It's easy to read things by people whose interests are similar to yours. But to be a truly good reader, you must challenge yourself to read outside your comfort zone. You have to read hard books to succeed in school, and that's a good thing, because reading challenging books makes you grow and become a more interesting person.
But, how to do it? How do you read a difficult text? The first step is finding personal connections to it. Even the most obscure and old-fashioned text has something in it that relates to your life today. The Great Gatsby is about money and class. The Crucible is about back-biting gossip. Macbeth is about someone who will do anything for power. These are themes that we see in our lives and in the newspaper every day.
When you find personal connections to a difficult text, you become more interested in it, and that gives you the motivation to keep slogging through the hard parts. The pain is worth it. These classics repay the work you put into them.
We're using Jim Burke's Making Connections organizer to practice connecting to a text. First up, we're trying it with Paul Feig's hilarious autobiographical essay, "We Stood in Line at Ellis Island for This?" Next week, we'll practice on the introduction to Anne Lamott's classic how-to-write handbook, Bird by Bird. We'll also talk a lot about making personal connections when we read Lord of the Flies.
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