In high school I took all the English classes I could, well exceeding the requirements. Why would someone do this? If you’re reading this blog, you know why. Because more English classes meant more reading. And if you love to read you understand the impulse to take on additional classes in order to read more. Novels, short stories, poetry, plays, essays—I loved all of it. If it was written in English (or was a good translation) and the writer was in the grave, I wanted to read it.

In college I majored in English so I could read more. I read scads of poems and short stories in anthology after anthology. I read Shakespeare. I read the Expatriates. I faked my way through Tristram Shandy. I read philosophical and political essays. I read slave narratives and sonnets.

However, even with all those classes and all those books and all those poems, there was still a long list of things I should read in order to be a well-read Westerner. Perhaps we didn’t get to Dickens or Melville because they were out of fashion with my forward-thinking postmodern professors. Perhaps my liberal university was embarrassed by anglocentricity. Or it could be because I was assigned the same book in multiple classes. I read The Great Gatsby five times over the course of high school and college, and Heart of Darkness four times. Such time could have been spent on George Eliot or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Virginia Woolf.

What about those writers who have many classic books to their names yet we only had time to read one or two? Can The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea really give me a holistic picture of Ernest Hemingway? Is Faulkner summed up in Light in August and As I Lay Dying? How can it be that I have not read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather but I have read The Professor’s House, of which hardly anyone has heard? Why are The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men the only Steinbeck I’ve read? Isn’t there more to James Joyce than A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

This blog is a place for me to chronicle my journey through the library of books, poems, short stories, plays, and essays that I should have read in school. As I slowly make my way through the lists and piles, I’ll post reactions, insights, questions, and reviews in this space. I may occasionally ask for contributions from other writers and former English majors. It is my hope that these musings will lead you to pick up some of these classics yourself to discover why they still appear in curriculum, AP English reading lists, and on the shelf of your favorite brick and mortar bookstore.

I welcome your comments, your reading suggestions, your own stories of the books you love. Just keep it civil, please. I know how passions can run high when someone criticizes your favorite author or dumps on the book that you feel defined your youth. Say how you really feel, but refrain from personal attacks. Focus on the works in question and we'll all have a good time.