This morning’s lecture certainly gave me a lot to think about regarding reading and emotion. I am not a passive reader. When I read, I expect to feel some sort of emotional response, even if this is resentment or critique that the author clearly should’ve got with a different angle. I often find myself talking through a text. Sometimes ohh that is nice phrase / yes I like that / why did they do that? More recently, I have come to write particular phrases down on post-its notes and stick them around my writing space. I don’t necessarily analyse them but keep them in the back of my mind.

Being purposeful to include a variety of forms, I have created a short list below of things that have moved me, at various points in my life.

All of these things began life as texts in one draft or another.

Lazarus Original Cast Recording

This is not the David Bowie version but Lazarus is instead sung by Michael C. Hall of Hedwig, Dexter, and Six Feet Under Fame. This opens with dark and powerful notes that transport me someplace else whenever it appears on my shuffle.

This song reminds me to stay grounded, and focus on what is happening in front of me. I saw the musical at King’s Cross Theatre on a day trip up to London during exam week. It is a very experimental show and whilst my Dad loved it, and I loved the soundtrack I wasn’t sure if I was going to quite get the show. However, when this was played early on, I knew I could settle in and relax for the rest of the show.

Fun Home – Alison Bechdel

Fun Home the Musical was adapted from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel about a lesbian cartoonist navigating her father’s death and introduction to college.

Last year my best friend, who was graduating, and I decided to spend our term three student loan on a trip to New York to do something a little crazy before she went. We ended up going to the show but didn’t sit together. It was actually performed in the round, and she had been worried that tickets would sell out so wanted to buy them from the hotel. I didn’t want to spend that much money and knew they wouldn’t so I bought them later in the day.

So whilst, I ended up front row, she ended up many seats back quite a bit to the left of me. This is the one on the list that really made me cry, probably more accurate to say sobbing. When we met in the foyer, both of us were crying and every single time we stopped, would mention something else we loved that would set us off again. My playbill is actually tearstained.

The Woman in Black

I studied The Woman in Black in Year 10 for Drama GCSE. I was young, impressionable and had been to the theatre quite often since an even younger age. I had also never been so scared in my entire life. We sat in the stall, deeply immersed in the fog, loud noise, and occasional Woman in Black aisle appearance. I have never heard so many swear words or seen so many people fall out of their seats.

I also came out of it mildly traumatised. I didn’t sleep properly for weeks. And could barely remember the second act from hiding behind my scarf. Yet it still remains to be one of the greatest pieces of theatre I have ever encountered. The film with Daniel Radcliffe was released on DVD, a couple of years ago, and we tried to watch it as a family. Within the first five minutes, I cried and screamed at Mum to turn it off, much to the hysterical laughter of my sister.

I’ve decided The Woman in Black is just one of those films I will never get to see.

The Book of Strange New Things – Michael Faber

I actually read this book accidentally. I had been left in a train station in the Netherlands by a friend of mine for several hours. It was cold but I hadn’t had the chance to just sit and read uninterrupted for a long term so went to the bookshop to choose something. The blurb was the reason I was slightly confused after the first chapter: “Peter Leigh is called on a journey of a lifetime, a highly unusual humanitarian mission into deep space”. I saw space, and understood mission to be a specific task, rather than as a religious missionary. I can’t actually recall reading any science fiction before, so why I even chose this I’m not sure.

Peter is there to bring religion to the aliens. This was a concept I found fascinating and the discussion of linguistics and communications was enough to keep me more than entertained throughout. I do feel dissatisfied at the ending but just because it wasn’t what I wanted to happen, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good ending and I think I have come to accept this.

This is a book that I want to re-read knowing that I know the plot. I want to focus on the structure of the novel and the characterisation of Peter. I would recommend it to everyone who is even a little intrigued by the premise.

Homewrecker – Ocean Vuong

If I get the opportunity to talk poetry, I will often head straight to my favourite contemporary American/Vietnamese poet Ocean Vuong, who actually has a real life poetic name.

Homewrecker is taken from his debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and it is beautiful.

You can (and should) read the full text here: https://linebreak.org/poems/home-wrecker/

As a warning, don’t listen to the audio available.It isn’t Ocean speaking and in my opinion, doesn’t do justice to the poem. Ocean naturally has quite a lilting and softly spoken voice that contrasts with his vivid and powerful imagery. His balance of rhythm, metaphor and anaphora create a strong sense of time and place. I particularly enjoy …’your fingers / sweeping through my hair –my hair a wildfire’ and ‘in the museum of the heart / there are two headless people building a burning house’.

Ocean is about the same age as me but already has such a craft of language that I could sit for several hours flicking through his collection and constantly find something new to underline, something else to wish I had written.

Hopefully you will enjoy this list, and the variety of emotions it will bring. I’d love to hear what things have moved you at various points in your lives.

This week, I had a change of heart. My initial reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress, was that it was tedious and very difficult to get through, despite its simplistic structure. However, I think this was partly due to my lack of knowledge about the Bible. It was hard work, as an ignorant reader, to recognise the parables and the huge number of references as they were being told. Nevertheless, John Bunyan has produced an incredible text that would surely be rewarding if you recognised more than the majority of biblical references. I will one day re-read The Pilgrim’s Progress, after I have read the Bible to see if it is more satisfying.

