What kind of literary teens were we? It seems only fitting to discuss what we were doing, literature-wise, when we were teens ourselves.
It may have been a long time ago, but even if the memories are partially faded, some of the gestures and habits we developed and further nourished during those years are still second nature today.
Literary Teens & Critical Reading
As much as I enjoyed reading, what I hated the most was reading books that someone else had chosen for me. Nothing frustrated me more than reading those books that were on the school curriculum.
Why?
Because they bored me. I didn’t find them particularly interesting to start with. More to the point, I couldn’t comprehend how out of the vast choice of books, someone would have picked a handful of them and decided to call them classics. The kind of classics that everybody should read.
With millions of books being published every year, the literary teen that I was couldn’t accept the school’s reductive list of must-read books.
What were classics anyway? Every culture has literary classics that I wanted to devour and understand. They could tell me so much about the world… But for some reason that made no sense to me, school wanted me to know only about a few national books.
Reading lists, spotting figures of speech, and writing summaries were the major parts of my literature classes. When I was 13, the same age as Rhode, my teacher asked us to write our opinions of the books. Finally, the literary teen in me could let loose.
I produced a 22-page-long handwritten essay on all the logical reasons why this specific book had been a waste of my time. I read the book attentively, motivated by the desire to break the school system.
The system is still intact. But I had come to realise one thing: I was allowed to have different views and to express them, as long as I could explain them. My literary teen was antagonistic by default. If right was the golden, chosen path that everyone trod, then I looked for ways to justify going left.
Literary Teens & Favourite Books
It’s hard to pick all the books that have been part of my teenage years. But there were many I enjoyed. It just so happened that they were never part of any mandatory school reading list.
I was particularly fond of all Sherlock Holmes adventures. I loved the idea that as long as you could be smart enough, the world could make sense. The world didn’t make sense to literary teen me. It still doesn’t. Perhaps I am indeed not smart enough, or perhaps (as it is more probable) the logical world painted by Conan Doyle never existed.
I also enjoyed a French playwright, Beaumarchais, whose writing, despite being older than the French Revolution, managed not to sound completely awkward in present times. He was also trained as a watchmaker and a frequent trouble-maker for his liberal thoughts. He was not just a man of his time; he was a man whose modern way of thinking remains relevant in most ways even today. I liked that in him. In the wildest dreams of my literary teen self, my writing would be just as coherent, articulate and witty as his.
Finally, the last book that has profoundly marked those years and that I kept reading and reading again was the encyclopedia of medicine that my parents probably bought at a discounted price to fill up their home library after getting married. I would spend hours, losing myself in the many articles on the human anatomy, nervous system, brain, etc. I was fascinated that there was a book that explained exactly how people worked.
Needless to say, the more I read it, the less I understood people. But I still remember proudly boring half my biology classmates to death each time I talked about the things I had learned from it– typically, unasked for.
As it happened, literary teen me had a very unique idea of what literature meant.
Literary Teens & Writing
Was I already writing at the time?
Hell, you can bet I was. I had already started writing stuff nobody wanted to read when I was in primary school, creating my very own newspaper so I could write an article defending the honour of sharks (who, I thought, had a completely unfair bad reputation). I was a fierce shark lawyer, not that I ever got paid for the fantastic ode to sharkiness I created.
As a literary teen, I was into writing mystery stories that I would give to my parents, my first non-consenting victims. I recall a story of a ghost flute and a mysterious musical portal that I wrote for Mother’s Day when I was Rhode’s age.
Around the same time, I decided I should be writing a diary to be read when I’d get famous. Naturally, the life of a 13-year-old may lack in excitement. At least, mine certainly did. But I was dedicated to sharing important opinions about the world around me: what I thought of old films with Basil Rathbone, which socks were suitable to wear on a Tuesday, and why my classmates had failed once more to recognise my sheer brilliance (13-year-old me was very optimistic).
However, I was also painfully aware that some parents could violate your privacy and read your diary. I had seen it in films, so it had become a universal truth to me. So, I wrote all those nonsensical thoughts in a language that I had invented and that nobody else could speak. I am not sure how I imagined that my future fans would decipher it, but I suppose if you’re already delusional, you shouldn’t let mere details stop you.
A few years later, I wrote caricature poems, briefly painting someone’s personality into words and arranging lines on the page to paint a rough portrait. Perhaps the most terrifying gift someone could ever receive from me, but I thought they were fun.
I am not 100% convinced that I am miles away from my old literary teen self. Granted, I have more experience and fewer mandatory books to review, but the desire to use words to process the world around me is still there.
On this thought, happy Teen Literature Day, and I hope your literary teen is still out there, enjoying themselves and exploring the world of books and ideas freely.