NEA: Americans are dumb because they don't read books

Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

The study also examined results from reading tests administered to adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.

"pleasure reading" rrrroWWWWWrrr

why come americans reads books?

Dude, you have to go to school to learn to hate reading, is what I'm saying. It's no coincidence that reading-for-enjoyment rates flatten in middle school and drop thereafter.

Uh parents are perfectly capable of teaching disrespect for books on their own.

It does kind of ruin a book to spend three months writing down all its vocabulary words and reading the entire damn thing out loud and taking an insulting and pointless weekly quiz on it.

What distracts Tom Sawyer's church?

a. A dog
b. A cat
c. A rat
d. A bat

Injun Joe: hot or not? Please explain why________________________

hahah

I can't even count how many books I read a year, but then I was raised by a librarian and a history teacher

Apparently a librarian and a history teacher who didn't teach you how to count.

I was raised by two people who read.

hey did you guys hear that n/a hates me? its true!

Although I agree, having to read a book for school can suck the life out of it. It depends on the teacher of course.

Yeah, i was raised by two english teachers, who, despite their conservative ways, read a lot of progressive education books in the 70s & early 80s and decided that their eldest son would be the best receipient of all these new techniques.

So i got books shoved down me throat at a young age. This also worked for my sister, but not too much for my brother.

Why would kids wants to read books these days? For super imaginative stuff, video games, movies, and TV shows exist in high, complex forms, and for everyone else, the pace of life is too fast to spend an hour or two a day working on a novel. It's a rare nerd that enjoys literature for its own sake.

Dude, you have to go to school to learn to hate reading, is what I'm saying.

otm. except for the folks who wouldn't learn to read at all if not for school--it's better to learn and hate than not learn at all

We had mandatory reading time in middle school--I wonder, do they still do that?

For super imaginative stuff, video games, movies, and TV shows exist in high, complex forms

this is debatable

i exist in high forms when i play video games

(also note the article does not specifically reference novels - it refers to ANY book read for pleasure)

I have been wondering lately whether there's something to that new media theory. I teach 18 year olds right now and they are very sensitive readers of film and terrible readers of language. purely anecdotal evidence, but...

Well, a kid could play Elder Scrolls and get lost for hours. Back in the day, you'd read Tolkien for that kinda crap. When I was a kid the best we had was Final Fantasy 1 where characters could only have, at most, four letters in their name. HURR JEFF BART POOP

Well, a kid could play Elder Scrolls read Moby Dick and get lost for hours.

I was brought up by a guy who roofed houses (failed accountant) and a mom with a high school degree, but they read books to me all the time, so I read books all the time. The end.

I thin a thing is too, kids don't get props for what they do read. My youngest bro would only read video game mags (whatevs), and Calvin & Hobbes. My mom was all upset but I was like "do you know how complex the vocabs aer in C&H etc etc comics can be good reading too rant" and she was like, "huh, okay." And now he reads other stuff. And one of the best-read men I know said he didn't read anything but D&D manuals until he was 17, and then he read a D&D novel (eight times!). After rereading that one D&D novel, which he thought was probably the only good book in the world, he read other D&D novels and then other novels, lit, and pop-sci books. So it can take time and happen in a number of ways.

OTOH that stuff abt reading levels is sad for real and I do get kind of astonished at the very low level of reading & writing skills that my adult basic education ...tutees...? Well I tutor them and they need a lot of help for real.

I really don't see an elementary school kid being able to read Moby Dick, but there's the kind of "big challenging impossible" fear-vibe surrounding that book normally associated with calculus.

fuck fear.

funnily, the way the limited language skills tend to play out in my classes, humanities classes, is that the kids assume language is transparent but that image necessitates interpretation/analysis/etc.

xxp Maybe because the first, like, 150 pages are incredibly boring? I tried it, and I read slightly less than a book a day from 5th to 12th grade, but I didn't get anywhere with Moby Dick.

I agree but still I remembering trying to read Great Expectations when I was in fourth grade and was like "BOLTING? TAR WATER? What the hell does any of this MEAN?"

xxp

yeah I think the importance of reading has more to do with understanding language and learning to deal with it and analyze it and tease out all the information embedded in it.

xxx-post

Also hated Madame Bovary, Cannery Row, and The Winter of our Discontent, all of which were to be found on various English class shelves, and none of which I finished.

Forget The Turn of the Screw, that was "literary" in my mind and therefore as dry and bloodless as text could be.

The way to read Moby Dick is to read until Ahab shows up (which is like 150-220 pages in) and if you don't want to keep reading that's fine. It's more of a post-high school book anyway, I think. Anyway, that was the first book that popped into my head. Lord knows, i hated The Scarlet Letter when I read it in high school, but I loved it when I re-read it in college.

Steinbeck is pretty overrated! There's also soooo many books assigned in high school that aren't really good high school books, like Great Expectations.

in my experience, i kind of felt that certain books were pushed on us too early for us to be able to appreciate or understand them in any significant way. most of the novels taught, the "great books tradition" stuff, should probably be taught in college instead

yep.

oh I forgot to add that I taught this same class a couple of years ago and there were good readers then. obviously, the idea that something has changed in two years is ridiculous and again, anecdotal evidence (lol english majors), but still. the kids this time around are certainly as smart if not smarter than the ones I taught before. they just don't get reading.

there probably needs to be more research done on what age-appropriate reading actually is

I loved Great Expectations when I read it in HS! Olivia Havisham is like the funniest character ever. "Hyar Pip wave these flags about! This cake reminds me that all I have for men is a frozen hatred!"

Whatever the kid goddamn wants to read is age-approrpiate for the most part. I think.

i don't really know about this notion of "age-appropriate" reading. i think Moby Dick is unassimilable to a syllabus, though.

xpost Abbott otm

we had to read john gunther's death be not proud in grade seven. bummer.

(also criticism of English teachers makes me defensive lol)

yeah well that's the other thing--some books click with people, (i.e. I can't stand Steinbeck or Henry James, but I accept that they are good writers, etc.) and some don't.

Mr. Que you're like the anti-me (step off Steinbeck)!

Abbott otm as usual

Dickens? Are you crazy? Also "literary", that is: written by dead people for dead people and over-examined by high school students ever since. Not that we were ever assigned anything longer than Of Mice and Men. Frankly I preferred "The Faerie Queen".

I wholly agree, Abbots -- I disdained what I saw as "classics" but I got hooked on plenty of other retardedly long books that were really too adult for me, so it clearly wasn't an age or comprehension thing.

age-appropriate reading is going to be incredibly subjective -- i'm arguing for more sensitivity to this stuff, not less! all i'm saying is that there are certain books that are often regarded as classics, etc., that are pushed onto kids in grade school/high school, and kids aren't really able to appreciate because it's probably more appropriate for older kids.

xposts

it's okay though! it's good to like different writers. like when i don't click with a writer, i feel like it's my fault more than the writers fault. also i need to read East of Eden b/c people who like JS tell me it's boss.

but that's okay! The Great Gatsby is a book I didn't properly appreciate until I hit adulthood, but it's not like it was bad for me to read it in high school.

xposts to Mark

yeah sometimes you're just not going to click with a book. but then you pick it up two years later and--BAM--it rocks your world

We read some Shakespeare too but all I really remember is people being totally bamboozled by the accented "-ed" verb ending, and everyone hilariously guffawing at the phrase "come on my right hand" in Julius Caesar. I hated school.

I find the idea that being required to read books written before 1950 is too hard on students kind of ridiculous. I experienced calculus as an intolerable imposition in high school, but tough shit, you kno?

reading a book and playing morrowind are totally different ffs! yes you're 'lost in an imaginary world' etc but the sensible experience of both have 0 common features beyond that.

i think the important thing is to get kids habituated & acclimated to the process of reading. the content is well nigh irrelevant. this would happen easiest if -- check this out! -- they read shit that was interesting and enjoyable to them at the time. nobody frowned on hardy boys books and all that, back in the day.

i lived briefly with a couple with an 11 year old, and got a cut off my rent by helping the kid with his homework every now and again. at one point, the mom got a bee in her bonnet that the kid wasn't reading enough, and stuck him with the mccullough history of the american revolution! i grabbed douglas adams off my shelf and gave him that instead. adults who haven't read shit get told their kids aren't reading shit either and then freak out, reaching for the biggest, heaviest tome they can get their hands on saying, "u r a disappointment 2 me." kind of the wrong attitude.

haha maybe i don't know what i'm talking about. i have zero experience in children's education outside of my own going-to-school experiences. i just remember a lot of books that i think i would have enjoyed a lot more, or appreciated or comprehended, or whatever, had i read them in a college course or something.

yeah laurel has it nailed down: I hated school, too.

xpost to horseshoe

God, I will rant on this for no reason here. Yeah I was a good fucking reader all my life, but I've always liked a wide range of things and in seventh grade I really liked trivia books and collections of funny essays (like Dave Barry and Patrick McManus). In my seventh grade reading class, we sat around and just read 'whatever book we wanted' for half the class. My family had just got a bunch of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader books, which were abt 500-700 pages long of 1-3 page articles, quotes or trivia. I thought they were the best!

My teacher, in front of the whole class, told me "Abbie, you need to start reading books that are your age level: ones that have chapters, like a novel." God I was pissed but I agreed so I started reading longer shit of the same bent like Dave Barry Does Japan, for example.

When she signed my yearbook he last day, she wrote "I'm glad I could help you read real books." I am still pissed about that! Seriously, I think about writing her an angry letter about twice a year! I read Wuthering Heights in fifth grade, I think it's okay if I read dumb articles about The Beatles or how soap is made or whatever! Fuck her.

okay yes, teachers who encourage baseless snobbery about books published before 1950 are kind of morons. I promise I don't do that, guys!

ughhhhh i hated wuthering heights xpost

haha i love all this books that everyone hates

horseshoe you sound like a sane and kind teacher

I loved Wuthering Heights, but I somehow thought it was a sequel to The Secret Garden.

Since the curricula of reading at public (and maybe private) schools across the U.S. seems fairly similar, but the range of reading comprehension/enjoyment varies widely from kid to kid, it seems like maybe the role of the parents in encouraging reading is way more important than that of schools. Though I guess a good teacher could counteract the attitudes of a nonreading parent.

Abbots, I love you.

thanks, Abbott! teachers are horribly insecure about precisely this stuff.

ha I remember The Secret Garden as the first novel I ever read and I had a totally anthropological fascination with it. The moors! That crazy Yorkshire dialect! porridge + treacle! what the fuck is treacle?? probably related to why I love Wuthering Heights--it never occurred to me.

