Whenever I go to Borders, Barnes and Noble, or the small little closet of a bookstore in my hometown, I always try and find that unique book that no one has read yet… the novel that is hidden behind the Da Vinci Code or by the unknown author pressed between Jack Kerouac and Stephen King.

When I go to the bookstore, I never ever think of the classics. I always associate those books with school- starting from the 9th grade until the (very) recent past when we were slammed with “summer reading lists” and semester syllabi. I’d think of The Scarlet Letter and wince… or Little Women and start to yawn.

Then, I grew up. I began to realize how delicious and fabulous these classics were. I read all 1,500 pages of Gone With The Wind and found myself in awe that a writer of her time could come up with such literature. I actually found Vanity Fair funny. And I think I’ll reread The Awakening every year for the rest of my life just to see what else I can wring out from its pages. I’ve returned to the Ernest Hemingway exhibit at the JFK library (a place I first discovered on a field trip in 12th grade and never appreciated until my sophomore year of college) and reread his manuscripts, trying my best to dissect his psyche and decode his art.

And pardon the cliche, but I can’t get over how timeless these reads are. I’ve had conversations with my grandma about Edna Pontellier, and about how, if at all, things have changed for women. My mom rolled her eyes when she saw me reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and said she did the exact same thing when she was my age (maybe every young woman does).

Anyway, that’s my little Hoo-Rah for the classics. Now excuse me, I have a date with Bernard Shaw.

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Amazon, you’re Fahrenheit 451-ing the world with Kindle. I’m only dramatizing in the slightest, but consider that a metaphorical prophesy.

The traditional form of a book, paper bound in soft or hard cover, has an aesthetic that cannot be replaced by electronics. Example… I recently finished reading Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. The copy was brand new, hard cover, and smelt like paper, new printing- satisfying and indescribable. This book was deliciously descriptive and fresh, following the difficult life of traveling psychic Alison Hart and her assistant Colette. I found it to be extremely eerie, dark, and honest. Front page to last, this is the best I’ve read in years. I recommended the book to my sister, who now has my copy. As she reads, she comes across underlined passages and little notes I made in the margins. She wasn’t just reading a copy of Mantel’s fantastic novel; she was reading my copy. A mutual friend of ours wants it next. I read it, my sister is reading it, and our friend will read it. The book has become an important object with meaning and sentiment attached to it, as do all the books I enjoy.

Sometimes, I don’t want electronics around me. I want to curl up in bed on a rainy day and fall asleep with a … Kindle? I want to take a bubble bath, surrounded by candles, reading a steamy romance on my… Kindle? No. No, no, NO. I want the magical stories I read to appear in real, tangible form. I can’t get absorbed and enthralled in a screen. When I read, I want to turn the pages. I want to feel the pages, and even smell them. I want to make little notes. I want to collect my favorites on a bookshelf, or pass them on to my friends.

While small bookstores are going out business due to immense companies like Barnes & Noble, how is the increasing popularity of Kindle is going to affect the market? On top of this, I’m tempted to go Kanye West on Amazon and say “Kindle doesn’t care about blind people.” Of course, I’d be a little more valid than Kanye and his venetian blind glasses. There is a feature to read text aloud, but there is no way to navigate to that option without the ability to see.

Nook (eBook reader by Barnes & Noble), you’re just hopping on the hate train. You’re slaughtering my literary world. My ideal Sunday morning while studying abroad in London last year was sitting in a café reading something I bought at a local used bookstore. A hellishly twisted version of this would be sitting in a fake Starbucks in Barnes & Noble reading text I digitally purchased on a Nook. Note how I used the word “fake;” I recently received a Starbucks gift card, but was dismayed when it wasn’t accepted at the café in B&N. The barista informed me it was not actually a legitimate Starbucks, and that they just bought the coffee and labels. They make drinks differently (poorly, from my experience), don’t accept gift cards, and are, in essence, BIG FAT LIARS. I feel like this is secretly part of Dante’s Inferno. Wait, hold on here— did someone forget to tell me I am actually in hell? Where’s Virgil? Is this why freshly opened eBook readers like Kindle and Nook smell like brimstone?

Oh, and iPad- I have nothing to say to you. I don’t even know what you are, but I think it has to do with menstrual cycles. Either way, please leave me alone.

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As a proud English major or even just as one of literature’s self-proclaimed lovers I am embarrassed to admit that I had no idea who Naeem Murr was or the extent of his popularity & esteem until a fellow student whispered with an enamored eagerness, “That’s him!” on the first day of workshop. Having pictured the instructor to be a woman when I registered for the class you can imagine my mild shock and confusion when I replied, “Him? Our instructor you mean?” to which the classmate gave me a dumbfounded look that made me immediately busy myself with my iPod – apparently I was out of the loop.

My ignorance continued for the first two weeks or so until, in search of an event to blog about, I stumbled across his name as a headliner for a reading at the Co-op. The last time I was at the Co-op for such an event I had stood in line for four hours to shake Wally Lamb’s hand (does this at all redeem me?) & practically skipped into the night with my copy of his newest book Wishin’ and Hopin’ to which he had signed, “Mandi, my best of luck to a fellow writer” (Wally’s reference to me as a colleague, as an equal to which I was sure I was not, had inflamed a very small and rare hope that caused me to smile with affection every time I looked at the book).

