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

[izhilzha]

Interesting. Maybe my experience is soooo different because I was homeschooled through high school--that's when I started getting interested in literary analysis, and on my own I went looking for books of essays (beginning with Tolkien's work and going on from there). So when I hit university as an English major, writing and reading that kind of analysis was AWESOME

[kalquessa]

I sort of missed out on high school, but my community college literature classes convinced me that being a Lit Major because I loved reading was the worst idea ever. The whole thing where instead of enjoying or experiencing a book you de-code it? Not fun.

[izhilzha]

The whole thing where instead of enjoying or experiencing a book you de-code it? Not fun.

See, this always throws me, because to me? These are one and the same, and in no way mutually exclusive. I analyze EVERYTHING (including my own work!) and it does not prevent me from enjoying and experiencing a book. (I adored Passage, but I was also going AT it in philosophical and structural terms even while I was reading.)

Truly, I think I am a freak! :-)

[kalquessa]

No, but see I like your kind of analysis, even if I'm no good at doing it myself. It's all about finding new layers and new reasons to like the story, which is for yay. The kind of analysis that turned me off in college was a lot less fun and kind of made me feel like I should have a Decoder Ring or something. Stories that are written with Decoder Rings in mind are no fun for me to read, since I don't have one, and I didn't like using the Decoder Ring on other stories because it never worked very well. And it's too much work for me, anyway. I just want to find out what happens, and if a greater meaning unfolds with the action, then yay! But I'm a lazy reader, so. *grin*

[yahtzee63]

I kind of don't agree with this article. Yes, you get handed the classics in school -- because it's school, and part of the point is getting introduced to things that a difficult/different/old, the stuff you wouldn't try on your own when you're 16. Do some people get turned off? Undoubtedly, but IMHO, anybody who gets really, seriously turned off by this probably wasn't an avid reader to begin with and might well never have become one under any circumstances. And sometimes people are introduced to the books that they'd never have attempted on their own but turn out to love. (War and Peace is one of my favorite books ever, and I put off reading that for decades because it gets held up as this Huge Undertaking. Had I taken a Russian Lit course, I might have found one of my favorite novels a lot earlier

[rj_anderson]

I didn't at all get the impression she was blaming the classics (that would be a bit hypocritical, seeing as she's an avowed Austen fan!), but rather criticizing the mindset that insists that only books of a certain narrow type are suitable reading for intelligent people -- and that truly "grown-up" reading is all about analysis and not about pleasure.

My understanding of the article was that she was blaming herself for buying into a snobbish mindset and denying herself reading as a pleasure for so long, not that she was arguing against introducing young people to classic literature at all. I think that like anything else, it's got to be a matter of balance.

Personally I adore Crime and Punishment, even though it is by no means an easy read in any sense. But I read it independently, of my own free choice, in my early twenties. Would I have been able to appreciate it if I'd had it forced upon me in high school at the age of fifteen or sixteen? I'm quite sure the answer would have been no.

[dichroic]

I'm vey glad I didn't get forced to read Austen in high school; I wasn't ready for her. I have no idea why; it certainly wasn't the language that was too difficult, or the plots. Maybe I just wasn't up to her delicate irony? All I know is that I tried P&P at 18, couldn't get anywhere with it, tried it again at about 23 or 24 and fell in love

[kalquessa]

I'm vey glad I didn't get forced to read Austen in high school; I wasn't ready for her.

Ditto to that. I tried very hard to read S&S as a teen and could. Not. Do it. I could read Shakespeare with ease, a knack that I seem to have lost since then, but I can read Austen with enthusiasm, now, so I guess it was an even trade.

[sartorias]

I wond4er how many of us shared similar experience?

[imaginarycircus]

I was always excited to read or reread books in school. I'd already read most of what we read in high school before we got to it in class--with the exceptions of Stoppard's plays and a lot of poetry. And I can't remember disliking any of it. I was a weird kid. When I was 10 I decided that I was going to read ALL of classic literature. I started with Dickens and worked my way through the English greats and then moved onto the Russians. My problem has always been finding interesting non-fiction to read. College helped a great deal with that and then I found really wonderful memoirs to read.

I know my experience is atypical though. I talk to people who groan when they remember being forced to read "Catcher in the Rye" or "The Sound and the Fury."