I read The Secret Garden and then I read that same author's adult novels, which had been out of print since like 1932 or something but kept cropping up at antique stores for $2 with no dust jackets. Wuthering Heights was entirely too much like something my teachers would have WANTED me to read.

i was really stubborn about reading, all the way through college. if i didn't like something, i didn't finish it, and i was a (very happy) English major. i don't feel like i'm missing out on anything by having skipped most of Adam Bede

Since the curricula of reading at public (and maybe private) schools across the U.S. seems fairly similar, but the range of reading comprehension/enjoyment varies widely from kid to kid, it seems like maybe the role of the parents in encouraging reading is way more important than that of schools.

this seems pretty reasonable

xp My favorite is The Shuttle.

xxp I was an English major too, and I barely read anything they assigned on college. At some point I realized the library had a whole CHILDREN'S SECTION for the El-Ed department that no one was using...

the entire concept of "reading for pleasure" is going to be totally alien to kids who have only encountered books in a schoolwork-based context. i hate to blame shit on parents, most of whom in all likelihood dont have the time (or maybe even the resources or desire) to instill a love a reading in their children through reading aloud, buying books, being a pleasure-reading role model, but if what we want to is have kids reading for non-work-related reasons, teachers can only do so much.

I saw thte article this morning but didn't read it (ha!)

What about the influence of parents? It's very likely that I would've been an omnivore even if my parents had been troglodytes, but when I was a kid watching them read (Mom and her Harlequin romarnces, Dad with his Nat'l Geographic and history) did a lot to demystify it.

im mostly only speaking from experience, but if my parents hadnt been wannabe-academic intellectual snobs/hippies who didnt have cable and didnt let me play video games, i doubt i would enjoy reading that much either

i actually think the single most important event in my life was that my mom taught me to read (well) before i went to school

guys how do I help my students read Shakespeare as well as they read Hitchcock?

Working at a small bookshop for three years did much to educate me on how Americans view reading. At the Gap or something they just saunter in; at my store they would always pause nervously, look around, and head straight for the counter. You can see in their expressions that they're still haunted by Mrs. Bixby telling them in sixth grade that books and broccoli were healthy.

max you're basically 18 right? HELP ME

Judging from what we actually read in middle school, kids can totally get away with long books. Hell, Stephen King & JK Rowling, they eat it up.

How would you reorganize a cirriculum to actually get kids to read? Would you still have the "To Kill a Mockinbird"-type works on there?

horseshoe, go back in time and teach them how to read at age 3 or 4, and then encourage them to continue to see reading as a pleasure activity rather than a work activity

there is a hyphen in Moby-Dick

(I haven't read it either)

i listened to the led zep version, tho

in our house, reading was just a normal thing to do. i don't really remember my parents actively encouraging me to read, i just remember going to the library at least once a week and picking out stuff that looked fun. my parents read a lot, not like superintellectual tomes or anything, but i'm sure just being around them reading a lot and being made to feel like reading was something you do probably lead to me reading regularly.

Working at a small bookshop for three years did much to educate me on how Americans view reading. At the Gap or something they just saunter in; at my store they would always pause nervously, look around, and head straight for the counter.

I worked in a bookstore, too. This never ever ever happened. Maybe you worked in an adult books shop?

ie, the same stuff everyone else is saying

xpost

Harold Bloom, of all people, offers the best advice: read indiscriminately, oblivious to the book's "importance." Skip the parts you don't like.

honestly though, the english profs that seem to get the economics and science majors reading are the ones that seem the most passionate about the books in the class--from what i can tell, the best way to get students interested is to show them that there is something fascinating in the book; that its not just about reading till the end. as for how to get them to read WELL? fuck, i dont know.

I took to reading young for two reasons: 1) my parents taught me to read before I got to school, and 2) comic books

in our house, reading was just a normal thing to do.

This is the key, I think, to this whole thread and the whole report, too.

I worked in a bookstore, too. This never ever ever happened. Maybe you worked in an adult books shop?

You beat me to the joke.

Well, I live in Miami. We've only one independent bookstore. Our most popular items were The Alchemist and travel guides.

read indiscriminately, oblivious to the book's "importance."

yea this is OTM. kind of what abbott was saying upthread, too.

(altho my parents didn't understand me and my brothers' fascination with comic books and thought they were stupid, they were cognizant of how they expanded our vocabulary and led us to enjoy reading in general)

x-post

for me it was 1) could read before I got to school, and 2) newspapers.

also a key and important thing to remember about reading is: it's okay to not finish reading a book. if a book is boring the shit out of you even if you really want to finish it, you should just put it down.

my parents taught me to read before I got to school

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
i think this is sosososososososososo important. id venture to guess that a huge portion of people who read for pleasure were reading well before they got to school.

The wall across from my bed has scuff marks from all the unfinished terrible books I've thrown against it

(xpost)

it's okay to not finish reading a book. if a book is boring the shit out of you even if you really want to finish it, you should just put it down.

yes!!!

I didn't learn to read until after kindergarten, I think I was "behind"! I wanted, oh how I wanted, my own access to stories, though, instead of having to wait for someone else to be the key. Read to your kids, people.

Wait, lemme get this straight. Laurel =

(a) likes The Faerie Queene, which combines bad fantasy + skeezy morality play in a way reminiscent of modern right-wing crazies writing thrillers about the godless End Days of America, except those crazies would probably come up with Evil Woman characters who were at least mildly hot or compelling

(b) dislikes Madame Bovary, which is about this awesome chick who shops for clothes too much and sleeps around

my mom thinks that my generation's inability to read for pleasure has to do with "stimulation" i.e. we're so used to being passive receptacles of meaning thru TV and movies and video games (and even school for that matter) that we dont know how to be active creators of meaning in books (and really in "texts" in general, incl. movies). she also thinks this is the cause of ADD--kids no longer know how to be without some kind of outside stimulation.

of course most adolescent boys have no problems stimulating themselves

but viewership of TV and movies is active!

Everyone in the book was at least vaguely contemptible, Nabisco. MB herself not least for being bored, and boring. The world is so full of a number of things, etc.

my parents taught me to read before I got to school

Hahahaha for a moment I thought you meant like "after I got dressed for school, my parents taught me to read during breakfast and on the school bus before class started.

ya well this isnt my theory but i think my moms sense is that when gen. y (or whatever group of strawmen shes after) is watching a movie or TV (or video games, which she especially hates), theyre NOT active--theyre relating to it in a passive way; theres no attempt to read meaning into those texts. she also hates books on tape because she thinks thats making "reading" into a passive experience.

everyone in LIFE is at least vaguely contemptible, laurel.
i have a much easier time accepting unsympathetic protagonists in novels than i do in television or movies. xpp

Dude nabisco MB has not NEAR enough "giant snake women who represent the Nicene Creed dissenters gets her head bloodily cut off and all the tiny phallic snake-women jump out and try to seduce the guy so more KILLING happens and then a beautiful horse comes out of nowhere."

Maybe that is why I like Castle of Otranto so much: it doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense.

xxp to myself: i mean really i think (for my mom) this has to do with the way time relates to our "reading"--we have no real control over the speed at which we take in movies or tv shows; the "author" (or corporation) that creates these texts controls our interaction with them and our reading is always going to be mediated by those factors. whereas with books, we have a great deal of control (obviously not total) over our engagement with them.

i dont necessarily agree with her but i also dont necessarily disagree with her. TV is just "easier" than reading a book.

Maybe the novel as a form is just not pink-bubble friendly.

i kind of agree with your mom. tv more so than movies.

I'm with nabisco on Emma B... as she is incarnated in "The Kugelmass Episode" by Woody Allen too. Wasn't she mostly surrounded by boring French aristos? I'd rather be on the Pequod.

we have no real control over the speed at which we take in movies or tv shows

obv digital media announces itself HERE, for better or worse.

MB has shopping, more shopping, even more shopping, and sex in the back seats of cars (or carriages, anyway): should be required reading for high-school girls, along with an explanation at the end that says "don't worry, you can sleep with multiple dudes and not have to die over it, it's all good."

They should make a Clueless-style version, maybe then I could get into it.

And I want to make a movie of Castle of Otranto bcz it looks like no one on heaven or earth will...perfect thing for Gaiman to do after Beowulf.

nabisco i have a memory of you repping for madame bovary on another thread

Madame Bovary's great – you people are cracked. And it's a quick read!

Mebbe will try, still have other things to read and this does not mean I don't want its Clueless incarnation.

Has anyone ever had to read PAMELA???????????? FUCK.

if this is going to become a taste thread, then yeah. Madame Bovary is one of the best things in the world.

I think the other recent thread had me repping MB over Sentimental Education, maybe? Though I admit Sentimental Education is much, you know, "better."

keep it up dude, bovary is pretty awes

Anyway I don't know why people don't read books, which is problematic, as it leads to the greater question of why I'd bother writing them.

i prefer Shamela.

Pamela is a creepy fucking book.

nobody likes Sentimental Education.

my least favorite required reading in high school was "catcher in the rye." go figure.

making people read Catcher in high school is crazypants

Hahaha FOR REAL.

xxxp

Jesus that book is the only thing that made Pamela worthwhile, getting to laff ass off at Richardson

i remember most people in my sophomore english class hated "catcher in the rye". i liked it though.

Does anyone remember that show Working, with grown-up actor of Kevin Arnold? Here comes a poorly-recalled quote!

BOSS: My mom was so terrified that I'd read Catcher in the Rye that she burnt our house down.
KEVIN ARNOLD: What? Why?
BOSS: It had a copy of Catcher in the Rye in it.

Either Drew or John D -- I think John D -- was really backing Sentimental Education on the other thread! (Curiously enough, a novel about a GUY who keeps shopping too much; it's just that all the political bits are way too opaque for me. I sense that people's affiliations are incredibly significant and sometimes even funny, but hell if I know anything about the background.)

I get he title stuck in my head to the tune of Beach Boys' "Transcendental Meditation" alla time.

Rewrite Woody Allen's "why is life worth living?" speech from "Manhattan"

ilu Abbott!

I think if you're ever going to like Catcher you have to read it in secret while you're still ASPIRING to the narrator's age. When you're ALREADY that age, you're too suspicious/contemptuous of the establishment that's making you read the book.

nobody likes Sentimental Education.

XPOST MAX!

everyone in LIFE is at least vaguely contemptible, laurel.

Jesus, ian, at what age did you come to this conclusion? 12?

xp Another one I never finished.

"A Simple Heart" >>>> Sentimental Education

I think I dislike novels categorically, they're so about examining inner life, and being bound up w/ self, and believing oneself individual/important. I prefer adventure and fairy stories, in which the characters are really stand-ins for all men and women, and what's emphasized is the universality of the experience or knowledge. There's a robustness to storytelling that doesn't bother to explain too much, it leaves the listener to make what he or she wills of it. Abbotts, I think you're grabbing much of this already with your love for Otranto!

I took a high school class in which we read everything Salinger wrote except "Catcher in the Rye."
Pretty great

I was raised by a reading teacher who passively hated reading. She had no effect upon me but was a good example of the standard American high school teacher -- someone chosen to teach a subject based upon an inverse relation with their competence in it.

>>math and science is dipping

Oh the tragedy. Yeah, school life was just overflowing with the American love of science and math in 1974. Especially in all the required shop, vocational technical and PE courses.

