Project Bookshelf: Kyle J. Wente

Reading was always as much of a polite way to be alone with myself as it was one of my favorite ways to connect with other people. As a kid, I used to be able to effortlessly produce excitement about reading to the point that I didn’t need a story. My Nana was deaf, and she and I would bond over her science books. I would flip through encyclopedias for hours and create my own stories in my head about the different animals or environments. When I started reading chapter books, I used to be able to consume hundreds of pages of fantasy and sci-fi in only a few days’ time. I would get lost in the oceans-deep worlds of Eragon or entries in the Halo extended universe. I loved how easily I could escape into a sleepy mountain village or an alien spaceship harnessing the energy of a star.

It wasn’t until my teen years that reading started getting difficult for me. There was pressure to move toward other hobbies. In high school, I loved all of the required readings—even when most everyone else loathed them. I remember how much The Great Gatsby floored me when I first read it. My first taste of literature felt like I was being inducted into adulthood, and I couldn’t wait. Even in high school, though, I always felt like the best reading was being withheld from me. I was so excited to go to college because of the access to books from all over the world. I went all-in on loving literature, and I forgot about the reading I used to do. In college, the pressure to conform stuck around, but instead of loathing all books, I felt like I was expected to compete with my peers in reading the most elevated text. I loved how important and powerful writers like Toni Morrison, Anton Chekhov, and Julia Alvarez felt to read that enjoyment fell on the backburner. I harbored such an elitist attitude that I felt like I was excluding people from reading rather than sharing reading with others.

It’s only recently that I’ve started to read again. My partner has been stressing that I need to rediscover what I loved about books and find a balance. Lately, I’ve been reading K.W. Jeter’s Star Wars books about Boba Fett and some short stories from a Jorge Luis Borges anthology. I’ve also started to read comics—books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus opened me up to how effective comics can be in blending a good story with communicative visuals. Nowadays, I most often admire when genre fiction and literature blend because they appeal to each others’ weaknesses. My favorite book is a hard question, but some books that I’ve been mulling over a lot lately are John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada.

Kyle J. Wente (he/him) graduated from the University of Tennessee, where he studied English and Creative Writing. He has served as Editor of Poetry for Sequoya Review in Chattanooga, TN. He loves nature, playing bass, and co-parenting his partner’s ten-year-old beagle, Marlowe Eugene.