So, realizing that Naeem’s appearance had to be significant I resolved to attend the event. I was curious, after all, what my instructor on the “craft of fiction” himself wrote about.  And it became clear through our discussions in class that this was a man of wisdom. I mean, not just anyone says things like, “Writers are, really, very shy actors” or “Fear is at the heart of all that which constricts human beings.” But of course, according to a very acute observation of a fellow student, anyone who speaks with such a mysterious intonation & captivating accent sounds prophetic, regardless of what was actually said. Indeed it seemed “deep” when he said short stories are like “bird brains or lizard brains which are quite amazing actually.” I was shocked-even more than when I discovered he was indeed a man-that he did not impress his professional life upon his students. He did not take twenty minutes to tell us about his appearance on Oprah or plug for his latest book by using its title as a frequently used personal expression. I inwardly laughed at myself when I recalled my attempt to find out what kind of professor he was on the notorious Ratemyprofessor.com where students rate professors by difficulty as well as their “hotness.”

All in all, the event was typical. Penelope Pelizzon, the director of Creative Writing, gave a grand introduction noting all of his awards & praised his prose. I sat wondering what it was like to have someone talk about your professional biography as if you aren’t sitting in the front row, as if you were some king whose presence is being announced in a hall. You must get used to it I suppose because Naeem took the podium comfortably, like a shy actor, and read a quick excerpt from his novel The Perfect Man which he followed with a witty satire on the dynamic relationship between a fiction writer & a poet. “Poetry was my first love,” he said. Perhaps, in a way, that poet in the story, who poured over an ancient dictionary making metaphors for each of the words, was a part of himself, hence the piece’s title: My Poet. The inside jokes were endless, and the audience, through collective chuckling, seemed to connect through a shared understanding of the struggles, triumphs & trivialities of writing.

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For ABC’s Richard Castle, using the proper language to make a point is of the utmost importance, especially if that point is worth killing over. Upon stumbling across a murder victim, sporting graffiti on her face (presumably left by her killer), Castle jumps at the opportunity to correct the criminal’s poor grammar. “Your should be you-apostrophe-r-e as in you are. That’s not even a tough one, not like when to use who or whom. I’m just saying, whoever killed her also murdered the English language.”

We all make mistakes. I’ll be the first to admit that I make them all the time myself. I know the differences between their, they’re, and there, but even I mix them up every now and then when I’m typing quickly. The trick is to always proofread the work. If I can’t take the time to read it myself, how can I expect someone else to take the time to read it? I read and re-read what I’ve written at least five or six times before letting anyone else see it. I’ve done enough peer-editing in my time at Uconn to know that most people just do not take the time to proofread their own work. They assume the spell-check option on Word is enough to overcome the really bad errors, and any other mistakes are so ambiguous that no one will notice.

The consequence of this is that the author is undercutting his or her professionalism with every grammatical or spelling error. Poorly proofread work is like taking a megaphone and shouting: “I don’t care about what I have to say, and you shouldn’t either.” The real message gets overlooked. One slip-up is bad enough, but most works these days are riddled with mistakes. In a single five-page essay that I read by a fellow student last semester, I found no less than sixty mistakes that a spell-checker wouldn’t notice, but a cursory glance at the work would. These days, the biggest blunders people make include misuse of commas, fragmented sentences, and too many mix-ups of the words it’s/its, breath/breathe, who/whom, and who’s/whose. I won’t even go into the misuse of the word literally. There’s not enough time in the world to cover that rant.

Obviously the issue is that students are not being taught the basics of the English language at an early enough age. Kids are taught how to read, sure, but they are not taught how to write well. With vocabulary lessons, kids learn how to spell obscure and often obsolete words, but they’re never taught how to properly use and spell some of the most basic words. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people spell the words “tomorrow” and “definitely” with the letter A. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I saw either of those words spelled correctly. Trying to teach students grammar rules and spelling in high school is just not going to work. It’s far too late.

I work in the Roper Center on campus where I view hundreds of surveys a day, processing the data and cataloguing it all. In the span of a single minute, I found three very obvious typos in three different surveys. Two were from Zogby International. One release claimed the survey was conducted December 28-20 of last year. The other release claimed December 28-30, 2010 as its field date. The third I found in a Word Public Opinion survey, which encouraged readers to visit their website at WorldPublicIoinion.org. Obviously the person typing just missed the O and P keys and hit the I and O keys instead, but if anyone had proofread this at all, they could have caught this and fixed it before releasing the study to the public.

The most humiliating moment came this week when I was reading Tuesday’s Daily Campus. Right on the Sports page, the big headline read: “PLAYING THE VILLIAN.” I read the article to make sure it wasn’t a play-on-words; maybe someone’s last name was Villian? It wasn’t. It was about some terrible loss to Cincinnati with a throw-away mention of Villanova. The article discussed how “embarrassing” Uconn’s losing streak is. I couldn’t help but laugh. If you ask me, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a huge newspaper headline with a screaming typo. What’s even worse is that the article said: “He call it ‘embarrassing.’” Even if you don’t know how to spell villain, surely you can recognize that “he call it” is not proper English.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but I feel like, these days, the most common mistakes are not difficult to remedy. I don’t think it’s asking too much that people learn how to use simple three- and four-letter words like its or your. I mean, people clearly do not know how to use commas. I’ve become pretty understanding with comma misuse in the last few years because the rules are too complicated for people to bother learning. The problem I have is with the more basic mistakes. If you’re not saying “it is,” you’d better not be using an apostrophe. You’d also better not be saying “your stupid” unless you can explain “my stupid what?” Murder is a crime, people. Please stop murdering the English language.

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