I wish I had the motivation to read more classics. Since I graduated from college nearly eight years ago, I can't think of a single book I've read from before 1930. And since my English major was restricted to British and American authors, I've never even read anything by Flaubert or, for that matter, Dostoevsky. Hell, I was such a committed Americanist in college, I managed to avoid reading any British writers between Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde: I read Wuthering Heights on my own but haven't touched a page of Jane Austen. This is only sad because I don't see this changing anytime soon.

it's not necessarily sad at all, John!

yeah fuck everything before 1900 (except Moby-Dick).

I think I dislike novels categorically, they're so about examining inner life, and being bound up w/ self, and believing oneself individual/important. I prefer adventure and fairy stories, in which the characters are really stand-ins for all men and women, and what's emphasized is the universality of the experience or knowledge.

I'm not sure that's an adequate summary of novels (by which I assume you mean "literary novels") -- but your description of "adventure and fairy stories" goes a long way toward explaining why I do, in large part, prefer "literary" fiction to those other kinds of stories. My least favorite kinds of novels are allegories.

I think I dislike novels categorically, they're so about examining inner life, and being bound up w/ self, and believing oneself individual/important

Not necessarily. Try Balzac.

(Although, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of literary fiction that can be classified as allegorical, too: stuff like Blindness or The Life of Pi or whatever.)

yeah fuck everything before 1900

yarbles, I've read relatively few post-1960 novels. Not exotic enough.

No one's taken the tack yet that Americans don't read books bcuz they're dumb?

I really want to respond to that line, but I'm still kind of wrapping around it and thinking it over -- my head keeps going back to the "hysterical realism" thing and deciding Laurel is the antidote to James Wood!

My fave "inner-life exploration" is in The Demolished Man, which was literal going inside's someone mind and was all like computer psychedelic beat-lite. Fucking awesome!

my head keeps going back to the "hysterical realism" thing and deciding Laurel is the antidote to James Wood!

lol

D&D books, comics, and Final Fantasy I were great for encouraging my love of reading and & vocab :>

Well this is a great picture of Wood, or anyway stuff behind Wood

http://media.thecrimson.com/10-24-2003/pic-4028.jpg

lolz Nas and Jigga

I'm trying to grok "hysterical realism" but I haven't read any of the authors being cited as examples....

Damn, lots of great stories here.

Loved reading/being taught to read early on. Mom tells the story that she stopped reading stories to me in bed when she was reading Paddington books to me, skipping over parts she thought I might not understand, and I protested and asked her to go back to the parts she was leaving out. Apparently I was three or something. After that the deluge.

There's wide gaps, though, in terms of what I 'should' have read, whether it means via a high school/canonical approach or in wider senses -- that or I've touched on certain writers only just so much and felt little need to explore further. Ane here I am with a grad degree in English lit! At the same time there's only so much time in the day/week/year/lifetime, and what I've noticed is that more of my reading tends far more towards nonfiction rather than fiction, which I'm fine with. I've noticed I'm drawn more towards the obscurer one-offs and cult classics the more time goes on -- when I think of writers during the 1920s, for instance, I'm thinking of James Branch Cabell more than James Joyce and Fitzgerald, say.

It's funny, Laurel's comment about examining the inner life etc., since generally speaking I really have no patience at all with those kinds of books and stories now, and yet that's a key part of my 'serious' NaNoWriMo efforts. But what I'm trying to do with them is actually talk about something that interests me rather than just a bunch of boring doofs fretting over their mortgages and midlife crises (or dumb teenage angst or whatever). Big surprise I like genre fiction so much as a result! As it is this year's effort for me is a combination of historical fiction, family history and psychological collapse, but the latter is driven by elements I'm synthesizing from everywhere from the 'mysteries' novels of the nineteenth century to Tanith Lee's more baroque horror fiction, rather than just trying to be a dull slice of life. It might not work in the slightest but it's been damn good fun to write (especially since none of the characters are remotely close to being a hero).

xp Ha, I remember when that term was coined, and I was like, "OMG all my favorite novels!"

See, I think the thing is that

(a) I disagree with Laurel about the interiority of novels so strongly that I'm not even sure how to start talking about -- so much of the history of the novel is explicitly social, with "interiority" itself only a recent Modernist invention, and one that I don't think has transformed the point or role of novels nearly as much as we like to pretent -- but then also

(b) beyond that, I'm somehow skeptical about the very idea of the "interiority" of novels, because it's inevitably the interiority of other people -- the author AND the character -- and that makes the novel some kind of meeting point that is anything but limited to interiors. It's almost like saying love and romance are strictly interior and limited and solipsistic -- the whole point is the interaction and communion of different people's solipsism, the moment where it's not just individual heads interacting socially in some kind of defined system, but rather getting inside one another, trying on one another's heads.

But then it feels like what Laurel's getting at is maybe less about "interiority" and maybe more about specificity -- the novel's aspiration to detail versus the fairy tale's trading on archetypes and roles and a kind of mythological broadness. (Except plenty of novels trade on this, too; another problem here is that "The Novel" is a very broad topic to talk about in any kind of essentialist way!)

(P.S. This is why I have been slow about writing lately, because I hate everyone k thx bye)

I like the idea of conflicting solipsisms, that's pretty much a good chunk of the novel I'm working out! Leave it to N. to sum it up better than I.

james wood makes me angry. i'm not, like, exhaustively familiar with his work, but i have read i've really disliked. he's incredibly eccentric, and not in a way that i admire.

Has anyone ever had to read PAMELA???????????? FUCK.

hahahaha. i HATED it first. i have to say, though, that reading it together with shamela ended up being interesting.

after devouring Gordon Korman as a YA and reading Tom Wolfe barely into my teens, most novels that followed to this day really weren't sufficiently fun

also the NEA doesn't seem to understand science

I'm borrowing the idea of "the novel" from Childhood Regained, which is essentially a book about story-telling and pubbed in 1985, apparently (altho I'd have guessed older by the cover, very cunning). So anyway ymmv and I haven't even finished the book yet.

so much of the history of the novel is explicitly social, with "interiority" itself only a recent Modernist invention

really, really good point.

the characters are really stand-ins for all men and women, and what's emphasized is the universality of the experience or knowledge

this is basically the definition of most of the pre-20th century novels that made up the bulk of my college courses, actually.

I don't know, I think interiority is at stake in the 19th century English novel, too. I understand that generalization of the novel. though interiority and the social are always fighting for space, even if the scale of the social is pretty small. Alex Woloch has a book about this.

Also, isn't a good chunk of Crime and Punishment interior? (Been years since I've read it.)

The best point of difference I can come up with, which might handily explain different tastes from me / Laurel:

"Storytelling," fairy tales, etc. = stories about and BY an entire vast culture, mostly; they don't have a detailed personal worldview, and so what you get out of them is deep (so deep it's almost mystical) stuff about the wellspring basic notions of the whole culture around you

Novels = obviously there's an auteur here, and so you get stories about and BY a specific mind, with an aspiration toward detail -- (NB, I know there are serious post-structuralist breakdowns to this but can we bracket them for a sec?) -- which stand a chance of actually communicating between solipsisms in the way I'm talking about above

In other words, the "storytelling" is this communal/societal thing that we all kind of gather around, contribute to, fashion ourselves information from, like having a conversation in a bar about what everyone means when they say "love"; one of many things I like about certain novels is how they offer the chance (or anyway the illusion) of cutting out some of the intervening society and peering one-to-one into someone else's view, which is maybe more like actually BEING in love with someone in particular, and finding out what they mean by it in practice

(I love the novel; it's a chore to get myself to read anything else. But I do get Laurel's schema.)

the odyssey vs. ulysses, right?

(P.S. that does not involve taking someone's character's narration at face value as a "worldview"; it also involves higher-level stuff about what kind of world they choose to paint or imagine here, and feeling out stuff like what they dream of the world being like, what they think the world might actually be like, what they seem to think is cool, what has priority in their vision of the world -- I think I'm just circling around the relationship metaphor, because novels work for me in very much the same sense, and I suppose from here on I will refer to Calvino as my ex)

Calvino and I have a love that just goes and goes and goes.

Just having fun here but:

"Storytelling," fairy tales, etc. = stories about and BY an entire vast culture, mostly; they don't have a detailed personal worldview, and so what you get out of them is deep (so deep it's almost mystical) stuff about the wellspring basic notions of the whole culture around you

Third person POV^^^

Novels = obviously there's an auteur here, and so you get stories about and BY a specific mind, with an aspiration toward detail -- (NB, I know there are serious post-structuralist breakdowns to this but can we bracket them for a sec?) -- which stand a chance of actually communicating between solipsisms in the way I'm talking about above

First person POV^^^

Ha, yes -- you can kind of take it that the mythological mode actually reaches a non-aritifical Platonic 3rd-person omniscient! Or at least the 3rd person narrator is something like "the entirety of your culture and everyone who has ever told this story and the psychology of the whole world this comes from"

cool. that was the only way i could understand that, it seemed a little over my head.

http://pages.prodigy.net/mike_p_smith/hbpimages/dumbledore.jpg

so much of the history of the novel is explicitly social, with "interiority" itself only a recent Modernist invention

I don't agree with this. Read Augustine's Confessions---Augustine pretty much invents the interior novel (though it's autobiographical). He tells us about his inner life in detail (and it's fantastic). It's from the late 4th century. What's a modernist invention is the idea that our language is shaped by our "interior" sensibility. Augustine, and most people before the 20C, wouldn't have even understood what that could mean. For them, language was a feature of the social world. With the modernists it becomes something to mess with in its own right, and this means shaping it as we want to, using it to represent our particular individual sensibility.

interesting that a lot of 'readers' came from families that read a lot. not the case in my family: i had to emotionally blackmail my parents and older bro into reading to me every night (they really fucking hated it, but i would yell until someone came and read to me). my dad reads car/golf mags & the paper, and my mum likes romance novels.

definitely noticed that since i started becoming an interwebs fiend a year ago, my attention span for reading has dropped way off.

ugh, same.

ruby, have you read/what do you think of geoff cochrane? i am a bit obsessed with him.

name doesn't sound familiar - have you read any eliot pearlman? '7 types of ambiguity' is maybe one of the best books i've had to read at uni.

The main reason I learned to love reading was that, any time I was grounded during middle or high school, the only thing I was allowed to do was read books - no TV, radio, or video games. Man, did I read some books.

I mean, without my already existing enjoyment of reading, it prolly wouldn't have blossomed the way that it did, but those three or four years were instrumental for my existence as a reader.

oooo... GC is a wellingtonian! but i've never heard of him :(

xpost estela

'7 types of ambiguity' is maybe one of the best books i've had to read at uni.

This has been sitting on my bookshelf for two years now. I was intrigued by the first few pages I read, but the thing's in hardcover and is like 800 pages, so I've been reluctant to lug it on the train (where I do most of my reading).

My parents grounded me once, and were so mad at me they were determined to crush every possible source of enjoyment. They said couldn't read, even the BIBLE. the last bit = weird!

