M.C. Higgins is Great

After today's discussion of "difficulty" in reading literature and the reading of Virginia Hamilton's M.C. Higgins, the Great, my ability to accept challenges I face when reading has reached a knew level of understanding. Up until reading M.C. Higgins I did not think that reading "children's literature" could pose as something difficult for a college level student like myself. However, I did hold the belief that children's literature had the power to challenge readers on all levels. A book that I had never heard of and most likely would not have ever read, M.C. Higgins, the Great has undoubtedly become one of the most influential books I have read in this class and possibly my entire semester.

As I addressed in class, the first three pages posed to be the biggest "difficulty" I was forced to battle through in the text. I quickly began to question my ability to get through the entire book. In having to re-read sentences, paragraphs and entire pages over and over again, I found myself wondering how children would deal with this challenge. What I do know is how I would have dealt with it as a child and that would have been closing the book and putting it on the shelf. After Molly addressed the fact that a book's challenging of the reader can related to an individual difficulty, I was able to start confronting my dilemma head on. While I initially thought it was the vocabulary that made the first three pages so difficult for me, dwelling on the topic after class and while preparing for this blog I have come to think of various other possibilities of why I found those pages so difficult. Regardless of whether it is difficult vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation, word choice and placement, or tone pace, an exact pin-pointing of what is so difficult can only be uncovered through more confrontations with texts that challenge me.

I am glad that I had the opportunity to read a story I had never read, much less heard of and that it resulted in such a positive reading experience for me. The ability to recognize a text as challenging and facing the difficulties it presents directly has not only made me a more careful reader but a more knowledgeable individual as a whole.