One woman's heroic quest to overcome the classics

It was the same pretense every night. "Good night, dear," said Mom. "Good night, Mom," said little Shannon. Mom turned off the light. She walked down the hall. I counted her footsteps...one, two, three, four, five, six, silence.... I fished my battery-powered nightlight from my side table, pulled the comforter over my head, and returned to where I'd left Nancy Drew in mortal danger. Mom knew about my nighttime dalliances, but she let them slide. What's a mother to do with a reader girl?

Illustration by Maura Condrick

That's who I'd been since the third grade when I first read Trumpet of the Swan on my own. Fourth grade brought C. S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Joan Aiken. Fifth grade was Cynthia Voigt, Anne McCaffrey, Robin McKinley. And so it continued with Ellen Raskin, Patricia McKillip, and L. M. Montgomery, a veritable battalion of fantasies, endless summer days curled up in a hammock while off exploring perilous planets from the back of a dragon. I cuddled with adventures and mysteries past dark, reading until my eyelids interfered. By my early teens I was sleeping in a basement room, and my college-age sister checked on me each night before bed, invariably turning off my lamp and sliding a splayed book out from under my drooling cheek. Then, 10th grade. When. Everything. Changed. (bum, bum, BUM!) I think you can guess what—no, no, not boys. Please. You should see the photos of my Braces and Glasses Era. It was that other thing. Assigned Reading. I'll bet you can guess which books I read in high school English—most likely they were the same ones you read. I said I loved them. I was "smart," after all, so of course I loved them! But slowly, book by book, Reader Girl was changing. What I learned about reading and life from the books I read in high school:

• Reading is usually boring.
• Endings should be depressing (with the exception of The Odyssey and David Copperfield, everything I was assigned in high school was a tragedy).
• If you find the love of your life, you will end up separated and alone.
• Life is hopeful at first but in the end almost everyone suffers and ends miserably.
• Life is not an adventure—it's about trying to survive, and if you do survive, it will be only barely.
• Children and teens are not protagonists—only adults (and most often, adult white males) merit being the subject of a book.
• If the book isn't a task to read, then it isn't a valid book.
• Books aren't meant to be read and enjoyed, they're supposed to be picked apart and analyzed.
• There is only one kind of literature that's good for you—realistic fiction written in the past, aka "The Classics." Mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, fairy tales, picture books, comedy, teen issues…anything that has a "genre" is inherently bad.