Maybe kids don't want to learn to read bcz their parents will soon force them into reading that grandest of soporifics: THE SCRIPTURES.

all that Biblical sex n violence = fun

that Onan, naughty naughty!

xp to Abbotts: Yeah, my parents never EVER sent me to my room.

Laurel might try Henry James' The Awkward Age, in which the young heroine's crises are delineated almost entirely in dialogue, like a play. Not a complete success -- and rather maddening -- but its calculated brittleness says a lot more about how English high society regarded nubile femininity than any interior monologue.

xpost to jaymc: it's long but doesn't feel that way once you get into it. but it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea. also gets kinda hard to keep track of the timeline. i also liked it because altho it's set in melbourne, and is grounded in australian social/political life, the themes are universal. most of the time, while reading it, i would forget it was even australian.

i'm not a huge fan of many of the classics (total sucker for austen and the brontes tho), but 'the turn of the screw' is a freakin' psychological masterpiece: best use of dashes and ellipses EVAH.

I don't mind that it's long -- it's just so heavy! I just need to read it at home rather than on my commute. Same goes with the Joan Didion omnibus I bought a few months ago.

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/modernletters/bnzp/2004/cochrane.htm

some cochrane

i'll swap you my paperback for your hardcover!

xpost

I'm in the same sitch jaymc, there's lots of books I'd like to read but I can't fit them in my bookbag or carry it around all day and on th bus.

I dread the next three and a half months of my life - I am about to begin studying for the bar exam yet again, and any time spent reading MUST be spent studying if I am beat that nasty, horrible, awful thing.

Alas, no leisure reading for this boy for a few months. Pooh. The holiday season is usually my favorite time to do just that.

Ah well. Here's to a vacation in early March, and OH! The books I'll read.

"I'm glad I could help you read real books."

Yikes, what an idiot.

In PERMANENT INK no less. Fuck you Mrs. Heier.

'seven types of ambiguity' is not 800 pages long. it isn't about novels, as this thread is -- bizarrely, since this is surely about "reading", which doesn't even imply books, let alone stories.

All right, some quotes from Childhood Regained, maybe you all will have better context for them than I do, with your fancy edumacations!

[By the conventions of novels] "...I mean those conventions which arise from establishment of the bourgeoisie's ascendancy and have their best plot manifestations in Flaubert's or Stendhal's novels: adultery, economic prosperity, adaptation or lack of adaptation to the social milieu, religious problems, the triumph of honorableness and hard work or the defeat of both by injustice, psychological confusions of every stripe, the marks left by poverty or vicious corruption, and so on."

Savater labels these "secondary conventions", coming after the "primary conventions" of "stories" or themes judged appropriate for children (which tells you something about what was considered appropriate for children, lemme tell you -- Kidnaped is some ruthless shit), such as "...the accidents of the chase, the energy called up by danger, physical intrepidity, loyalty to friends or to obligations incurred; protection of the weak; a curiosity that is willing to risk life to find satisfaction; a taste for the marvelous and a fascination with the terrible" and so on.

Interiority has always been a part of the novel, both modern and ancient. Just read Lucius Apuleius - the Golden Ass (he was a contemporary of St. Augustine).

"(Walter) Benjamin writes, 'An orientation toward practical interests is characteristic of many born storytellers...All this points covertly to the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, some practical advice; in a third, a proverb or maxim. In every case, the storyteller is someone who has counsel for his readers.' Practical interest and wise counsel form part of the hopeful nature of storytelling. The storyteller includes his hearer in the story itself, as a future protagonist, and warns him of dangers which by the mere fact of listening he has already begun to experience. The best part of an adventure tale is to sense it as a prologue and the initiation of our own adventure. Hence the interest in practical details, whose usefulness may become essential for us."

Most of the people I work with write at about the remedial 6th-grade level.

"In the novel, the book is a hiding place and the scene of a withdrawal; a solitude has sought to nestle in the inviolable silence of its pages. The contents of a novel cannot really be told by voice...the novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others."

Am I boring everyone yet?

That's quite eloquent bullshit.

Interiority has always been a part of the novel, both modern and ancient. Just read Lucius Apuleius - the Golden Ass (he was a contemporary of St. Augustine).

Also, the popularity (especially with women) of epistolary novels and consequent denigration of fiction in the 17th and 18th centuries is often tied to the access to interiority supposedly granted by the novel.

Wow, that's poorly phrased (and sort of dealt-with upthread). I guess I shouldn't try to rehash half-remembered literary history while I'm high.

I'm resistant to so many of the assumptions in that! I mean, if we're contrasting the novel versus things like oral traditions and mythology and fairy tale, some of the examples given of Flaubert-era novel "conventions" fall immediately apart: there is more concern with "economic prosperity" in fairy tales that begin with young men off to seek their fortunes, and "the triumph of honorableness and hard work or the defeat of both by injustice" hardly seem absent either. The difference is always detail: the novel usually wants to ground those things in the specifics of Life as Lived Now, which is why Flaubert gives you accountings of how much the furniture cost, rather than falling back on the archetypes of money. (And even that's a sloppy generalization: plenty of novels deal in archetype as much as fairytale -- insert Calvino here! -- and plenty of storytelling verges on getting nitty-gritty about such topics -- insert Golden Goose.)

So Savater labels these "secondary conventions", which seems fine -- they're the details the "primary conventions" play out in, which is possibly why novels are often 300 pages long and fairy tales are around 8. That doesn't exactly seem like it should be a derogatory argument, especially when everything listed as a "primary convention" is still all over literary fiction: "the energy called up by danger" and "a curiosity that is willing to risk life to find satisfaction" and "a taste for the marvelous and a fascination with the terrible" all just sound like a review of a Denis Johnson novel. And some of the others -- "loyalty to friends or to obligations incurred," "protection of the weak," "a curiosity that is willing to risk life to find satisfaction" are actually reminding me of Bovary, in the context of this thread: you can almost see the last of those things as the issue that makes her fall down on the first two!

But this last part is what I was trying to get at:

In the novel, the book is a hiding place and the scene of a withdrawal; a solitude has sought to nestle in the inviolable silence of its pages. The contents of a novel cannot really be told by voice...the novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.

The ending of that is the bullshit, I think; it's making the most bizarre rhetorical leap, imagining the author "no longer able to express himself" without really arguing why. What I was trying to express upthread is that (post-structuralism and Deconstruction aside) I'm a big believer in the "isolated" one-to-one communication of the novel -- at its best, this kind of reading strikes me as being right up there with love and family relations in terms of our opportunities to get detailed information about what the world looks like from inside other people's heads. (And yet love wins even though -- ha -- you have your own vested interests interfering with the whole business.)

I wouldn't even posit Flaubert as the paragon of realism; it ignores the stronger Romantic strains, which bore fruit in The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Salaambo. He was more interested in gesture and behavior than the price of furniture. It's Balzac, in Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions or Pere Goriot in which you see a pitiless catalogue of material goods as reflection of interiority.

'seven types of ambiguity' is not 800 pages long. it isn't about novels

there's apparently am 800 page novel that takes its name from the Empson book.

if you weren't joking. I am very literal-minded.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOBDEhxd_WU

'seven types of ambiguity' is not 800 pages long.

OK, you're right, it's 628.

Unless you're talking about the Empson essay? In which case, we weren't.

Hi, Horseshoe beat me to it.

I read that b/c my Aussie colleague told me to. Didn't think I would like it but strangely, I did -- altho I never felt compelled to read it, I never wished I were reading it instead of doing something else...but when I picked the book up and started reading again I was content, more or less, to be seeing through those eyes. Kind of unexciting, though.

"Literary" reading is up

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/11/AR2009011102337_pf.html

hurrah

"Over the past six years there has been a new sense of urgency in the United States about the cultural disaster represented by the decline in reading," he said in an interview last week. As a result, "millions of teachers, librarians, parents," politicians and others put their energies into reversing the trend.

Gioia said he likes to think that the NEA's surveys "played a catalytic role" and that NEA programs such as the Big Read -- through which the agency encourages American communities to sponsor the reading and discussion of a single book -- have been important.

lol. So we are to believe Americans were successfully PANICKED into reading more!

don't see any mention about PANIC. guess you must be one of those NYers who doesn't know how to read

"It's 'Harry Potter' and 'Twilight' and Oprah and the Big Read and the Internet,"

Harry Potter and Twilight and Oprah, okay. I've never even heard of the Big Read and can't imagine it made that much of a difference, though....

Dana Gioia? Apparently he's Ted Gioia's older brother?

Yeah, he is. He spoke at my graduation. He comes off as kind of pompous, but I'm sure any NEA Chairman is. His whole speech was about the NEA study and how he was worried about it. It's weird, though, that he was speaking to a bunch of nerdy college grads about being sure to read a little more each day.

But what about prose nonfiction? Why did the NEA decide to single out the "literary" category in the first place?

"Because we're the National Endowment for the Arts," Gioia said. "Fucking duh."

There's a big 18-24 uptick involved here, right? Which lots of people will be placing -- fairly plausibly -- on the long-anticipated Harry Potter Effect.

18-24 year olds are all now at wizard colleges, which have an intensive literary program for all majors.

its kinda hard to get excited about this when its basically the result of 1 or 2 shitty books & ppl are actually reading less in general.... its like a couple years back when jazz album sales were up 3000% or something but it turned out 95.7% of the jazz sales that year were the norah jones album

ive read a book before

E, part of the logic of the anticipated Harry Potter Effect was that it really doesn't matter what young people are reading, because the very act of engaging with a book and getting some joy out of it is a gateway to doing so in the future and being a fundamentally literate and non-bookshy person -- i.e., "bad" books make readers just as effectively as "good" ones, and often better. There's truth to that, I think, so long as you're talking about younger people.

Which is why I want to know: is it bad if a kid only wants to read BMX mags and Calvin & Hobbes anthologies and D&D manuals?

The fans of Harry Potter and the Twilight novels and Goosebamps and whatever rarely read just that one thing. Once they've become hooked, they have to keep trying harder and harder stuff just to get teh equivalent "rush" or "high".

yeah im familiar with that idea but i think 1) the idea that reading bad books is inherently better than watching good tv or playing good videogames or whatev is pretty fuccin lame imo and 2) like i said on my old thread bitchin about grown-ass harry potter evangelists it seems like 95% of them dont read anything besides harry potter and the same goes for every other da vinci code style bestseller phenom - they seem more about cultivating an outside culture surrounding the book (waiting in line midnight at borders with a lightning bolt drawn on your dome or watching history channel docs about how the virgin mary was secretly an alien or some shit) instead of reading other novels for pleasure

the idea that reading bad books is inherently better than watching good tv or playing good videogames or whatev is pretty fuccin lame imo

this is true

my mom is a teacher from the "tv is shit" school of hippie education and i usedta get in fights w/ her about this all the time - she bitched to me once how her school was showing the kids finding nemo in class and im like wtf thats a hood classic its not like the kids are better off reading another shitty book about a dog who makes friends with another dog or some such faggotry but she came around after she saw wall-e & now she thinks pixar joint are ~~the shit~~

he idea that reading bad books is inherently better than watching good tv or playing good videogames or whatev is pretty fuccin lame imo

Seconded.

i dunno i think kids in middle school or younger can read whatever the hell they want--don't think it's a big deal if they read crap. i read all sorts of crap when i was in middle school and i still read all the time now as an adult

goosebamps

i dunno i think kids in middle school or younger can read whatever the hell they want--don't think it's a big deal if they read crap. i read all sorts of crap when i was in middle school and i still read all the time now as an adult

― Mr. Que, Monday, January 12, 2009 3:05 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think its the "all sorts of crap" thats important here

the idea that reading bad books is inherently better than watching good tv or playing good videogames or whatev is pretty fuccin lame imo

Guys, I would agree with you on this in certain ways, except that even leaving aside the depressing number of people in this country who are, like, functionally illiterate, I feel like there are a lot of kids who manage to grow up without ever thinking of an actual text-heavy book as something that can be in any way entertaining or useful to them, and there are a billion educational studies that can be trotted out to prove that this really is bad -- that having a decent relationship with printed text really is an important life skill.

