Sula, by Toni Morrison

I’ve only just started to read “Sula,” by Toni Morrison, but I can already tell that some high school student took this book out from the library for English class. There are markings and underlinings, which actually isn’t unusual in comparison to other books that I’ve read lately, but the difference is that the things that are written amuse me.

Next to “Eva lifted her tongue to the edge of her lip to stop the tears from running into her mouth,” the scribbled blue pen wrote “She cares.”

Next to “Lord, it’s cold. Don’t just sit there, honey. You could be pulling your nose…” is a giant blue question mark. I can picture some 15-year-old kid thinking “What the hell does that mean?”

After a paragraph beginning with “She only heard Hannah’s words, and the pronouncement sent her flying up the stairs…,” someone wrote in that same blue pen, “This is when she realized that she can only rely on herself.”

These phrases were bracketed in blue pen: [“Some kind of baptism, some kind of blessing, he thought. Everything is going to be all right, it said. Knowing that it was so he closed his eyes and sank back into the bright hole of sleep.”] The word “baptism” was underlined and next to it was written, “death – to a new life,” and next to the brackets, someone wrote “EXAM.” This makes me smile.

I certainly don’t miss reading books not for enjoyment, but for the threat of the impending essay, class discussions, and exam. And yet, it was always those things that led me to either love or hate the book. I doubt I would have appreciated, or even finished Dickens' “A Tale of Two Cities” or Bronte's “Wuthering Heights,” without the pressure from school, though the former is now among my all-time favorite books (and I’ve read it on my own now and then just for the hell of it). And yet, I still have an irrational hatred of books like Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” and “The Pearl,” partly due to their depressing nature but also partly due to the frustration of being forced to process books at the same speed as my 6th grade peers, though I was probably reading at a 12th grade level. At least college literature classes expected me to finish a book and understand it well within a week’s time, whereas middle school classes drew an afternoon’s reading into a whole month affair, complete with quizzes, homework assignments, and full-on tests.

Is this why so many people hate reading?