The Autodidactic Bookshelf

A Guest Post by Anthony Grooms

It is strange to find a writer for whom reading is not important, but it happens. Mostly, I find this in beginning writing classes where students express a desire to write, but claim they don’t like to read—a pathology seen often among young poets. I understand it. They, as do all who breathe the sturm und drang of this Earth, need an emotional outlet. They respond to personal situations—a bluesy day, a romantic breakup, a hormonal rush. Some, and this is one of the teacher’s goals, have been led to good reading habits and to good literature—the artistic sturm und drang of others. They become readers as well as writers, and reading carefully—reading as a writer—will be the most important autodidactic tool they will ever possess.

I was a reader before I was a writer, and I came to love both before the age of ten. Books excited every sense in me—their textures, their smells, their design, their heft or lack of it—even the pattern of the paragraphs on a page. I recall my excitement and confusion when thumbing through a civics book, a toss away from a high school student, I came across a page on which the sentences were oddly arranged.  Some were long and in short paragraphs, others short and in series. The page looked like it could have been an advertisement—and in a way, it was. It was Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” a broad-shouldered poem—though, a third grader, I did not know to call it a poem. It knocked me out! Reading became more mysterious and adventurous than ever.