Please welcome Joss Olson to the Junior Spotligh.
What is one thing your fellow English majors don’t know about you?
In my junior year of high school, I had to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Annotation was mandatory, and three-quarters of the way through I was sick of Gabriel García Márquez. From that point on I rolled a die, skipped ahead that many pages and made a few notes in the margins where I landed, until I reached the end. I did this before lunch on the day it was due, and I got a 97 when my teacher handed our books back. Pre-IB English, ladies and gentlemen. (Note to potential English majors: don’t do this.)
Why are you an English major?
I view English as a science. Any author worth the words they write writes with a particular intent, whether it’s to comment on the nature of justice (Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy), to offer a glimpse into purgatory (Samuel Beckett’s “Not I”), or to reimagine Abraham Lincoln as an antebellum Van Helsing (Seth Grahame Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). It’s the reader’s duty to uncover what exactly the writer’s point was, which requires one to step into their shoes and see the world as they did. Also, I can’t do math.
What is one book you’d be fine never reading again?
The Awakening. Well, it’s not a bad read, actually, and it works as an admonition to not give up on a quest for independence, but every other person I meet insists that Edna Pontellier does the right thing in the end. No spoilers. In terms of a book I dislike, rather than the interpretation to which a book’s fan club subscribes, I’d have to go with The Giver–we had to read it every year from third grade through eighth grade, and precisely nothing new was ever added to the discussion after the first time. In terms of a book I’m not merely tired of, Breaking Dawn is hands down the most boring, self-indulgent waste of paper I’ve ever struggled through.
You’re stranded on a desert island and can only bring three books. Which books would you bring?
Les Misérables, because it’s really long and taught me that some things are indeed worth dying for. Beowulf, because it’s without exaggeration the greatest story ever told. Going Bovine, because it strikes a difficult balance between thought-provoking, riotously funny and utterly insane. There are several books you could plug in for that third answer, I just picked one of the ones that fit.