One aspect I did enjoy, in terms of popular culture, were finding phrases like Vanity Fair and Worldly-Wise appearing in The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is incredible to think that words we almost take for granted had to have an origin somewhere. For my dissertation, I am writing a collection of poetry based on the life of mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing. Additionally, I am developing my own digital humanities resource. Therefore, the opportunity to explore the Reading Experience Database was fascinating. I will certainly be using this in the future to look for new avenues of research.

It was during this exploration of the database, that I happened upon a happy coincidence.

As I’ve been reading a copious amount about Alan Turing recently, I decided to try and find out what he had been reading. Of the three records that appeared, it seemed almost unbelievable that Alan Turing is documented to have read The Pilgrim’s Progress as well as: Reading Without Tears and Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know.

Alan’s extraordinary experience of The Pilgrim’s Progress was as follows: “The only books he had were little nature study notebooks, supplemented by his mother reading The Pilgrim’s Progress aloud. Once she cheated by leaving out a long theological dissertation, but that made him very cross. “You spoil the whole thing” he shouted, and ran up to his bedroom”. – Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, (London, 1983), p. 9, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=31265, accessed: 03 February 2017

As a result of this research, I have decided to work on a series of poems titled respectively after the three books on record. I have included a first draft of one of these below. It is based on the death of Turing’s childhood friend, Christopher Morcam, with whom Alan enjoyed academic argument and astronomy.

Reading Without Tears

At sundown before Saint Valentine’s Day a boy

extended out the tether of friendship and yet

died from complications of bovine tuberculosis.

I am sure I could not have found anywhere

another companion so brilliant and yet

so charming and unconceited.

We journeyed to Cambridge to try for Trinity

I was unsuccessful but he was not and yet

I went and he did not.

I wrote his mother to ask for a photograph

so that I might remember him and yet

found I did not need it.

I looked over the glass ball stuck round

with paper to mark the stars and yet

couldn’t trace them all alone.

On the hockey field I watched the daisies grow

under the warmth of sun and yet

wait to spread their petals wide.

My own mother will write to your own

send flowers for the funeral and yet

she will not quite understand why.

At sunrise on Saint Valentine’s Day a boy

heard his footsteps fall heavier and yet

he will not quite understand why.

Bethany Ashley

I don’t know if I am allowed to admit this, but I haven’t previously read any Jane Austen. I recall opening Pride and Prejudice briefly, then deciding I’d much rather re-read Wuthering Heights instead. So, this wasn’t just my first time reading Northanger Abbey, it was my first time reading Austen – and what an indulgent text I found it. Rich in social history, and impropriety, I loved having the opportunity to explore Bath and the Pump-Room along with Catherine. This wasn’t a book I had to struggle through, I humoured the drama of Catherine crying throughout her breakfast after receiving news from her brother, and earlier wishing to throw herself from the carriage so that she may walk with Henry and Eleanor.

It is quite clear that in places we are also indulging Austen, especially in her declaration on the values on the novel. At times, this created a distancing that removed you from Catherine’s world briefly, and reiterated that you were merely an observer and that Austen too was observing these things. It was quite clear that this was Austin’s interference in the story, but I saw no reason why she shouldn’t use her influence and readership however she had wanted.

One of the passages I found most interesting, awoke questions of the value of the written versus oral text. As Henry, Eleanor and Catherine walk to Beechen Cliff, Henry mocks Catherine’s lexical choice: ‘nice’. It is clear that there are many interpretations to Henry’s mocking, and flirting seems most probable in my opinion, but the important question it raised was whether Henry would have the same critique of the written word. This is not answered in the text but was provocative enough to allow me to think of other places I’d encountered this before.

The most prominent in mind was from the Bible. This year I’ve downloaded an app in which David Suchet, of Poirot fame, will read the Bible to you in one year. (Another text I haven’t read before). In Luke 11:28 Jesus says that ‘blessed are those who hear the word of God.’ Suchet pointed out in an interview about the project, that the emphasis in this passage is ‘hear the word’, not read, not speak but hear the word. I therefore wondered whether Henry was giving the same authority to the spoken word as the written word, or if one is more worthy of respect than the other. The written word is more often carefully considered, than the spoken which is spontaneous, but this doesn’t necessarily make it better, or truer.

I then considered poetry, my go-to form, and one I feel more comfortable discussing. Especially in regards to poetry, do I feel that the reader experience is important in discussing the value of oral texts. There is nothing worse, than finding out your favourite poet is dull at reading their own work, and nothing more powerful that somebody surprising you with something you’d previously ignored by feeling every word fizzing around your bloodstream. There is no truer example of this than Kevin Kantor’s People You May Know. I loved it so much, I bought his collection to re-read which sadly failed to capture the tension in the air, and I spent longer looking at what I thought was an errant comma than enjoying the reading experience.

I am now left to wonder if the next time I re-read Northanger Abbey, I should do so aloud.

Bethany Ashley