This isn't the same as saying that reading Twilight is somehow more morally edifying than watching good movies, or something, but it is saying that reading Twilight is at least some practice in dealing with an important medium where we might actually be kinda slipping in our national dealing-with skills!

is it bad if a kid only wants to read BMX mags...etc

Not in my book. Reading is a general skill. It all uses the same circuitry.

we're talking about phonics vs functional literacy vs enculturation ... these things don't just naturally flow into each other

so no, it doesn't "all use the same circuitry"

the idea that reading bad books is inherently better than watching good tv or playing good videogames or whatev is pretty fuccin lame imo

Yeah, I agree, too. But what's if it's lame and true? I don't wanna accept that bad books are better for kids' heads than good video, but there seem to be studies out there that back this up. (That reading is intrinsically good for kids, I mean; not that video games are bad or whatever.)

PLUS nabisco sayin it better and OTM.

this doesnt change the fact that harry potter and twilight and the da vinci code are all really fucking wack

Books have such a forbidding aura in this country. If a child reads Harry Potter, he can't read it just for fun: the experience must be rendered as something as healthy as eating broccoli. An Amazon fan writes about the last volume that it's about "a brave and endurable hero, one who will linger in the hearts and minds of readers for generations to come," and what fun is that?

I'm thinking of a line of Adorno's – that you should get suspicious of anyone who calls reading "a hobby," as if it was a guilty pleasure, like eating chocolate ice cream after the spinach.

My regular, routine consumption of the novel format basically went Dragonlance Books > Stephen King > Douglas Coupland > books I still believe are good, so I cannot be too hard on young people reading things that seem a bit lame.

On the other hand, I won't dissuade kids from reading crap since I plowed through lots of Dean Koontz (not King though!) in high school. There may be a connection between reading crap in your childhood and reading more of it as an adult, but I'll need to see the evidence.

King is way better than Koontz aside from his inability to end a story.

xpost

if it "all used the same circuitry" my kids who learn how to solve algebra and geometry problems would know how to construct algebraic and geometric proofs. they could make algebraic representations of geometry problems. they could build trigonometry for themselves out of algebra and geometry. well, people can't really do any of those things, not without guidance, practice, training and support.

i am thinking, nabisco, that you probably had people pushing you to read things beyond the dragonlance books? i guess what i worry about is seeing adults lining up in the science fiction aisle at borders to read "bounty hunter tales from the star wars cantina lxviii"

xpost

mjtb, the good lord knows how many Superman, Green Lantern, Batman comics, dinosaur books and lame joke books I read between age 9 and 12. I can tell you that I read nothing that resembled literature. Nothing whatsoever.

But my parents had books around that could be called literature, and I got a book for Christmas every year and I read that. And then in HS I began to pick up adult lit books. They seemed like news from another planet to me.

I used to be a 97 lb. literary weakling, but now I am a behemouth of learnedness, a man-mountain of classical hepness. I spew poetry like sawdust from a sawmill.

Sometimes one thing does flow into another, even if it is unnatural.

i read tons of koontz king and michener in high school and middle school--i just loved to read and still do

We should distinguish between kids for whom Harry Potter, et al were "gateways" to The Joy of Reading and those who read Harry Potter, et al indiscriminately as children, because they were totally fucking nuts on reading and consumed whatever they got their hands on.

there's a difference?

Isn't there some story about T.S. Eliot reading one murder mystery every night before he went to bed? Just sayin'.

But does the wack come from the writing style or the subject matter? Or maybe both?

What i'm thinking here is something like the Left Behind series, each tome of which has like, what, several hundred pages. Yeah, it requires attention and base literacy just to consume each book, but both the prose style and actual content are indefensibly excreable.

re: nabisco progress model:

l niven, h harrison, m moorcock & p anthony >-> ballard & PKD reprints >-> other stuff

i read xxxactly one star wars novel when i was in 5th grade at the urging of fatty friend matthew (dedicated fans of and what history may remember i never really gave 2 fux for star wars and always repped star trek instead) and it was pretty lame, def didnt get me away from the asimov/h.g wells/arthur clarke shit i was geekin bout at the time - iirc it was about some gangster uncle of jabba the hutt who had a long tedious feud with jedi knights or something

xpost

in my experience, there's not much difference between the two. i think the bigger distinction would be those who read ALL HARRY POTTER ALL THE TIME, reading all the books ten times each and nothing else and those who plow through the series once and then get hooked and start reading all kinds of other stuff

e, i believe youre talking about zorba the hutt

there's a difference?

Sure! There's some overlap – teacher and parent recommendations are influences – but, in my experience, kids who love to read will binge on everything. I read Dumas, Koontz, Dickens, and comic books indiscriminately.

seriously my fundie grandma reads non-fiction voraciously but every single one is from the left behind series or one of those chuck colson political thrillers about "pro-abortion terrorists" or something shes never read an actual novel in her life

Haha Star Wars fiction is almost universally pathetic, I find.

Scarily, if you are looking at media tie-in shit, the World of Warcraft stuff is very obvious but, at the same time, very entertaining; if anything, that seems to be the true successor to the Dragonlance books.

lmao max this was it
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e5/Zorbathehuttsrevenge.jpg
check the beard on that motherfucker

i guess what i worry about is seeing adults lining up in the science fiction aisle at borders to read "bounty hunter tales from the star wars cantina lxviii"

― moonship journey to baja

Yeah, but that's just a sneer. Maybe they read other stuff, too, and maybe they just like what they like. Nobody's saying that reading's gonna make u genious, but I imagine even the SWC58 readers are better off than if they'd stayed with Baywatch reruns.

Louis Brandeis read nothing but dime novels.

oops, 68

;_;

I read the SW novels. Along with, like, a jillion other books a year.

Louis Brandeis read nothing but dime novels.
What about Louis Auchincloss?

Really? How was that Zorba one?

xpost

What about Louis Auchincloss?

Tax returns and tort law.

hey pancakes hackman youre one of the only other god-haterz on ilxs weekly smug atheist threads doesnt the whole magical/superstitious/monarchist steez of SW bug you??

I'm trying to remember what the last books I read that actively pissed me off were. I think they were V. and Digital Fortress. OH and Rhapsody, which inspired this thread:

I have just read the wrongest scene in a fantasy book ever written.

i didnt read any of the star wars books because they werent canon

god, I have a box full of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels in my closet.

Anyway, hooray for ridiculous, simpleminded crap adventure novels of whatever sort (a category in which Harry Potters is top shelf), because they get kids reading, and it's good for their little dendrites, and that shit can come in handy later on. If the worst that happens is that people keep reading garbage into their dotage, well so be it.

On that tip, am rereading Elric novels. Still awesome.

Expanding this a little, is there value in reading nothing but trash? Not 'trash' in terms of pulps/dime stories/genre exercises poo-poo'd by tight-assed literary types for decades, but actually shitty books? Books with godawful writing, that don't spark the imagination at all, that contain nothing so much as actually harmful ideas and that make one feel dumber thru the mere act of consuming it?

Movies satisfy my yen for pulp.

I hated Elric but loved Jerry Cornelius.

My nutrition-free reading back then was Agatha Christie, and 87th Precinct and Travis McGee series.

xpost -- only if you read good stuff too so you see the difference

Baja, my point is more that all the time I spent as a pre-teen reading things like Dragonlance books was part of what helped me develop a positive relationship with books in general -- just being used to them, comfortable with them, seeing them as worthwhile things that were part of my life -- and having that relationship was surely part of what allowed me to sit in high school and read Dickens or Heller or whatever else in a way that wasn't just some arduous English-class assignment . . . and so on, until I was sitting in college reading non-fiction books in the same way.

Which isn't a statement that reading books is somehow morally superior to doing other things, but I don't think it's controversial to believe that having some level of comfort with them as a channel of information is helpful to people . . . and who knows which kids will become ardent readers and which kids won't, but a lot of our education is pretty reasonably based on the notion that it'd be best for as many of them as possible to have that skill and opportunity and comfort early on, even if they don't all follow up on it in any huge way.

I.e.:

is there value in reading nothing but trash

There is if the alternative is having the kind of poor relationship with printed matter where you're not inclined to access anything, "trash" or not.

maxi-multi-xpost

This discussion reminds me of the gradual demise of woodshop, mechanics and any other high school classes which might prepare one for a life other than as a college graduate. Somewhere along the line the idea took hold among educators that education only meant higher education.

Reading is not entirely about reading Ulysses, great as it is, because Ulysses is never going to attract a really mass audience. Why should it? Reading is not some race to an end goal, with the goal always being the canon of great literature. Reading is good in itself, and the reader can find as much in it as he looks for. If that means reading a lot of Stephen King, who am I to complain? At least they are knocking around in the right place - among books - and tomorrow they may stumble into something entirely different.

Shop worn aphorism: it takes all kinds to make a world.

I think there is self-enhancing value in reading almost anything when yr a kid, cuz EVERYTHING is new and challenging when yr a kid. And there's similar value in reading stuff that continues to challenge you as you get older.

Only value in reading unchallenging shit is in the comfort/diversionary entertainment it provides. Nothing to sneer at, but of a different order.

Really? How was that Zorba one?

Well, I didn't read THAT one. I think it's a "young readers" book.

hey pancakes hackman youre one of the only other god-haterz on ilxs weekly smug atheist threads doesnt the whole magical/superstitious/monarchist steez of SW bug you??

Nah, no more so than any other sci-fi tropes do.

Yeah -- as a child you want to consume as much as possible, in the hopes that you become more discriminating later.

I mean, I grew up with lots of drug-store paperbacks (a mix of YA and sci-fi). But even in that case, you get a 13-yr-old me wandering into whatever supermarket of the town that my family would travel thru on our interminable summer camping trips, and making a beeline right for the sci-fi rack.

I figure, that way it was far more likely that I would go 'Hey, there's these books here called _The Space Merchants_ or _I Am Legend_ or _Man in the High Castle_. I wonder if they're any good, maybe I should pick one up...'

