New Post for 2010

I'm teaching ENGL 104 again this summer and think I will allow my 2009 archives to provide examples of class posts. If anyone wants to see them, click on 2009.

What I'd like to write about instead is some of the thinking I've been doing about reading over the last year. As I have posted earlier on this blog, I have been reading off and on Robert Jordan's fantasy novels from the Wheel of Time series, and in the spring I did an inquiry project for my ENGL 339 course thinking about the question, "Why do I like Robert Jordan?"

I came up with three answers: 1) I enjoy the complex world and characters he creates because readers can kind of live there, which is like a vacation.

2) I think my reading may be influenced by my personality type (since it is all about me!). I'm more of a shy person than a talker, and I like to think through things first before talking about them. My guess is that people like me might like this kind of in-depth world-creation fantasy. I can fit all the details in my head and come back to them during the day to wonder about what will happen next.

3) I keep coming back to the idea that having an emotional connection to reading is really important. When we do all this school reading on subjects we don't care about, it's hard to know that some reading can be fun, that we might find a kind of reading suited to us out there in the world. I think I experience an emotional connection to fantasy because I like the heroic good vs. evil struggles that occur there. I have friends who think fantasy is kind of silly, but I do think, despite its escapist quality, it gets at some important value issues that are relevant to the real world. Nancy