English Major Heretic

No institutional training required

It’s a day ending in Y, so I am thinking about or starting a new website. Actually, in this case, it’s a new Substack, and this time, I’m asking others to join me. In short, I want to share my experiences with individual books and give others the opportunity to share theirs. If this sounds good to you (even if it doesn’t), please read on.

My love and dependence on books can become a problem. Every few weeks, I take a good, hard look at the books on my Reading Now shelf and return as many as I can part with to their permanent homes on the bookshelves taking up much of the wall space throughout my house. Doing this helps me breathe a little more easily and lightens the load in my arms when I carry from the living room to the family room the day’s chosen—no, hoped-for—reads of the day. The living room mostly houses the pool table (and my Reading Now shelf), but the orange leather sectional where I make my morning reading nest each day is in the family room. I write “hoped-for books” because I seldom manage to get my eyes on more than two or three each morning, even though I always carry over at least four.

No matter what, the lightened state never lasts long. Before I know it, I’m adding more books to the Reading Now shelf, like today, when I slid among the volumes already there another four. Finally accepting that this is who I am, I’ve stopped telling myself that I need to change. Besides, some of the best conversations I’ve ever been part of are ones that take place among books that, by bookstore or library categorization systems, have no right to be together.

My other big problem related to all this is my habit of keeping Reading Journals in which I copy down important passages from the books in my life. I have amassed more than a dozen of these commonplace books and never manage to limit myself to just one home for notes, quotes, and excerpts at any given time.

So, why this new Substack? Well, not only am I looking for kindred spirits, I also feel guilty about tucking away in a drawer, never to be heard from again, important ideas and hard work, even when it’s just my own appreciative copy of someone else’s hard work. So the words in my Reading Journals—along with other people’s thoughts on books—need to see the light of day and get interacted with.

Hence, English Major Heretic: a site and name chosen by a woman who no longer plays the good girl game of writing what someone in academia deems acceptable. Institutions demand conformity because those who don’t play by the rules are hard to rule. I want nothing to do with any of that. Instead, I want to hear and learn from individuals. What you read is important, and every human is born with a need to be heard, but far too many of us have been shamed for what we think, what we feel, and even what we read. And let me say, straight out, that I have done it to people (including my kids). It’s something I regret, and I am deeply sorry for hurting anyone in such a manner, because it does hurt. I have my own set of wounds; most have scarred over, but should they have been inflicted in the first place? I am hopeful that this little place on the Web might become one in which relationship ruptures—among people and among books—are repaired.

So, here’s the call to action: if you would like to share your book thoughts with other people who love books, please contact me here in a comment, over at English Major Heretic, or via direct messages at Instagram (@ruffedgedesign68), X/Twitter (@RuffEdgeDesign), or Telegram (@CherylRuffing). Thank you. Here’s to great relationships among readers and the books they love!