(this is how i first got into _Have Spacesuit, Will Travel_ which was GREAT and long before that dude devolved into libertarian time-traveling incestual adventures)

Books with godawful writing, that don't spark the imagination at all

Ha, that's why Gilbert Sorrentino said he didn't want to write conventional novels- they bored him. Of course, there are only two people around here who read Gilbert Sorrention, but still.

Yeah -- as a child you want to consume as much as possible, in the hopes that you become more discriminating later.

I consumed as much as possible--but I seriously doubt most kids are self-aware enough to hope they will become more discriminating later.

And how do/should we go about beating a sense of quality or the ability to discriminate by such into the soft, pliable heads of our youths?

I will rep for Tales from the Bounty Hunters all fuckin day IG-88 was a cold blooded motherfucker.

i've been pretty disappointed with the Sorrentino that I've read

You don't beat it into them, it's not the point

I hated Elric but loved Jerry Cornelius.

― WmC

Used to feel the same, cuz JC was so much denser, more literary, challenging, and experimental. But in rereading the Elrics I'm blown away by the visual storytelling and the extreme simplicity. Every scene is so monstrous and vivid and colorful. They seem more like processions of gothy pseudo-nouveau paintings than proper novels.

Haha, and OH MAN, was it big news when they finally licensed Tim Zahn and Dark Horse to start doing SW stories. I had friends in high school who camped out for this book:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n2/n13665.jpg

and this was in the pre-HP midnight event era

I consumed as much as possible--but I seriously doubt most kids are self-aware enough to hope they will become more discriminating later.

You hope that it happens naturally.

And how do/should we go about beating a sense of quality or the ability to discriminate by such into the soft, pliable heads of our youths?

wtf who's talking about beating? Were you whacked on the head with a copy of The Golden Bowl?

xpost:
You don't beat it into them, it's not the point
^^^this

(this is how i first got into _Have Spacesuit, Will Travel_ which was GREAT
Think at some point people were arguing that Heinlein's juveniles were actual his best.

Don't know exactly what point vahid is trying to make about teaching math and science versus reading, seems to me too different to compare.

as long as we're reppin secret nerd shame i never read star trek novels but i did own this

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Image:Star_Trek_The_Next_Generation_Technical_Manual.jpg

and whats worse is i got it by winning a star trek trivia contest at the book store

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Image:Star_Trek_The_Next_Generation_Technical_Manual.jpg

wtf who's talking about beating? Were you whacked on the head with a copy of The Golden Bowl?

Gotta learn 'em somehow. Spare the Rod Serling, spoil the child.

#@#&@$#&@&

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Image:Star_Trek_The_Next_Generation_Technical_Manual.jpg

xpost - I mean, surely the thing we cheer about when we hear people are reading isn't that the tastes or sophistication of the public is higher, it's that an important, valuable, and edifying skill (one that's unique and not quite replaceable by other skills) is still going strong.

xpost - I think Vahid's distinction is right that they're educationally kinda separate, and that we're not talking about basic literacy here, but I'm not sure anyone's really suggested anything different (I mentioned functional literacy just as an aside, really)

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/5/57/Star_Trek_The_Next_Generation_Technical_Manual.jpg

HOOS OTMFM

Did not dig Cobras enuf to follow Zahn into Star Warses.

zahn's heir to the empire is so awesome IMO

honestly i really enjoy a lot of paperback crime stuff, i almost have to go back and forth between something serious and then just some random thing in the grisham/turow kinda vein.

I tend to read a variety of pop-history books these days, interspersed with more academic stuff, not surprising given where I work. I did just read Michael Lewis's Moneyball the other day.

monkeybone?

All I read is the intraweb these days. Oh wait.

if it "all used the same circuitry" my kids who learn how to solve algebra and geometry problems would know how to construct algebraic and geometric proofs (etc)

Surely being able to fluidly solve an algebra or geometry problem, and finding that fun, is going to make you better at understanding the construction of an algebraic or geometric proof when it's explained to you? idk i know there's a big difference between reading literature and reading popular fiction but in a foreign language I'm trying to improve my reading skill in, I think I'm better off reading a YA novel with a plot to keep me interested, rather than trying to navigate high style when i'm still a poor reader.

I like the point upthread about kids who like reading tearing their way through a ridiculous mess of books without really noticing which are more worthy than others.

When I was a kid, I basically checked out entire shelves of books at a time and tried to read them all within a week. After a certain point, I realized I only really liked the science fiction and fantasy stories and, following brief diversions with mysteries and horror, basically settled into reading those and have been very happy ever since.

I think this is the most rockist thread ever on ilx

zomg nabisco I am so glad you were into Dragonlance! :D

surprised to hear and what so opposed to trash culture when it comes to reading -- i mean hp/dan brown etc. isnt cool trash reading, pretty mainstream-y i guess, but imo trash culture reading is a big part of everyone's young adulthood isnt it?? honestly i dont know too many ppl who were JUST reading asimov and not checking out those 100-book series w/ cartoon cover art -- hardy boys or babysitters club or dragonlance or xanth or star trek/wars or battletech or whatever else -- btw this is where i share my secret dream of becoming a ghostwriter for one of these dumb series as a career

ANIMORPHS

My goal is to WRITE those books.

http://scholastic.com/animorphs/download/bk17.jpg

Also I would like to write coloring book captions. "The duck put on his rainboots."

deej i dunno man i just admitted i used to spend hours poring over the star trek tng technical manual i just think its kinda dumb to be like ok kids are reading lol job done!!

Just to be clear: the original NY Times article describes employer anxiety at diminished reading comprehension and writing skills among workers, and cites studies suggesting that the cause of this change is diminished time spent reading for pleasure among adults.

To which I respond: we have a lot more workers nowadays for whom reading and writing skills are important (a "knowledge economy"). So I hesitate to accept that it's our becoming a more tv-centered culture that is making us less capable of reading and writing. It could also be that we expect more reading and writing skills from more people now than we did in the past. That's consistent with Americans staying about the same at reading and writing on average, with more people whose reading and writing skills aren't super being asked to use them.

at a certain point u realize that 'quality' isn't always so closely tied to 'subject matter i find intriguing' but i dont think its not also a learning experience, and it certainly helps you figure out what it is you do and dont like about reading -- i mean how do you find out what bad writing is unless you read some of it

Did you ever try to play the TNG game for the SNES and what? I cannot figure out what the hell is going on or how you get off the main deck.

My dad was a huge reader, esp. sci-fi -- before he joined the Army, he worked at a publisher in the shipping department, so he read everything he could get his hands on. He passed that on to me; I remember having a library card of my own by the time I was 6 years old. And my grandmother had, like, four shelves full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, which I used to read cover-to-cover no matter what four novels they had defiled in each edition.

I read a shampoo bottle once.

animorphs was my shit in grade 5 and in retrospect they are horribly written

Did you rinse off and read it again?

xpost

ALL-ONE! ALL-ONE! ALL-ONE!

I read a shampoo bottle once.
This is a good way to improve your foreign language ability!

Did not dig Cobras enuf to follow Zahn into Star Warses.

My love for the Cobra series is well documented, but even more I love the Backlash books x 2.

Surely being able to fluidly solve an algebra or geometry problem, and finding that fun, is going to make you better at understanding the construction of an algebraic or geometric proof when it's explained to you?

yeah of course ... and you won't be able to go straight into reading adult lit without first cutting your teeth on young adult literature. but people don't just naturally graduate into reading adult books from reading young adult books.

And my grandmother had, like, four shelves full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, which I used to read cover-to-cover no matter what four novels they had defiled in each edition.

Same here -- unfortunately one of my most vivid memories of these is a couple really unmagical summer weeks spent trying to get into the Horatio Hornblower volume.

NB my secret dream career is writing the stuff on shampoo bottles; I think about this during a good 40% of showers

this thread

tl;dr

but movies are better than books, did someone say that already?

xpost - Vahid, the thing is that people were originally happy with stuff like Harry Potter because there was some sense that we were losing even the cutting-your-teeth battle! Sad, but we kinda celebrate even that -- and as for whether that upswing in kids reading is translating into reading "better" or more edifying stuff, that seems still up in the air, and all anyone's rejoicing about these days is the first tiny possible indication that okay, at least they didn't just put down the last Potter book and stop reading again over the long term.

yes Morbius said that already

didn't or couldn't?
xxxpost

don't bother engaging, just suggest ban; it's no big loss since he doesn't like reading anyway

lol

develop a positive relationship with books in general -- just being used to them, comfortable with them, seeing them as worthwhile things that were part of my life

I think this is probably the most important factor in all this; to establish or imprint very early on the notion that books are an acceptable, easily accessible, and enjoyable source of entertainment, and also the habit of consuming them regularly.

For all my parents' faults as detailed in the other thread, they were both English teachers who spent a maximum amount of time & effort into getting myself & my siblings to become readers, to the point of subsidizing our consumption when we were old enough to pick for ourselves. As for the results, as the song goes, two out of three ain't bad.

but movies are better than books, did someone say that already?

― Someone Still Loves You Evan and Jaron (Tape Store), Monday, January 12, 2009 3:20 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

please post your challops in the form of a youtube confessional

hey, you're already on top of it!

math is structured a bit differently from reading/writing

tell me about it

i see that nabisco and i raise you one - i'm rejoicing too, even when my 10th graders are reading twilight or whatever instead of stephen king. and fuck, i probably read more trash lit than anybody on this thread (wouldn't make that bounty hunter joke if that wasn't me at that age - i probably read more roleplaying manuals than anything else as a teen)

but there's another extreme to the argument that says forget trying to push kids into challenging reading, let's just let them bring whatever graphic novels and trash lit they're reading into 10th grade class. and i want to push back against that line of thinking while i can.

Well see, the problem with that is that reading for school is not the same thing as reading for fun and should not be treated as such.

Ok, i'll exit self-parody mode for a moment to say that, based on my 12th grade lit class, many people in my generation--myself included, honestly--prefer short stories to long novels (it doesn't help that we spent like a whole semester on fucking A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY).

agreed, totally

what is in a henry james book that a kid can't understand

lack of droids or pulse rifles?

When I was a kid, I basically checked out entire shelves of books at a time and tried to read them all within a week.

― HI DERE

Reading as many books as possible w/in a week or even a day was a big goal of mine as a kid (between 10 & 13 or so). Once when I had terrible flu, I got a bunch of books from the Bookmobile and read five in one day. Still a personal best! Only one I remember was called Sirius, and was maybe about a kid contacted by telephathic dogs from the titular star? Then again, maybe not, as I was delusional from fever.

agreed with Vahid -- every bit of hard economic evidence in the world suggests that people do not prefer short stories in the least, except possibly when they're being given assignments in class and prefer whatever the hell is shorter

Detail I remember from Prayer for Owen Meany: Owen has a big dong.

you'd kinda have to, to jump on a grenade like that

so in what category does something like tender buttons fall

He took the hit with his dong. xp

Generally speaking, I have a problem with the glamorization/valorization of "challenging reading" because all it really does is ruin it for people who don't like to struggle at things.

finnegan's wake, the comic book edition!

http://community.livejournal.com/fanficrants/1798922.html

So you wrote a Draco/Harry/Ron sex fic. Hot. I like it.

