A Failed Math Major on the Joy of Reading
Most people become English majors because they love to read but that truly wasn’t me. I became an English major because I was ashamed. I entered college as a math major but, as I moved through Calc 2 and started Linear Algebra, my brain stopped computing. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Being bad at something ignited a flare of shame in me that felt deeply uncomfortable and so, rather than confront it, I dropped the class and declared myself an English major.
I chose English for one main reason: I knew I could endure. By this I mean — I knew that, if all else failed, I could always just get to the end of the book. While I felt that Linear Algebra revealed an inadequacy in me that called my intelligence into question, English felt safe. I just needed to be prepared to put in the hours to read the books and write the papers. And rather than a love of literature or of reading, that’s mostly what English was to me in college: every box in my planner was filled with scribbles, three to four sets of page ranges for every day, the amount of pages I had to read for each class each day in order to finish all the books in time.
And so I moved through the major. And I was pretty good at it. Mostly because just getting to the end of the book automatically put me above about 75% of my classmates. But also, as I learned to close read and construct compelling thesis statements, I realized that English and math weren’t so far apart. I started being good at English for the reasons I was good at math: I could notice patterns and apply logic. As I struggled with my senior thesis, something suddenly clicked. A good paper is like a mathematical proof. You’re trying to get from point A to point B and you need the most compelling proof in the most logical order in order for it to hang together correctly. That’s really all it took. This all occurred to me late one night at the library as I sat on the floor with a pair of scissors and scotch tape, cutting up and rearranging paragraphs to better visualize the cleanest way to work my way to my logical conclusion. I could endure to the end of a book and I could paste things together in the correct order. And for this, I received ample praise that quieted the shame of my math failure. And so I continued with English for essentially the same reason that I stopped math. I didn’t like being bad at things and I was good at this.
I threw myself into my PhD program with all the vigor and ambition of a 22 year old who sees her future unfold in front of her, full of possibility. I read every novel and every single piece of academic theory assigned. My planner continued to be filled with lists of page ranges. My strategy was the same as in undergrad: I could succeed as long as I could endure. In all my years of school, I never once failed to finish an assigned reading to the very last word.
And in time I learned from my teachers and my peers to get better at the writing part. I got better at seeing patterns and making connections. Just as I had sat on the floor of the library, cutting and rearranging parts of my paper, I became good at finding compelling pieces of evidence and moving them around, taking characters and lifting them from their texts, moving them around like little paper dolls so that they could best speak the evidence of my argument. There was something uniquely satisfying about using a dense text to produce what felt like a very sound argument.
The summer following my first year of grad school, I picked up a novel and spent a whole day reading. It was the first time I had read a book for pleasure since my junior year of high school, which seemed obscene for someone who was studying English and literature for a living. It went on that way for the next six years — I spent the school year enduring, experiencing literature and theory in self-assigned page range chunks and I spent the summer gleefully reading a handful of novels.
The summer I defended my PhD I started reading again and it was wonderful. I assigned myself nothing. I just picked up anything that looked good and quit it as soon as I stopped enjoying it. That fall I half-heartedly started applying for academic jobs and working on a commissioned book chapter but I seemed to have lost steam. Without the formal structure of an institution and professors continually telling me I was good at it, I wasn’t as interested in continuing on. I was enjoying working gigs and, in my spare time, gulping down novel after novel. Just as suddenly as I had quit my math major, I quit the academic job search that I had more or less just started. My patience to endure had run out.
In the 6ish years since then, I’ve read 274 novels. I’ve yet to read a single piece of academic theory, though I do read reviews and author interviews. It’s ironic to me that I only truly discovered the joy of reading after receiving a BA and a PhD in English. I think it’s because, in the end, I learned what a lot of other English majors already knew: the joy of reading is the joy of meeting new people and learning their stories. Understanding them and empathizing with them. Sitting with the truth of their experience. I don’t need to use the characters anymore. I don’t need to pick them up and move them around just so that they can help me prove my point in the most efficient way possible. I can just spend time with them and let them move me, teach me. I will forever be grateful that studying English and literature made me a better reader and writer, someone more equipped to identify and enjoy and revel in patterns. But I am more than happy to release the need to use characters to prove my points. I just want to enjoy their stories.
