I’m pretty sure I’m not the only English teacher who has a private “Library of Shame” that I rarely share with others. It’s filled with the books everyone assumes I’ve read that I haven’t. That shadowy room in my head has always been my secret shame, but I also keep it there as a mindful list of books I will one day read. Sort of like a literary to-do list. So every so often, I pick up one of those “classics-I-should-have-read-but-haven’t” and read it. It’s like my summer reading assignment for myself each year.

This summer, it’s East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

It’s not a monumental read. It’s not like I’m tackling Infinite Jest. But reading John Steinbeck solely for myself has become an inspiring and bittersweet activity. As an English teacher, I am always revisiting classic works and teaching them to my classes. But when I take a book out of my Library of Shame, I am reading solely for myself. I am reading just to experience it. And even though I read a lot of bestsellers and popular fiction, and even though I periodically chip away at my neglected classics, it’s been a while since I felt the presence of an author so deeply. To read East of Eden is to jump into art. It’s to read from someone who knows what the Salinas River looks and smells like and can describe it in a way that takes you there. It is alive:

“Under the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the maidenhair flourished and gave a good smell, and under the mossy banks of the water courses whole clumps of five-fingered ferns and goldy-backs hung down. Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long.”

I have no idea what goldy-backs or harebells are, but I can see them on that shore as clearly as the moss. *sigh*

In Fahrenheit 451, Captain Beatty explains to the protagonist Montag how society reached the point where burning books became the law. It turns out it wasn’t an edict handed down from on high. Instead, books became boring. Commonplace. A “nice blend of vanilla tapioca,” he calls them. In that world, books became obsolete way before the burning began. Why would anyone read the same old boring writing that’s dead on arrival on the page?

Lately, I feel like we are all heading into a Bradbury-esque future of ideas written by computer code that takes the feeling and imagery of writing and converts it into strings of zeroes and ones. The danger isn’t unreadable prose; it’s the competent prose that’s slowly erasing any sense that there is a human being on the other side of the page. The words make sense, and the sentences are legible, but it is missing its soul. When I read Steinbeck, I know exactly who is speaking. I know there is a mind behind the sentences and I hear that clear voice. Fill publishing with enough soulless writing, with novels that read like every LinkedIn post, and, like the world that Beatty describes, reading will be lost.

“Oh, but I taught Chat to copy my style,” say the naysayers. “It writes like me.” And yes, if writing was stagnant, that may work. But it isn’t. It is dynamic. It changes. As writers, we know that growth. I’ve seen it happen with my writing, and I’ve seen it happen with the writers I love. Writing is fluid. It speaks. It thinks. Claude may be able to mimic, but it can’t sing or inspire. It can only sit like a five paragraph freshman essay: organized, logical, vanilla.

So I’m reading East of Eden. And I’m reminding myself of how important it is to revisit the works in my “Library of Shame,” take down those old tomes, dust off the jackets, and plunge in.

Because the Salinas River is waiting. And I don’t just want to read about it. I want to feel it.