Let us now read about depressed white males with no lives!

[rj_anderson]

Shannon Hale has just written the most insightful and accurate description of what high school and college reading lists do to many passionate young readers that I've ever read. Her experience mirrors my own in many ways, on the high school side at least:

How Reader Girl Got Her Groove BackBut how about you lot on my f-list? Do you find that the

Comments

[pameladean]

I really didn't care how the books were discussed or dissected; the point was that we got to read them. School was my job, as a kid, and I got to read during it. The rest was irrelevant.

Until, that is, they started in on My Stuff. My high-school creative-writing class -- a really fine effort by a wonderful teacher -- had a textbook that was mostly there because all classes had to have one. Our teacher told us to read the stories and we'd discuss their techniques as they came up in critiquing students' stories. She said not to bother with the questions at the back. But there were three Ray Bradbury stories in that book, and I just had to see what a textbook writer asked about them. I don't at all recall the questions now, but I was very indignant about them at the time. These people had no idea what they were talking about, I felt; I'd been reading Bradbury since I was eight and could have done far better questions.

I always felt that this was an aberration, though -- educators were fine when they talked about regular literature, but they just had no clue about science fiction. I liked the vast majority of the books I read in school, the notable exceptions being Billy Budd and something or other by Turgenev. And yes, the books I liked included The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace.

P.