There remain hundreds of books on my reading “to do” list, yet sometimes I find myself re-reading an old favorite. With poetry this is a fairly straight forward venture. I browse through the volume looking at notes I have made, lines I have underlined or otherwise marked in some way. It is interesting to see where my tastes have changed, to be reminded of lines, to see again poetic influences I may even have forgotten about on anything but a subconscious level.

With a novel or book of non-fiction this is a different experience altogether by definition. Re-reading a novel or full length non-fiction work is more of a commitment. And since it is more of a commitment, it needs to be a real special book.

Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa is such a book for me.  It is special for me because it was the book, more than any other, that introduced me to real writing and real literature. It was the book that made me want to read something more than comic books and sports biographies.

There was a time in my working life when I spent a part of every working day in and out of a middle school media center (library). In middle school, juvenile fiction is king. It has also become huge business. In the early 1970s, there was not a lot of juvenile fiction and what there was did not interest me in the least.

In 1972-73, I was in 7th grade and 12 years old. I did not want to read about kids like me, I wanted to read about men. I knew about the kid world. What I wanted to know about was the world of adult. The real world.

One day I pulled down a copy of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa from the library that was in our English teacher’s classroom. I suppose I liked the cover and that it was about Africa and hunting. Who knows why we choose some of the books we do?

Whatever the reasons, that moment changed my life. Until that moment, when I had to read something I always chose non-fiction (and that is probably another reason I chose Green Hills of Africa). As soon as I finished Green Hills of Africa, I started The Sun Also Rises and after that, I read book after book, novel after novel, poetry book after poetry book until this day.

I am pleased to say that The Green Hills of Africa holds up well. It is Hemingway. It is memoir in that great prose of his. Ostensibly, it is about a safari he and wife Pauline, took to Africa in 1933. It is more than mere travelogue though, for Hemingway intersperses with details of his hunting with discussions of writers and literature: Twain, Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. All these writers I began reading within a few years of having first read The Green Hills of Africa precisely because Hemingway recommended them.

When I was in the middle school media center, I would often look at the books that were there. There was no Hemingway. There were plenty of books about boys and girls, and many of these are, of course, very well written. But there are few about men and women doing the kind of things that I’m sure many middle schoolers want to know about. There are no books that would have appealed to me.

My life was changed because I picked up Green Hills of Africa one day and discovered great writing and great literature. It was the beginning of a life-long passion. I am forever grateful for that serendipitous moment. I am forever grateful that I had access to adult-level books like this in my classroom when I was just 12 years old.