Ann Hulbert
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 2)
I remember a novella by Henry James called The Pupil, which I read in a sort of summer program for bookish high schoolers. It sort of changed the way I read in that I was always sort of looking for the secrets that this omniscient narrator who seemed to be just telling you a story was actually slipping in about something.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 2)
a particular character that that character didn't necessarily know himself or herself. And that as a reader, I really had to pay very, very close attention to figure out myself. And it just sort of added a whole new dimension to reading and kind of made it a quest in a way that I think it hadn't so much been before. It's about an anxious young tutor and an ailing, precocious boy.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 2)
And they're both trapped in this American family that is debt-ridden, self-deluding, sort of exploitative. And what you read at first as a kind of social satire in a wonderfully Jamesian way actually turns out to be this really heartbreaking story of a relationship between them. at its core, all in, you know, 18,000 words.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 2)
It does all sort of point to not just this insight into narrative technique, but kind of into a whole realm of curious dynamics between children and adults, and who really knows more, the children or the adults, that I've been interested in ever since. I just spent a lot of time in worlds that I found in books. And I feel very nostalgic for that even now.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 2)
And I'm sure I romanticize the degree to which it was sort of easy to do that. That's my memory is that, you know, I just... You know, had a phase in which I just wanted to read all the fattest books in the library. And so ended up just reading a jumble of things that I was really glad to have encountered. And I can't imagine having lived through adolescence without that as part of my life.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 2)
I can't imagine life without. without having had these different worlds in which I could lose myself and feel like I was learning all about how human beings work, how society works, and what's possible to do with words, which in the end proved really important to me. I am Anne Hulbert, and I'm the literary editor at The Atlantic. After the break, more good memories.