total of my classics reading before 12th grade.

The fact that a reader gets "burned out" by too much required reading -- screw off. Don't take the class. Sit with the lower levels and manage your way through the easier stuff. It's called learning.

Now, later on in the article a girl opines that they basically had to read the texts and explicate them until they bled, and I agree: That stuff is a pain in the ass, and can sap a story of some of its fun. I mean, as Mark Twain says before one of his books kicks into gear, all metaphors and so forth are completely unintended. It is important to understand the story beneath the story, but the fact that "Red Badge of Courage" is an anti-war book ... you know, I can get that on my own. But knowing about "Heart of Darkness's" "noble savage" trope, and the metaphor of the river as heading into death -- that's good stuff. That shows up everywhere. It's useful.

My brain probably was tired, too, and I remember being completely pissed that of all the books we studied, not one was on the AP Essay portion of the test, and I had to dredge up what I remembered about Richard Wright's "Black Boy" to write something coherent -- a book I'd read for fun. That said, I should have just thrown caution to the wind and done "Gone with the Wind," which if I remember right is what my canny friend Lynda wrote about.

I wish people would quit letting students whine for being too well educated.