The point of literature

From Kathryn’s post, Belonging, and libraries as empathy engines?, this bit really resonated with me:

The most library-relevant part of the talk was Isabelle Li describing her annoyance at being asked “but how could you understand what it was about?” when she revealed that she had read Dicken’s David Copperfield several times as a teen because she loved it so much; the presumption being that a 20th Century young woman in China would not have anything in common with a young lad in Victorian times. But, “of COURSE I could empathise with the characters. That’s the POINT of literature”.

Growing up in Malaysia, I didn’t have access to public libraries, and there was no library at school, so I didn’t have as much access to books as I might have liked. Despite this, my parents did think that books were important, so we did have some books at home – some encyclopaedias, sets of popular science and wildlife books, quite a few Enid Blytons and lots of Reader’s Digest. An eclectic assortment.

I’ve always liked reading. Growing up, I enjoyed the books I read: Reader’s Digest condensed books, Enid Blyton school stories, and “classics” like Black Beauty, Robin Hood, the Greek myths, and Sherlock Holmes. It’s a cliché, sure, but books just opened up the world to me. So many things were alien to me as a child in Malaysia, but I could learn about them, imagine them, by reading: Hercules, Medusa, lemonade, horses, puffins, red haired men.

I will always remember reading To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee for the first time. I think I was about thirteen years old. A classmate had a copy, and I persuaded her to lend it to me. I was intrigued by the book – it was something new to me. I loved this passage in particular:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the court-house sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then; a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Everything about this seemed so exotic to me, the name of the town, the fact that its streets turned to red slop when it rained, and what was a Hoover cart?

And the names of the characters: Scout, Jem, Atticus, Calpurnia, Dill, Boo Radley, Mayella Ewell… The courthouse scenes. Everything about the book fascinated me, and reading it, I started to realise how much injustice there was in the world.