First Writing Assignment

In my Patterns of Fiction class, we were given the assignment to write our "Literary History". Unfortunately, though, we only had 600 words to write it in. The instructions were that we had to help people understand why each book/genre/author were important. Then we posted it online and commented on others posts.

I think I did ok--but this was an incredibly difficult thing to write. I had a million books in my mind that I could have written about. What would your literary history look like?

Here's mine:

I was 5 years old the first time I stayed up all night reading. All right, my sister was reading aloud to me, but that was the beginning of my love affair with pages and bedside lamps. Corinne brought The Boxcar Children home from the school library and we sat together in our basement bedroom and read until the sun began to peek through our window. Today, I can whip through The Boxcar Children in about forty minutes; but for my first grade sister, it took the entire night.

As part of the Harry Potter generation, I had volumes 4 and 5 taken away from me on Saturday mornings until I got my chores done. I stayed up all night with volume 7 to see if Snape was really a baddy (and was delighted to learn he wasn’t) and spent hours discussing the possibilities with my brother.

At 16, The Killer Angels kept me up before choir rehearsal at 6 a.m. where I was scolded by my director for falling asleep while others rehearsed. When David McCullough’s John Adams fell into my lap on Christmas Day 2001 I couldn’t believe my luck; Mom had looked at my list and bought a history book for me, even though I was just 14.  After hours with Mr. Adams, I decided to dedicate my education to studying history and then share it with others as an educator.

Advanced Placement Literature my final year in high school kept me up all night with Dostoyevsky, Tolkein, and Austen; Crime and Punishment left me feeling like I had actually committed murder and was going insane along with poor Raskolnikov, while Persuasion frustrated me to no ends (just marry the guy, Anne!). Of course Frodo and the Ring changed my definition of true friendship.

My first three hundred nights at university were spent with book recommendations from professors, generally nonfiction. Endurance, Alfred Lansing’s tale of Earnest Shackleton, made me shiver in my chair. I felt the horrors of Communism as I read From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, and learned from Salt: A History that the placement of salt on the table was a sign of status or affection in the 16^th century. Every Christmas, Scrooge and Cratchit make their appearance in my home, where I greet them with cocoa and a comfortable armchair.

At the BYU London Centre, I fell in love with Shakespeare, hauling King Lear and Henry IV Part I with me everywhere I went. Oliver Twist and I spent a few nights together in my bunk near the window on the 5^th floor.

Today, I find myself reading Sheep in a Jeep and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? over and over again: not exactly books I would pull into bed with a cup of cocoa. But my son loves them. I feel the same pleasure watching him discover stories as I do when I smell the pages of a new novel. At 7 months old, Henry is still learning that we don’t eat books, but his delighted squeals and kicks when I pull them off the shelves makes me giddy with excitement; I can’t wait to put The Boxcar Children in his hands or read Harry Potter aloud to him for the first time. Will he find himself looking for his own Hogwarts letter like I did? Will he cheer as the Ring finally falls into Mount Doom? I like to think he will—with readers like his Daddy and I presiding in our home, I’m bound to discover him in his bed with a book, the bedside lamp still on as the sun rises outside his window.