tough (read: challenging) for us. We hated him. His classes of less than an hour felt like forever for us. At times we wished he would not show up, for whatever reason: laid up in bed, sprained his ankle, whatever. He made us read, read, read—besides the Hardy Boys pocketbooks that we tried to outdo each other reading. Nothing wrong with Hardy Boys, he said, but he also made us read “strange” novels. He had a list of must-read (to us unheard-of ) novels such as J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye , Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment , Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth , Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha , Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory , Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea. (Many of us preferred Hemingway’s novels because they were short and his books were light to carry. Hemingway was also easy to read and he understands his young readers, so we thought.)
The secret to learning the English language, he once told me, is reading . Read every printed word that you come across.
One hour each day we were all required to read the novels he prescribed: we were not allowed to read just any novel. Parents and guardians were enjoined to sign on our daily record card to attest that we’d read the pages indicated. Each day, Mr. Cecilio would ask probing questions about what we had read. “What happened in this chapter?” “How?” “Why?” It scared me. You could not just make up stories. You could not fool around since you were also required to write a synopsis of the plot.
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