So you feel the need to mention that Ron has a 21 inch penis. Um. No. No, he doesn't. Ow. I keep reading anyway because wth hot sex fic, right? But then you had to write this line : "Ron felt himself blush with embaressment. He felt small compared to Drco."

O_o. Right.

And then, the last sentence I read before I hit the back button is this: "...and Draco was at least twice as big as Ron."

He had a 42 inch penis? I believe that was almost the length of my old skipping rope, people. o_o

That is a short skipping rope.

finnegan's wake, the comic book edition!

but i've always been a lol snob towards comic books ... even when i was a little kid. which is why i never know shit about things like sin city and i thought that ghostface killah made up the whole business about tony starks and shit.

Isn't there an image around here of a dinosaur shouting a thunderword?

what is in a henry james book that a kid can't understand

Okay I haven't read any James so someone else should maybe field this but isn't HJ about like subtleties of human nature and behavior and betrayal and love lost or abandoned and so on? Those are pretty adult themes that take experience (or more than the normal human dose of empathy) and a much more nuanced understanding of social mores/the "greater good"/history than most middlegrade or even YA readers probably have.

Not that kids SHOULDN'T be reading things that go over their heads; I think in fact they SHOULD, and just take a pass on things they don't get, because some percentage of those ideas will stay with them and get looked at again later. But to say that there's nothing kids can't understand is a little bit facile.

forget trying to push kids into challenging reading, let's just let them bring whatever graphic novels and trash lit they're reading into 10th grade class. and i want to push back against that line of thinking while i can.

― moonship journey to baja

I don't see what's so horrible about this idea. If you feel you're losing the battle to begin with, I mean. Why not legitimize what kids might actually be interested in, as a way of connecting it and them with a broader literary world? Better than failing to force them to read Henry James or whatever, right? Plus "graphic novels and trash lit" does not = flat line. There's a lot of room for variation in quality, intelligence, literary ambition, thematic depth, etc.

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=2021

Spark Your Tween's Interest in Reading
-
Try these strategies to keep your busy pre-teen turning the pages.
By Francie Alexander

As children become "tweens" and have more competition for their time, it is a challenge to keep them reading for pleasure. In reading, like everything else, you are still an important role model. Try these activities to get your child reading and be sure to let him see you read...

Some good ideas here, but if I ever actually use the term 'tween' to refer to me kid, he/you all have permission to shoot me.

I think a good idea is to ignore your kids at dinner and read.

also, lots of literary classics were the pulp fiction of their day -- i mean, dostoyevski and dickens and daniel defoe all published the bulk of their works in weekly/monthly journals and were paid by the word (which is my theory why all of those russian novels are so damn long).

I can't find them. What was Scholastic line of YA novels, the one that had the little green apple on the binding?

This was the pre-music version of me consuming every 4AD/Creation/SST/Fat Possum release I could get ahold of; you were guaranteed a good time from the label alone.

i can't think of a writer who would turn 90% of high school kids off of reading stuff than Henry James

no you are thinking of william faulknet xp to laurel

the internet has captured my mind

don't see what's so horrible about this idea.

I think a good idea is to ignore your kids at dinner and read.

contenderizer, name your top 5 dragonlance novels that are on par w/ "invisible man" -- GO!

I thought the Henry James thing was a joke from the 1st post.

Not me, man. AD&D OK, Dragonlance was usurper shit.

Well to be fair "graphic novels" is as close to flat-lining as you can get when the goal is to teach reading and comprehension of extended texts -- intelligence and literary ambition might be considered a job for later on if you seriously don't believe you can get high-schoolers to read more than a few dialogue bubbles each page.

I mean, look, if you reach a point of last resort where you think you're really teaching something even by getting kids to read and understand anything at all they bring in, then fine, that's apparently where you're at -- but obviously there comes a point where this is just laziness and coddling.

I thought the Henry James thing was a joke from the 1st post.

Which I read in a college restroom graffito.

okay, that's a bit flip about graphic novels, plenty of them have a decent amount of text running, but still, that's like an admission that you are way, way, way behind if you're resorting to that, you know?

How much reverse-psychology should come into play here?

"This book...is NOT for you!"

*carelessly leaves large tome of _THE NEVERENDING STORY_ within easily stolen reach*

then again, my undergrad college had an advanced-level English class devoted to reading graphic novels ...

that's like an admission that you are way, way, way behind if you're resorting to that, you know?

So...you were opposed to the alternate ed classes in Season 4 of "The Wire"?

No, no, I'm not saying moonship is wrong, Nabisco; just pushing the idea a little, so I can understand it better. There are some seriously dense, text-heavy graphic novels out there, but I don't know that you'd wanna foist em on little kids. Same goes for "trash fiction". I was just wondering at the out-of-hand rejection at the more inclusive approach. Sure, it could result in coddling, but it wouldn't have to. Depends on the teacher.

I'd like to reiterate that making kids read for school and getting kids to read for pleasure are two totally distinct things that don't necessarily have to use the same set of literature. Yes, I read The Stranger for fun because I was obsessed with The Cure but there was no way in hell it would ever have occurred to me to pick up Death In Venice or Siddhartha were it not for various reading assignments.

Speaking for myself, I'm glad they force-fed us one Shakespeare a year in the NYC public school system. Then years later when I went to the foreign film festivals and saw the Kurosawas and the Mizoguchis and the Satyajit Rays I could say "That's what Shakespeare was talking about!"

Hahaha I wonder how many people read The Stranger bcz of the Cure. *raises hand*

I have the "seriously this is not a racist song so don't kill people" sticker on my stereo.

or oscar wilde b/c of the smiths and/or morrissey.

i did read nabokov for the 1st time b/c of the police!

but dan, both use the same set of phonics, so it certainly serves my pedagogical purposes to have my kids reading for pleasure outside of class. but at the same time, i don't think that reading graphic novels is going to prep them for reading the NYT sunday magazine or editorial page, so i have to entice them in class into reading science-relevant NYT articles so they can be contributing members of society.

I don't see what's so horrible about this idea. If you feel you're losing the battle to begin with, I mean. Why not legitimize what kids might actually be interested in, as a way of connecting it and them with a broader literary world?

nothing! and i don't necessarily endorse taking a hard line with kids. i have a bunch of students who *are* reading frankenstein in graphic novel form because they have dyslexia or processing problems or whatever and for them the phonics is the challenge, but they also need to keep up with the class and learn the themes and cultural value of frankenstein. hard line with children and teenagers = not very effective, in my experience.

As children become "tweens" and have more competition for their time, it is a challenge to keep them reading for pleasure. In reading, like everything else, you are still an important role model. Try these activities to get your child reading and be sure to let him see you read...

but this is SO true.

Laurel I think Bunny and his academic friends would have been happy to admit that they were indeed attempting a last-resort process! (Although technically that was more like ESL or something, where all you're trying to teach people is the basic skills/behavior that will allow them to learn what they're normally supposed to be learning in normal classes.)

Gotcha, contenderizer, yeah -- I mean, yeah, ideally educators get to teach whatever they can, whatever it takes, etc. -- but as an approach to general curricula, or as a principle, it seems misguided, like you're allowing the subjective nature of literary value to let you get away with not advancing the curriculum. (And in fact the subjective literary-value part isn't really the issue -- older kids aren't assigned what they're assigned just for the moral sake of Great Works or their intelligence; they're assigned things to increase their reading level, vocabulary, challenge the depth of their comprehension, etc. The main reason they can't all bring in whatever they want is that it's not logistically possible for educators to approve every work in the world and then teach them to kids individually.)

I'd like to reiterate that making kids read for school and getting kids to read for pleasure are two totally distinct things that don't necessarily have to use the same set of literature

Yeah, how does one teach a book in grade school so that reading it DOESN'T suck? My dad taught an elective sci-fi lit class for years where they would cover stuff like Puppet Masters or Dune. Does the formalized and reinforcement schedule and structure of doing a book for class allow for any pleasure at all? I haven't been in grade school for 15 years; i can't remember.

I just have the sense that merely due to its association to class, any otherwise enjoyable novel was tainted.

reinforcement -> d

Along these lines, I've been thinking lately about something Nietzsche wrote regarding reading:

"Admittedly, to practice reading as an art in this way one thing above all is necessary, something which these days has been unlearned better than anything else—and it will therefore be a while before my writings are "readable"—something for which one must almost be a cow and in any case not a "modern man": ruminating..."

Nietzsche is making the point that there are different ways of reading, not just of reading different media but of reading the same text, for instance based on how much you "ruminate" on it. I suspect that the NEA is right, that this kind of reading comprehension is low. It might be that if this level were higher, that we'd be worse at making money; there are trade-offs in spending your time reading rather than doing woodwork or fixing cars, e.g.

I get yr point, vahid, but mine is that I don't think you have to sell kids on reading for fun to make them read for school; I think you have to fail them if they don't know the material. They have to take responsibility for completing the assignments given to them or suffer the consequences; if they can't complete the assignments, they need to communicate with the teacher.

I recognize how easy it is for me to have this opinion as a non-teacher with no kids, btw.

i can't think of a writer who would turn 90% of high school kids off of reading stuff than Henry James

I was the dork who read The Portrait of a Lady in the summer of eighth grade because Ole Golly mentioned it in Harriet The Spy, my favorite book in elementary school; I liked the title. Much of it went over my head, yeah, but enough didn't to get me to try other 19th century novels.

you're right dan, and i worry about the trend that more and more parents are asking me to make learning fun at the cost of making it valuable.

lol @ everyone implying that high school kids would enjoy graphic novels more than hamlet

I am having difficulty thinking of any graphic novel that doesn't have tits and naked in it.

jesus, people, look

http://www.baltimoremagazine.net/maxspace/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/american-teen.jpg
"Oh my, I sure do love reading these graphic novels. They're so hip!"

"I like the tits and naked."

http://blog.going2oahu.com/images/101934-94768/cheer.jpg
"Oh my, English teacher? I really adored SIN CITY. What should I check out next?!?!?"

I thought we were talking about kids who already enjoyed graphic novels, TS. Kids who don't enjoy graphic novels probably wouldn't, and big surprise.

My wife (who is not a kid) doesn't like graphic novels and she liked "Watchmen".

Your wife and I would enjoy each other's company.

^^ lol crepey

all kids enjoy graphic novels if the alternative is regular novels, jeez people.

fava beans, graphic novels, etc.

(xpost)

Also, Jordan: No.

I like graphic novels and I disagree with that!

"americans tend to read less for fun"
"as a result, reading test scores are dropping"

RLY

i read tons of novels when i was in elementary school and junior high. i had pretty easy access to comic books and i never really got into 'em. i still haven't, tbh.

