The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

78 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 he escaped to his aunt, and breathed a sigh of relief when he landed his job with Mr. Wickfield. The other reason I was chest-deep is because 700+ pages is a lot of reading, and Victorian-style language can be...shall we say dry at times. When the plot lulled, I found myself reverting to middle school again. But such was my ambition, my interminable drive to be the eighth to finish David Copperfield, that I pushed forward. I read in the lazy boy, in the dining room, in the kitchen, at school, during my breaks at work, on the way to soccer games, and anywhere else that I could with proper concentration. As our team was traveling one sunny day, I sat in the back of the van plugging away at this bastille of a book on my Nexus 7. I swiped to the next page to find it much shorter than the rest. “Could it be?” I wondered. Deep in my heart, a little flame of hope was lit. Another swipe confirmed my elated expectation. Across the screen read the words, “You’ve completed this book!” That was two and a half years ago when I saw that beautiful phrase materialize on the screen of my Nexus. Now I read the works of the Founding Fathers, John Locke, and Adam Smith with the same enthusiasm I had for Cook-A-Doodle-Doo. The lofty prose that once repelled me now draws and fascinates my senses, though it’s not the only literature I read. I’ve flipped through the pages of World War 2, gripped by the timeless heroics contained within it; I’ve found the world of fiction to be just as gripping. Atlas Shrugged has become a recent quest of mine due in no small part to my aunt’s and mother’s insistence on reading it. My appreciation for having read Copperfield is enlarged with every page I turn. In a way, David Copperfield was a right of passage for me. I was a good reader before Copperfield, but I never challenged myself (which had stagnated my reading skills). Copperfield developed my vocabulary, expanded my appreciation for fine literature, and worked every literary muscle I had. As I sit writing now, I look back on it as the true turning point in my journey of literacy. Do you know what I started doing after reading David Copperfield? I started using a thesaurus. I began to appreciate complex words and phrasings that added meat and zest to my writing. Since then, few things in writing have so consistently delighted my mind as the moment in time when a well-worded sentence and its proper placing lock eyes for the first time. I won’t say that I would be an illiterate mess without reading