in defense of difficult literature

hello.

i double majored in college and got half of my degree in english literature, and for a long time i was ashamed of it. not because i didn’t love what i studied. i did, i always have. but because i grew up around people who believed it wasn’t enough. in my family, anything in the arts was seen as a luxury at best, a mistake at worst. real success was something you could quantify with a salary and a trajectory. and english didn’t promise any of that.

when people asked what i was studying, i’d try to make it sound like a phase. i’d say “english,” then pivot into something more acceptable. maybe teaching, or editing, or law school eventually. i knew how to make it sound temporary. like i was being realistic. i’d play to the other half of my degree—biology, and talk about medical school (another lofty dream) because the truth was, i didn’t have a plan that made sense to anyone. i knew i loved books. i loved the way they made me feel. the way they made me think. and i felt like that wasn’t enough.

for years, i tried to make that love more practical. i tried to reshape it and justify it. and somewhere in that process, i started to forget why i had chosen literature in the first place. not for the outcomes, but for the experience of it. the difficulty. the intimacy. the interiority. the way it asked you to stay.

it took me a long time to realize that the books that shaped me most weren’t the ones i understood right away. they were the ones that confused me. the ones i had to grow into and sat untouched on my shelf until something in me was ready to return. and it wasn’t because i wasn’t smart enough, it was because those books weren’t built for speed. they weren’t designed to be consumed and meant to be lived with. read slowly. read again.

this next section is for paid subscribers. the rest of this piece is a love letter to difficult books: what they teach us, how they change us, and why they matter more than ever right now. if you’ve ever felt intimidated by the classics or unsure where to begin, this is for you. subscribe to keep reading and get the full list of my canon: fifteen books that break and rebuild you.