I was one of those children who basically decided on my college major in grade school. I wanted to be an author, and just write, and read books, and soak up all the stories I could. That’s still all I want to do. Up to this point, I am fortunate enough to have literature and the creative process of writing as significant parts of my everyday existence; sometimes even to the point that these things become an overwhelming and always looming inconvenience. I am an English and Creative Writing major.
I could not be any happier with my academic concentration. A good portion of the time, I still legitimately find enjoyment in curling up in the library with a piping hot coffee, or three, and getting lost in the pages of a book. What has changes the most for me is not my love of reading, but what I’ve decided that I love to read.
As a millennial I grew up in the prime literary age of popular works such as Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Holes. In high school, I devoured the classic internal conflicts of characters in books The Outsiders and The Catcher in the Rye, both of which I still re-read, or just skim passages of, from time to time. And when it came to the beginning of college, I just read what was assigned to read. I was hardly disappointed with the material assigned for my literature classes, most of it read well. But then, it came time to fill my general education requirements.
At a liberal arts college, with regulations on the amount of credits you must take across numerous departments, the gen-ed’s seem dauntingly extensive to underclassmen. Even today, with the ability to glance at my final degree audit, I still wonder how I got through it all without a major hitch in the four-year plan—knock on wood. My freshman year, I toyed with the idea of becoming a business minor. Business classes seemed to fill a decent number gen-ed’s and certainly accounting would not be as miserable as “real” math…
After a somewhat discouraging second semester of freshman year, pursuing business classes, I made the executive decision to fall in love with something other than English. As much as I wish I could just read novels and poetry and write creatively for the rest of my life, it just was not attainable to earn the degree I was seeking. Somewhere along the way I found a friendship with anthropology, and from there, a new and exciting passion for philosophy, and from the combination of both of those, an insatiable curiosity for topics of gender studies.
So, I can now return to telling you what I love to read. I love novels, short-stories, poetry collections, my peers’ creative work, the works of my professors, memoirs, ethnographies, anthropological theories, histories of development, a logic textbook, and hopefully this list will only grow. Don’t get me wrong, 130 pages of Gustave Flabert or Karl Marx in a night will never be my idea of the greatest thrill, but it has all become something of a comfort. And yes, I’m still an English major, but I owe my continuing love of it all to my exposition to the liberal arts.
