I have been preoccupied, for the past week or so, by studying for my AP English exam--difficult, because it seems like there's not much that can be done to study for an English exam. Besides reading, perhaps. And writing. But the test isn't so much about reading and writing as it is about being a reader and a writer, or analyzing the position of those who are readers and writers. It's a constrained form of psychology, in a way, one that analyzes not the human psyche, but the more delicate and manipulative power of words.

I have always been a voracious reader, and I don't doubt that this will help me on the exam, as it has helped me through the class preparing for it. I will read any text, and more often that not I will comprehend it. But comprehension is a different thing than understanding. The test calls for us to be literate--not in the sense of a comprehension and appreciation of reading, but to be literate about our understanding. To articulate exactly why a passage evokes such emotions in us--emotions that we must be very well aware of, and that we must be assured are universal before we generalize.

In a sense, the AP exam calls for a hyper-observational form of self-consciousness that most of us wouldn't bother conjuring in our everyday lives. The AP class I have been taking since September has groomed me for this, and tempered but not tamed my desire to read, molded it to a specific method of questioning and wondering via marginalia. In many ways, it has deepened my understanding, but I get the sneaking feeling that I am sometimes analyzing too much while I read, that I have become overeducated in this area of literary psychoanalysis.

***

A year or so ago, I read a book called The Remains of the Day. It was reccomended to me by a friend, who urged me to read it but not ask questions beforehand, because if I knew what it was about I would surely not be interested. In that spirit, I won't tell you what the story concerns, but I will say that it is an amazing story--subtle and life-changing and tragic and sweet all at the same time. Combine that with superb writing and a carefully restrained outline, and you have a classic.

The same friend more recently reccomended that I read The Chosen, a book about Hasidic and Zionist Jews in America during World War II. I am in the midst of that book now, and I am absorbed in it as I never have been in any book I have read since The Remains of the Day--except maybe Breaking Dawn. But I find that I am constantly attempting to qualify or explain my enjoyment, even as I keep my eyes glued to the page. I don't understand why exactly I enjoy it, and that worries me. If I cannot even understand my own feelings towards a book--except that perhaps, vaguely, they are somehow related to the diction and tone of the writer, how can I hope to answer questions that ask why (and/or to what effect) the author chose the pronoun "we" rather than "I" in the fourth paragraph of the passage?

***

Since I was very young, I have refused (or rather abstained) for the most part from art classes. The concept of an art "class" seems overwrought and useless to my superiority, since "art", of course, can not be taught under most circumstances. This was my lofty conclusion, which was actually the result of the fact that I had not particularly enjoyed any of the art classes I had taken, nor gained anything much from them.

In the same way, I approached my AP English class with a somewhat arrogant attitude. Surely, I believed, I could not learn anything I did not already know; I was, after all, a proficient writer and accomplished reader (or the other way around) who would naturally earn a high score in any English exam, that language being so attuned to my instincts. I have not been cured of that arrogance entirely, but I did walk away from this class with not only a new way of reading but also a heightened sense of my own limitations. For example, I am not very good at multiple choice questions, and analyzing a reading passage is much harder than it appears to be. An extensive knowledge of terms (syllogism, metaphor, homily, aphorism, etc.) DOES help. One could argue (and I certainly have tried) that this simply shows that the test is an inaccurate survey of students's abilities. Perhaps it is. But that's not exactly the point at the moment; I'll post a lengthy rant on that subject after I've completed the test itself, never fear. The point right now is: am I prepared? I certainly hope so.