How did I get interested in Literature? needs some digging into memory, and going back to the first or probably the first books I started to read. Coming from a provincial town, books were a rare thing, because many people at home read only either news papers or journals. In high school the non-detailed texts for the English subject were regularly read out in the class by my teachers and sometimes enacted too. We had some wonderful texts for five years; Around the World in 80 days, The adventures of Tom Sawyer, Captain Blood, The Three Musketeers, The Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Prisoner Of Zenda. Somebody who had designed the curriculum, packed the syllabus with texts abounding in adventure, thrill and action. There were short stories as a part of the detailed texts which had Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, Cricket by Neville Cardus and stories by other eminent writers.
Although the non-detailed texts were abridged or condensed, the stores of action and adventure along with some mysterious tales like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of Baskerville had forged an attachment to reading a good story, which perhaps what Literature is all about at one level.
In the Intermediate classes, the obvious choice was Advanced English, which unfolded many more interesting books and plays like ‘The Little Man’ by John Galsworthy about universal brotherhood and a play called ‘ The Man in the Bowler Hat” which is a Director’s spoof of a group of characters enacting his play.(many years later my students enacted this play for a school anniversary).
More serious Literature in the form of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Walter Scott, Harper Lee, Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Daniel Defoe and many others was not far away and the engagement with the great writers has been a riveting experience.
Introducing is the best part and we had great teachers who could bring a text to life with their passion and dedication to the subject.Literature is a sort of ambrosial well ( excuse the hyperbole)and can keep giving entertainment, spirit and inspiration