Going Beneath The Cannon

By: Rachel Masselle '14

I promised myself I would never buy a Kindle. In my mind it went against everything a book offered. The smell of the pages in the book, the feel of the paper between your fingers, the rustling sound it made as you turned the page all didn’t exist with an e-reader. I felt like you got cheated out of some of the most delightful parts of reading. However, for a Term III class I caved and bought a Kindle.

Yes, all the stuff I mentioned before is lost when you’re reading off a Kindle, but there are also more options for a novel enthusiast when using a Kindle. For my Term III class, my classmates and I have to read novels that have gone out of print and are not considered “classic”. Our mission is to analyze these works and see why they have fallen out of favor.

Our findings so far are that there is no reason for these books to not have a high place of honor on the educational scene. All of these books have presented great insight into the time period they were written and given our class many hours of discussion about the importance it presents to our world today.

The bottom line in all of this: it doesn’t matter what you are reading, as long as you are reading something. Reading authors like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Emily Bronte, and Oscar Wilde don’t make you any better than a person who has read Jodi Picoult, Louisa May Alcott, or George R.R. Martin. True, these authors are not hailed by educators as the crème da la crème of fiction. But they are still writers who have put their heart and soul out into the world and can be seen as valuable in one way or another. Going beneath the cannon has allowed me to renew a love of reading and to get me into new kinds of fiction that I never would have explored before.

As for the Kindle, all I can say is I’m hooked on the darn thing. I love how I can hold 3,500 books in one little tablet. I love how I can instantly download any books I want to it in a matter of seconds. And I love how all the books that are out of copyright are free, which means I can broaden my horizons for almost nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I still love books and still make weekly trips to the library in order to get my hands on those lovely pages. But I also have a portable way, a convenient way to carry my library and explore new literature wherever I go.