I have always felt it difficult to describe the impact that Invisible Man had on me, but it woke me from my dogmatic slumber. I had, as most did, gone through a world in which I knew things were more precarious arbitrarily cruel for me because my ethnicity, but I did not truly question—or should I say had the question put to me why this was in such an intense way. In truth, I was not aware enough to question why or what it meant to go through life as a black man— always having a set of rules to go by that were different from…the “mainstream” Americans that I heard of on T.V. Life in my neighborhood was a precarious one in which danger and the threat of death was the ever-present miasma. Into this I sat down and opened a borrowed, beat-up copy of Invisible Man and read that incredible first paragraph of the prologue:
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.”
By the time I had read the whole prologue, I was Godsmacked. I had felt like lightning had been written into my soul and was trying to understand what I had read. I was coming into my 14th year on this Earth and had never read any lines like that in my life. Maybe in the Bible there were epic passages close to that, but to find something that summed-up what my—and many peoples around me—life looked like and I had only read the first twelve pages of the novel. After a few months just reading that prologue and finally feeling confident enough to go on, I proceeded to read the rest of the novel and decided that I must read everything by this man and understand how to understand the world as he did. Outside of books my world was changing drastically; I became convinced to leave my hometown for a time and move to less hostile lands in the central Virginia country-side, I had asked my mother to purchase me the book of essays I saw listed in the book called Shadow and Act for me to read after I finished the novel. Though I did not know it at the time, this would be my road-map to becoming a “book-reader.” I started tracking-down the books and the writers mentioned in Shadow and Act. Writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky & T.S. Eliot were now on my radar. My follow-up novels to Invisible Man would be Go Tell It on the Mountain & A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I started doing closer rereads of writers from my childhood like Langston Hughes. As I found more writers that I liked, I started reading who they liked.
Now I must disclaim now that because I took in so much literature during this time, I do not always remember when I read something or everything I read (really, most things before 2015 is a blur). For example it was during this time that I read both The Color Purple & The Third Life Of Grange Copeland. I also read The Fall of the House of Usher every October around this time, but can't recall the first time I read it. Same goes for Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.. I was introduced to Maya Angelou, William Faulkner and Elie Wiesel. I also encountered my first fraudulent non-fiction author with Greg Mortenson. The Handy History Answer Book started my love of history in earnest, but don't ask me when I first read it.
I encountered William Shakespeare in high school, but was still not a fan of him. I read The Haunting by Shirley Jackson and liked it. I was also becoming a bigger fan of Edgar Allan Poe's work. Outside of high school, I was becoming a big fan of Modernist literature; I toyed with reading fan-fiction (being a blerd, I was pre-disposed to such things), but could not really engage with it. The consequence that I would be more or less engaged with classic literature and not into contemporary literature or Young Adult.
If my love for literature needed stoking, it would find that in my 11th grade literature class. This was not an advance class with an Ivy League teacher, but it was a class filled with what was supposed to be the bottom-of-the-barrow being taught by the Cross-Country coach. It turned out to be the best literature class I ever had. I would not have traded it for any class in the world. We were not meant to have as good an experience as we did, but a miracle occurred. I can’t remember what we were reading-aloud (I believe it was A Christmas Carol), but we sort-of started to get into these characters, first as in obvious joke and mockery of the text, but then in-earnest. It became something very rare in the American public school system: we were looking forward to participating in class! I never quite witnessed the phenomenon again (not even in university), but it was amazing to be a part of something special like that.
Despite my love of that class it was my social studies teacher who had the deepest impact on me. Mrs. Pamela Lobb was of Monacan ancestry and had a strong sense of what we call social justice. She was probably the “woke-ist” teacher in that school and her teaching of history, Afro-American studies, and comparative religion was crucial. She introduced me to books like The 20th Century: An Illustrated History Of Our Lives And Times and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (seriously my history teacher gave me this book). She was that teacher that told us to question what we are being told and not just apathetically accept things.
