one article from the Digital Americana (June 2011 issue)

(this is just a draft version, fyi)

Summer reading lists were typically things to dread growing up. In the middle of that beloved solace provided from early June to late August, academia had to rear its ugly head, didn’t it? That constant reminder that freedom was simply an illusion and most of the time, you were locked in the trap of notebooks, trapper keepers and report cards most of the year.

            “Oh, crap,” I would say to myself come the second week of August, when I hadn’t tossed another glance at that piece of paper I received on my way out in June. “I have to do this, don’t I?”

            Now don’t get me wrong. Don’t misread me here. I loved to read ever since I figured out what words and letters were, instead of strange blotches decorating paper. I spent a good chunk of my childhood buried within my stories. Was it because I was a lonely and shy kid with no athletic prowess or social grace? Well, maybe.

            But I like reading so much better when I pick what I read, which is really egotistical. Like “Oprah, please shut up. I’ll read East of Eden on my own dime.” So when someone is like READ THIS BOOK IT’S GOOD FOR YOU, my automatic response is to shutdown and not read the book. Which is why I was a disaster when it came to my summer reading lists, every year, on the dot. Like clockwork.

            Plus a lot of the books my teachers had dutifully listed weren’t anything in my taste category. Meaning, I read How Green Was My Valley and hated every syllable of every Welsh-coated word reverberating through my head. The Devil’s Arithmetic was interesting, but I still labored over every page. My abandoned Fitzgerald collection laid on the other side of my bed, begging for my touch, but the way things were going, I wouldn’t give it a go until September had started and I was back in the k – 12 grind.

            However, there were exceptions, as there is to everything. One in particular stands out, shoulders above others.  All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque was written in what feels like a different world. True:  it was nearly a 100 years ago, now.

            I knew little about the “Great War” going into reading it. I simply knew that All Quiet was one of the most notable classics written about that generation of (mostly) young men lost between 1914 and 1918. And what I saw when I thought of WWI in my mind was bad grainy silent films, something so far away from the reality of 1990s/2000s America it might as well have been dragons and King Arthur’s era England.

            And as someone who appreciated slightly scathing works on the imbalances of society or goofy science fiction (at least then) , a novel about war (of all uncouth things) seemed an unlikely fit. I’m glad I read it, that summer in high school. It was an eye-opening read, introducing me to concepts such as trench warfare. It was the first novel I ever encountered that seemed to hit, nail on head, the disillusionment that comes when your youthful dreams are disintegrated.

            World War I was the world’s first modern war. To us in the age of Afghanistan and Iraq, that may seem like another off-the-wall idea. We’ve become so used to modern war, which itself seems to be constantly evolving. Erich Remarque did a wonderful job of humanizing what it was like to be a young German soldier experiencing this, well for lack of a better word, phenomena.

            A lot of the books on those lists for school could be considered “fluff.” Not All Quiet though, never. It was a hard book to read, content-wise. I “walked away” from the book, feeling kind of numb. Feeling so much sympathy in my stomach for the young protagonist, who was only a few years older than me and my peers.

            Whatever teacher put All Quiet On the Western Front on that monstrous list, I appreciate it. World War I was a war that changed society forever. Not to sound trite, but it did, in a variety of ways. Even the invention of plastic surgery, misused by most people today for whatever vain whims they seek, came out of that terrible period during the 1910s.We may be losing more connections to that frame of time every day, but its influence is still with us, ever strong. Not only that, it speaks to an universal experience. Sadly, people don’t change that much.

            Summer reading would still be something I’d hate, up until that day I graduated. Now summer reading to me is reading an ineffective piece of literature on a beach somewhere. But every time I see another story about war in the newspaper, or hear of another soldier’s death, or think of the last combat veteran we lost not too long ago, I think of Paul Baumer. An example of summer reading done right, I think.