This may sound simplistic, but it's what I truly believed. No one told me this directly, this is what I understood based on the books assigned and the way we studied them. And you should know—I had PHENOMENAL English teachers. I adored the intoxicating discussions, the unraveling of poetry, the sweet little A's at the tops of my essays. (Let's pretend they were all A's. There's no reason to become slaves to detail here.) Some of the books were luscious to me—not in a hammock way, but in an upright-chalkboard-number-two-pencil-way—Fitzgerald, Poe, Kafka, Dickens, Homer. But while I delighted in the conversations and gray-matter stimulation that made me feel all beret-ed and full of Earl Grey, I never stood back to realize how subtly, how completely, I was falling out of love with reading. An example: In 12th grade, we were assigned To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Stream of consciousness was fascinating, the images and ideas invigorated me, I relished the classroom discussions more than my birthday party! And yet... I never actually finished the last third of the book. Even so, for years I claimed (and believed) that Virginia Woolf was one of my favorite authors. Another embarrassingly pathetic example: In the 12th grade I tore out of a CliffsNotes (purchased to ease my passage through the more inedible books) the page that cataloged the other titles they covered, figuring it must be a comprehensive list of The Classics, the works I should know and love as a true Reader Girl. In the past, I had picked out my library books by the cover, how much the librarian gushed over the story, what the title evoked in me. No longer. The CliffsNotes catalog became my "fun" reading list. I started at the top and worked down. Animal Farm: check. Anna Karenina: check. The Awakening: check. A few more quick confessions: Some books really did click with me, but many didn't… .(As a 16-year-old girl, I had a really hard time identifying with Willy Loman. Steinbeck was like trudging through mud to get to an ice cream stand that exploded and burned just as I arrived. I couldn't understand why I was supposed to care about Hemingway characters who spent forty pages drinking and fishing. I still haven't recovered from The Scarlet Letter. Reading Dubliners straight through, all the stories started to sound the same. But please don't tell anyone. I never did....) I attended a state college, my major English, and once again, everything was The Classics. I must have wondered if authors were an extinct species, or perhaps cursed creatures out of a fairy tale, and their typewriters, like Sleeping Beauty's spinning wheels, had been burned en masse around 1962. For four years I read dead authors exclusively. I never questioned this. Some books I liked, some I loved, many showed my drag marks through the pages. Late in my college career, a friend took me along to his favorite independent bookstore. I remember how he ran his fingers along the spines, hefted the books, smelled their pages, flipped them open to read aloud random paragraphs, fingering the cover art with longing in his eyes. "Don't you just want all of them?" he gushed. And I thought, No! I don't! Alarm bells clanged. I was an English major, by gum, and had been harboring the secret and outrageous desire to become an author since age ten. I should be gushing, too! When had reading become work, a duty? How had books lost their sensual pleasure? Ashamed and confused, I squashed the internal questions and made one purchase that day—Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I think I read the first two pages a dozen different times. Don't tell me how it ends. Emerging from the writer's closet, I pursued an MFA in creative writing, and discovered, much to my shock, that there were living authors in the world! The Classics were replaced by literary fiction (cue angelic choir). I often heard my fellow MFA'ers and the occasional professor openly mock other genres. One of my professors (with chagrin, it seemed to me) admitted to reading mysteries on the side. My reading list was full of sad stories, minimalist stories, slice-of-life stories, drug and abuse stories, death stories, existential stories. And yet most of them seemed to lack one item—Story itself. My own writing mirrored what I read—my characters were beaten down and hopeless, my endings tragic. Eventually I had to admit that I was going through a literary depression. But I trudged along dutifully until the day I had one of them there Joycean epiphanies—I couldn't remember the last time I had stayed up reading into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn't bear to put the book down. How had that happened? I searched my memory for the last time reading had been a pleasure: age 15. Fantasy had been my favorite genre back then, so I checked out a few fantasies from my library. On the sly, of course. I read them huddled in my bed, nightlight and all. And felt punched in the gut. I'd been spoiled by all that fine literature and couldn't read past the sometimes unpolished and awkward writing enough to enjoy the story. Well then, I thought, pulling myself up by my boot straps (oh, for genuine boot straps!), if your ideal book isn't out there, then go write it. So started The Goose Girl. Inspired by my favorite author of the Golden Era of Reading, Robin McKinley, I thought to base a novel on a fairy tale. My goal was to please myself now and please my 10- to- 15-year-old self, to write the kind of story that would keep me turning pages without sacrificing the quality of writing I'd gotten a taste for. A real Story, with a beginning, middle, and ending, with characters to root for, with magic to ooh over, in a place I wanted to be. Three years later, I sold that book to Bloomsbury Children's Books. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! (But, um… really?) One more shameful confession: I was a little embarrassed. You see, I'd become a literary elitist. I never questioned my assumption that only The Classics were good for you, or that literary fiction was the One True Genre. And now, I was going to be a children's author? Apparently there was this new genre out there, Young Adult literature, that I had never explored. Curious about where my book seemed to fit in, I went to the YA section of my local library and browsed, led by title, cover, how the first words slinked around me and pulled me closer. I read one, then another, and another, book after book like a starved girl. I had found it—my one true genre (cue angelic choir again). Who knew? Here was the land where Story and Wordsmithery could live hand-in-hand, where ideas sang to me and characters were relatable and flawed but also rich with hope. Now I read all kinds of books, old and new, nonfiction and fiction, devastatingly tragic and laugh-out-loud funny; but there's one section in the library where I most often linger, letting my fingers trail over the spines, breathing in the hearty scent of Book. I feel so stinking honored that my own novels sit there, too, alongside some of the greatest living authors (and I'd pit them against many of the dead ones). As I write this, I'm fighting sleepiness because last night at 10 I cracked open a new book and couldn't force myself to put it down until three a.m. Reader Girl is back.

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Author Information

Shannon Hale is the author of the popular Newbery Honor–winning Princess Academy (2005). Her latest book, Rapunzel's Revenge (2008, both Bloomsbury), is a graphic novel which she wrote with her husband, Dean Hale.