As I transitioned from high school to university, my tastes were developing further. I went from reading mostly fiction in high school to reading a lot of non-fiction in my early undergrad years. I read a book by a black senator running for President of the United States & I read Going to the Territory. Having access to a university library was like a windfall for me because now I could indulge my taste to my limit. I expanded the amount and difficulty of literature I was reading with writers like W.B. Yeats and books like The Cantos of Ezra Pound. I also read The Divine Comedy (under the influence of T.S. Eliot) and read the short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates. I also read the autobiographical writings of Anne Frank, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs.
The biggest development of my early college years was my finally being converted to Shakespeare. It was a rainy day and I spent my time after class in the L. Douglas Wilder Library. I decided (I can't remember why) to watch an adaption of Hamlet that was on YouTube (this was when you could still post movies there) starring Mel Gibson. It entertained me enough, but I realized it was an abridged adaptation. I tracked down the full adaptation by Kenneth Branagh and it knocked the hell outta me. I have been a devotee ever since.
I spent many years of my undergraduate years going from school to school before I graduated, but I will condense time by focusing on the books solely, as much as possible. I read To Kill a Mockingbird and was not a fan. I read my only Stephen King with Different Seasons. I read Lessons in Disaster which was really popular during the first months of 2009. I read Lord of the Flies & The Kite Runner (which was one of the most emotional books I ever read). I read my first Russian literature with Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground and read Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
My second year in college was also my introduction to philosophy and the second writer to change my life. I took a Philosophy 102 class where I received Classics of Western Philosophy; I read The Republic, Leviathan, Critique of Pure Reason, and selections of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Of all the one's I studied, Søren Kierkegaard had the deepest impact. He reordered the way I thought about religion and introduced me to Existentialism. His book Fear and Trembling was the beginning of my reintroduction to ecclesiastical. In 2011 I read Conversations With Myself, The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Portable Chekhov and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Given that it was 10 years since 9/11 and the Arab Spring had occurred I read Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban and The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. Both helped me gain context to the endless war in central Asia. By this time I had also joined Goodreads.com, but would not start using the site actively until 2012.
I started reading excellent plays by people like Tom Stoppard, Eugene O'Neill, Sophocles, George Bernard Shaw and Molière. I also built-up my Shakespeare in-take, and read my first full Russian novel Crime and Punishment. It was a new experience of a novel for me and I was excited to do a thorough follow-up with The Brothers Karamazov. I discovered the beauty of John Keats' verse around this time, as well. I listened to my second audiobook with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and really enjoyed it. The end of 2012 saw me read The Prince, Spunk by Zora Neale Hurston, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Richard III and Paradise Lost. New Years' Day of 2013 saw me finish reading The Communist Manifesto and inaugurated the busiest year I ever had reading books it was the year that I graduated from being just a "book-reader" and became a bibliophile.
I read a lot of philosophy during the beginning of the year notably The Trial and Death of Socrates and The Guest, my introduction to Albert Camus. I was also rapidly finishing The Sickness unto Death.
This era of my literary life was capped when I finished this sentence: “ ‘And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!’ Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.” The Brothers Karamazov was an epic journey for me. It tested everything in me physically, mentally, spiritually, philosophically and emotionally. I went down in the valley with this book. The story of this family, their community, and ultimately their country made me truly see what great power books had. To see a whole world of folks trying to figure-out why they are suffering the way I’d been before I read Ellison. Folks who were on a hard journey to search for love—and the devastatingly horrifying things they were willing to do to each other to find this elusive thing (though the “hero” finally finds it at the end of the book). Though Invisible Man is still my favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov is the perfect novel in my eyes. After reading this book I had an emotional breakdown and something in me was loosed. Fire shot up in my bones and my reading abilities went into overdrive. I feel that 2013 was the year I could’ve read a million books if I wanted to. I never had a better year before or since. Dostoevsky took the mental inhibitors off me for a year. I’ve not read anything that hit me as hard since. Taking it for what it’s worth, I realized that I loved to read.
July 2020 Postscript: I still am not sure if I will continue the story, but it has been interesting to read over this. To think that I hadn't read any Baldwin essays or any Morrison when I finished TBK, had not read One Hundred Years of Solitude or any of Chekhov's plays. I had not even picked up a comic book and had not read a manga beyond my old Pokemon one from when I was 8. A lot covered in these two parts, but much left to be told...
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