The Good Earth, Bad Literature and Life's Ugly Truths in My New Life

“Why is it that we teach the worst novels by the best authors in school?”

-The Squid and the Whale

I have read over 500 novels in my life. And they were not the paperback westerns you see in truck-stops either. I started in the “Literature” section in Walden Books, but now I’m not sure what that section name meant. I think it was suppose to mean “Classics” or novels of aesthetic value. Well, actually I started… well I didn’t. When most kids were reading, I wasn’t. I was playing outside catching salamanders, crickets, lizards, and earthworms to put in my terrarium with a mossy floor. My older siblings were reading at young ages, but I saw them there during study times, and I took every chance I had to get outside, play in nature, and with the other kids at the playground. Whatever they were doing sure didn’t look like any fun. I skipped around reading as much as possible. I think I first read Hop on Pop by Dr Seuss when I was 11. I was pretty well liked with my people skills, so I didn’t feel too embarrassed about it. But then Pokemon came out for Gameboy, and that game had a lot of reading. There was no way around it. I had to read more. A lot of our home schooling was done in Public Libraries; Manga, and Graphic Novels caught my attention. My cousins were super into Dragon Ball Z, but we didn’t have cable. But the library had the Dragon Ball Z Manga! and other good Manga’s too. DBZ was what started it all for me. Eventually the hype about the New Lord of the Rings movies were coming out. My English teacher Grandmother decided she would take all her grandchildren to see it. I couldn’t believe it! I would have thought something called “Lord of the Rings” wouldn’t have been tolerated in my home. It sounded like witchcraft that I otherwise would have had to sneak, but I found The Hobbit in my mom’s old books in the basement, and one chapter at a time, on long car rides I fell in love. My Grandmother would then teach my English Lit class at our home school co-op, and she taught poems by Frost, short stories by Jack London, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Poetry then began to take route. A few years later that’s when I found the Literature section at Walden Books. That’s when I bought The Catcher in the Rye, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and A ClockWork Orange. Life was good.

In my Early 20s I would read The Good Earth. I had been an English major, and I liked what I was taught, but I got burnt out on reading. My Professors taught slightly depressing Literature for a 20 year old at the top of thee world. It was hard for me to relate with Kate Chopin, and life was changing fast. But Wang Lung caught me the same way the novel’s on the Literature shelf did. It clicked, and I couldn’t put it down. I loved reading again.

Now that I am in my mid 30s, the college lit is on full throttle. And the time in Wang Lung’s life enduring the army occupying his home, or his unwanted relatives poking around when they’ve run out of money, and need someone to live off of; that book, and those books prepared me for Life’s Ugly Truths.

Last updated June 03, 2023