Required Reading

Categories: Rediscoveries , Fiction

When I hear the words "high school," certain memories spring to mind: catching the city bus each morning, memorizing those French verb conjugations, and putting off "required reading"--the tedious Shakespeare plays, Melville stories, and the Dickens novels--as long as possible.

I wasn't averted to reading; after all, my bedside was cluttered with books by Amy Tan and John Grisham, among others. But the idea that I was required to read certain books because they were "important" always bothered the teen-aged me. 

Luckily, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County provides ample opportunities to discover (or rediscover) classic literature, old and new. Today, for example, not only can I read the library's copy of Hamlet and watch it performed by Patrick Stewart, but also I can download an audio-recording of the play from NetLibrary or a video study guide from MyLibraryDV and gain an even better understanding of this classic that became one of my favorites, long after I had to read it for eleventh-grade English.

The short story index, one of the many internet databases to which the library subscribes, allows users to read entire short stories from their home computer or on one of the library's public terminals. I found some of wonderful stories there, including Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." And after rereading that classic, be sure to check out this recent biography of O'Connor, simply titled, Flannery.

I'm on record as adoring the short-story form, each story containing its own world and characters. Here are some collections that have stayed with me over the years:

• Ocean of Words: Army Stories, by Ha Jin, 
• Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, by Raymond Carver, 
• The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, 
• Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 
• In the Garden of the North American Martyrs : a Collection of Short Stories, by Tobias Wolff