101 Greatest Books- Jane Eyre #5

Going through the 101 Greatest Books List put together by the College Board. Their original list is in alphabetical order. I am approaching it in no particular order of my own....

While I am on a Bronte kick I thought I should go ahead and tackle Jane Eyre. Jane, Jane, Jane you and I have a complicated relationship. On again off again for years. I feel like I have a high school relationship with this text. Moving from love to hate in a blink of an eye only to make up one raining weekend when there is nothing else to do and starting the cycle over again.

You see the problem is I have read Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. I know Jane is supposed to be the first great feminist hero way ahead of her time and redefining the claustrophobic boundaries of her female contemporaries. But you see, I can not unread Wide Sargasso Sea and Rhy's Bertha is a intertextual sledge hammer to the original text. So stretched somewhere between 1847, 1966, and now I look for the space to fit the pieces of Jane Eyre back together for me. I may have to wait for a rainy weekend.

I am interested to know if you have ever read one book that has forever changed the way you will read another?

101 Greatest Books- Wuthering Heights #4

Going through the 101 Greatest Books List put together by the College Board. Their original list is in alphabetical order. I am approaching it in no particular order of my own....

The first time I read Wuthering Heights I was a senior in high school in AP Lit class. There were about 20 of us crammed in Coach Weeks trailer in the back of the over-crowded school. Having a coach as an AP English teacher would be surprising to some but Coach Weeks was my Varsity Soccer coach. In the four years I played for him I never once doubted his intellect and talent for the game of soccer. I knew he was an English teacher but I never imagined I would have him as my AP English teacher senior year. He made us run sprints until we hurled and do push ups in the mud so when I sat in his cramped trailer and cried as he read WH aloud to us with tears in his eyes I had one of those life changing moments. The moment when you realize what you think you know of the world is very different than how the world is and you stretch beyond yourself to make a new meaning. It was so with me as tears streamed down my face listening to the passion and anguish of Heathcliff and Catherine's love read by a Coach I admired so much. In that moment I learned how connected we are by literature and the vast power of the written word. I knew then I wanted to be a part of that.

So years later I have sat in front of hundreds of students getting choked up reading To Kill a Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men or pretty much anything by Shakespeare (except Julius Ceasar) hoping that one of them would open their heart to the words and find the power for themselves.