I’ve always been a big reader. All throughout my life, I have used reading as an escape from reality and a way to vicariously make my life a bit more interesting in the glowing and mystical worlds of fiction. I used to love reading everything: adventure novels, murder mysteries, science fiction, and even the occaisional young adult novel, just for fun. 

   However, in the past year, I’ve noticed myself picking up fewer and fewer contemporary works of writing and instead choosing titles from the likes of Verne, Salinger, Ovid, Hurston, and Vonnegut. Lately, I’ve been drawn to the classics for some reason that I can’t really put a finger on. It could be anything from my enamoration with the dark academia Pinterest aesthetic to growing up in general or a simple desire for some more challenging material in the mundanity of the pandemic. Either way, I’ve really been enjoying the beauty of the prose of older written works. Modern communication has become very streamlined and simple to understand, so sometimes it’s nice to take a break and slow it down with page-long setting descriptions and character studies — things that can be hard to find in modern novels but are abundant in those of the past. 

   Despite having already read it once, I was thrilled that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was on the AP English Literature syllabus. I really, really, unironically love Hamlet — there is just something about that 400-year-old play about a depressed Danish Prince that is so, so personal. It seems strange to think, but I don’t feel as though things have changed that much since Shakespeare was writing his plays — and the fact that we still gravitate towards them and other arts of antiquity just goes to show how universally timely they are, that we still have many common threads through our lives and those of people long dead. 

   Ultimately, the human experience is the human experience, whether it’s Prince Hamlet being emo, Holden Caulfield being done with everyone else being phony, Franz Kafka’s characters having bad relationships with their parents (projecting, much?), or Kilgore Trout being phenomenally existential. Reading is so therapeutic (and dare I say relatable) to me, and it’s comforting to know that the struggles I’m working through aren’t even remotely unique. The same experiences I have everyday might have sparked the plots for the books I read — even if they were written centuries ago — because we’re all experiencing life as humans and I just think that’s pretty neat.