Undergraduate / Learning to Read: Brown Intellectual Experience Essay [3]

The prompt is:

Tell us about an intellectual experience, project, class, or book that has influenced or inspired you.

And here is my essay...

Learning to Read with Calvino

I didn't learn to read until my junior year of high school.

I could breeze through a 500-page novel in a few days, yes, and I had a bookshelf as respectable as any other 17-year-old bibliophile. I could spell long words like "ophthalmology" without using spell check, and write a reasonably eloquent, moving essay, but reading-truly reading-was not in my arsenal of academic abilities. For me, a purely escapist reader, each word served its purpose only insofar as it moved the story along.

My 11th grade AP Language class, therefore, came as a shock. My teacher enticed us to savor each paragraph, each sentence, each word individually, allowing it to melt in our mouths and saturate our minds with meaning. Our class discussions revolved around symbols in novels I would have dismissed, even ignored had it not been for her guidance: a simple green light in The Great Gatsby, a slow-moving and determined turtle in The Grapes of Wrath. I soon realized there was an ocean of meaning to be deciphered in the literature I had previously so blindly and enthusiastically devoured.

When I revisited the novels of Italo Calvino, who had become just another author on my read list on Goodreads, I found myself positively drowning in print. The complexity of his themes and the utter mystery of his fantastic characters astonished me; he asked questions about storytelling that I had never before considered and invited the reader to ponder them with him. In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Silas Flannery, a novelist suffering from a dire case of writer's block, muses about the relationship between an interwoven world of reality and ideas, not yet captured in print, and a book yet to be written: "I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to be as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it" (Calvino, Traveler 172). Aware of the possibilities of relationships between the two worlds, written and unwritten-either the written work reflects something that already exists, or its subject is the negative of reality, something that does not and cannot exist-Flannery is uncertain of which path to take. Should his writing simply describe the beauty, the ugliness, the fear, the happiness, in reality's climaxes? Or should his world offer a wholly new thread to the web of existing ideas?

Such musings mystified me, but the fact that I could accept Calvino's invitation to at least contemplate them was thrilling; no longer was I that passive, escapist reader, who consumed novels voraciously but carelessly. I was able to engage in a dialogue with the author-his questions became my questions, I offered my tentative answers and he gave me his.

My concerns:

I'm too specific with the quoting of his novel, and that it won't make sense to anyone who hasn't read it!
It's doesn't really connect to the academic interest I already indicated on the supplement.
Do I need more of a conclusion?
DOES IT WORK?

Any input is greatly appreciated! Thanks!