We read this in junior high:

http://ape-law.com/GAF/images/psa14.jpg

uh

You guys remember those abridged, illustrated adaptations of classics for children? That's how I first read Tale of Two Cities and The Three Musketeers. I'm not opposed to illustrated novels.

Dan I could mail you my copy of that if you need persuading that smoking cigarettes will kill your track career.

It is pretty much the pinnacle of Marvel team-ups.

It has already convinced me that I need a haircut before ppl start saying "hey Power Man, what happened to your headband? lololol"

imo reading ilx is really bad for encouraging me to read books

Thankfully our film threads encourage you to rent movies.

i love books encourages me to read books

i love the nfl encourages me to watch football

ilm encourages me to sell all my cds

funny stuff guys but you dont play football on ilx to get convinced to play football, but u do read on ilx about reading

i play wide receiver on ilnfl

I read The Stranger because I read No Exit, picked up on a whim at the high school library because the book binding looked cool.

You guys remember those abridged, illustrated adaptations of classics for children? That's how I first read Tale of Two Cities and The Three Musketeers. I'm not opposed to illustrated novels.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, January 12, 2009 11:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

But the appeal of those books is not the illustration...it's that they're abridged.

The appeal of those books is that they distill the essence of the original for eight- and nine-year-olds, and, in the case of The Three Musketeers, included a hawt pic of Milady that set my heart aflutter in fourth grade.

I vividly remember how Milady was illustrated in those books! The illustrations make up 50% of the books, so I'd say they're half the appeal!

oh man I forgot about milady

her name sounds like a brand of cookies tho

I also remember that D'artagnan threw his broken sword hilt through the Conte de Rochefort so hard that it exited through his back -- which I don't think was in the original.

i remember the classics illustrated version of moby-dick pretty well and it was actually pretty faithful to the story (as opposed to the digressions) in the book. except the illustrations changed ahab from a craggy old man into a rather dashing, clean-cut young dude.

also instead of tattoos, queequeg looks like he has chicken pox

lol @ everyone implying that high school kids would enjoy graphic novels more than hamlet

this made me enjoy hamlet more when I in high school:

http://www.bethspage.us/candh/food/hamlet.jpeg

Also, Polanski's Macbeth would have made me enjoy it more(didn't see it until sophomore year at university), if nothing else than just for John Finch's sheer bad-assness, especially during the final confrontation.

I can't find the scene on youtube, but I always liked the bit from _Major League_ where everyone on the team bus is trading issues of Classics Illustrated.

               INT. INDIAN EXPRESS - FULL SHOT
               We see that now most of the team is reading classic comics.
                                     HAYES
                              (to Dorn)
                         I'll trade you Song of Hiawatha for 
                         The Deerslayer.
                                     DORN
                         Naw, I'm not into Song of Hiawatha.
                                     HAYES
                         All right then, how about Crime and 
                         Punishment?
                                     DORN
                         Yeh, that sounds pretty good. That's 
                         a detective story, right?
                                     HAYES
                         Yeh.

shit in my cart at amazong

-machen 'the great god pan'
-labelle 'background noise: perspectives on sound art'
-malone 'country music u.s.a.'
-'oishinbo' vol. 1 (this will be the first manga i read since approx age 12.)

what else do i get? i have enough postwar century fiction for the rest of my life, so no cormac mccarthy or pynchon or vonnegut or any of that kinda stuff. i am interested in other good volumes of sf/horrorcrime pulp, if anyone has suggestions. mostly nonfiction though.

have you read richard k. morgan?

(i go to the thrift store every day (working days--5 days) to buy books cheap and highly recommend it.)

no! tell me more.

altered carbon

^^first in a very good sci-fi thriller trilogy

that sounds intriguing. what is so good about it? are the others in the trilogy written yet? it's not.... cyberpunk, is it?

it's basically a detective story transposed into science fiction. i would hesitate to call it cyberpunk though i think it has a shitload of elements in common with it. the last two novels were already written, the second is less detective story and more "war film", involving a platoon on an expedition of sorts. it's a well-written series (the first has maybe some rough spots but nothing terrible imo) and the stories are well-plotted. tons of sex and extreme violence, if that's your thing in this genre.

oh, i'll probably pass, or maybe check the library?

Given the Machen, go for some M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood (if the latter, only if it includes "The Wendigo" and "The Willows").

i have read a lot of blackwood but no james. will investigate.

James is one of my all time favorites -- he wrote his ghost stories more or less once a year for a specific reading for friends as light breaks from his academic work, so reading them in a heap means you tend to see the similarities between them. (Very Lovecraftian protagonists in many cases in that they're ciphers.) But at his best, insanely great and some stuff that still creeps me out on a reread decades after I first read him. There's a couple of omnibus editions of his work that pretty much collect everything.

Ha -- for a moment I thought you were describing Henry James' ghost stories (which are, in fact, quite excellent too)!

curious about that labelle book, let us know how it is?

i chose it over alan licht's book. i don't know why, but i am not the biggest alan licht fan.

Ha -- for a moment I thought you were describing Henry James' ghost stories (which are, in fact, quite excellent too)!

And all is well. Maybe the last name is the key in the end.

hey ian, richard morgan also has a really dope fantasy book out called the steel remains if yr the dude that likes george r.r. martin than youd probably like that one

i will look into it!
i was just thinking that i may have made a hasty judgment on morgan--it looks like the one omar little suggested is only available in hardcover, and i don't wanna carry that on the train. but anyway, cuz i don't mind (and sometimes even enjoy) the sex & violence in grrm, I don't see why it's less appealing to me in the context of a sci-fi thriller. maybe because sci-fi sex gets weird a lot? i don't know. it's not like the sex in grrm is like, elf sex or anything. i kinda draw the line at the sorta thing.

shit, that one's only hardcover too.
to the library!

altered states is pretty fukked up imo but steel remains is reasonably tame. the protagonist is gay and that fact isnt hidden or minimized so some of the reviews that call it ott are just lol fantasy readers and not really accurate.

morgan posts(ed) on another forum i post to he seems like a good dude and there's a lot of thought and craft put into his books

i decided to add this:
http://www.amazon.com/Crime-Novels-American-Postman-Nightmare/dp/1883011469/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231830006&sr=8-2

and axed the sound art book. art criticism always loses to good fiction in my world.

if we could get kids to read fucked-up bad-ass shit that works at a fifth grade reading level, like osamu tezuka translations, would that prepare them better for middle school and high school reading?

Most importantly, if teachers were equipped to explain the significance of the heavy shit students are required to read throughout 7th-12th grade (as vahid might be for his science materials etc), would that help? I tend to think the real argument here (as with lots of other seemingly esoteric college prep subjects, lit, math or otherwise) is how to get kids over the hurdle of understanding why this shit matters IRL, not getting them over the hump as regards boring. There's a lot of shit in life that's boring, but you got a dude hanging over your shoulder who can tell you why that boring part means your job, or another persons' life, or a promotion, or whatever. Teachers only get to speak in an abstract about another abstract (semester grades), which is nonsense; all knowledge can be explained in real terms, and all education is relevant, because nobody knows from 11-19 what kind of problems they might be asked to solve on Adult Planet

They can only visit this sexy planet at age 18 though.

hey ian you can find altered carbon in mass market paperback!

http://www.amazon.com/Altered-Carbon-Takeshi-Kovacs-Novels/dp/0345457692

(also oversized trade paperback if you prefer that)

lolz I couldn't get past the first 5 pages of that book - the noir-transposed-onto-sci-fi thing is SOOOOOOOO old and has been done way way better imho

the noir-transposed-onto-sci-fi thing is SOOOOOOOO old and has been done way way better imho

― Shakey Mo Collier

Seems like the idea got deaded off in the late 80s. Opening of Wetware runs some novel twists on it, only to (wisely) abandon the premise a few pages later in favor of some other shiny object. Lethem picked up the fragments, gave 'em new names and wrote a whole book around it, but couldn't improve on Rucker's original.

Others? Beyond, you know, that one?

not sure which Lethem you're referring to there (Gun With Occasional Music, I assume?) but yes that is way better than AC. Been a long time since I've read them but Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy comes to mind, as does KW Jeter (Dr. Adder, but also, duh, Noir). Also assuming "that one" refers to Bladerunner and not Obama

seems to me lots of Heavy Metal magazine also featured this noir-sci-fi hybrid, tho I'm blanking on particulars (there is that first sequence in the film)

"any questions?" zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.......

http://www.noircast.net/Images/cybernoir_opening.jpg

do androids dream isnt very noir

Jiminez wrote the cab driver story, but I dunno that it's based on anything he did for HM. Ranxerox was based in a kinda noirish, hard-boiled future, but was a different kinda thing, overall.

award for worst website goes to...

http://cybernoir.com/

do androids dream isnt very noir

yeah that's why I said Bladerunner

cool

Actually, the "one" I was talkin about was Neuromancer, didn't even think of Blade Runner til after I'd posted. But yeah, that. And good call, Shakey, on KWJ. Love Dr. Adder!

Cybernoir, sometimes also referred to as cybergoth fiction (not to be confused with the This article or section should include material from cyberpunk fashion Cyber subculture is, depending on ones perspective, a subgenre of the goth subculture or a subculture in its own right; proponents of the former view typically term it as cybergoth. ...subcultural movement), is a subgenre of Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ...Science Fiction. Though a somewhat contentious term, it is most often used to describe a combination of the A dystopia (or alternatively cacotopia) is a fictional society, usually portrayed as existing in a future time, when the conditions of life are extremely bad due to deprivation, oppression, or terror. ...dystopian focus of Cyberpunk (a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk) is a sub_genre of science fiction which focuses on computers or information technology. ...cyberpunk with heavy elements of The gothic novel is an English literary genre, which can be said to have been born with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. ...gothic fiction and Film noir is a stylistic approach to genre films forged in depression era detective and gangster movies and hard_boiled detective stories which were a staple of pulp fiction. ...Film Noir. Such works often contain some elements of Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction that centres upon the investigation of a crime, usually murder, by a detective, either professional or amateur. ...detective fiction, for example the novel Chasm City is a science fiction book by author Alastair Reynolds. ...Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds is a Welsh science fiction author. ...Alastair Reynolds, or Forests of the Night (DAW Books 1993) First book in the Moreau Series of books by S. Andrew Swann (aka Steven Swiniarski) published by DAW Books. ...Forests of the Night by S Andrew Swann. This is one of the main features distinguishing works of such genre from cyberpunk, another being the heavy use such novels make of gothic For an account of the late 19th-century movement in poetry and the arts, known as Symbolism, see symbolism (arts). ...symbolism, dreams etc. as well as more gothic settings. Authors arguably working in this style include Alastair Reynolds is a Welsh science fiction author. ...Alastair Reynolds, Micheal Marshall Smith and Peter F Hamilton

Bladerunner just seems to be the apotheosis of the combo, its the most visible example in popular culture and has become an obvious reference point.

Sterling's "Islands in the Net" is pretty noir...

STOP IT SCOTT

who's that dude who writes those sci-fi books with plots that have benjamin franklin fighting hitler

I love Neuromancer.

"seems to me lots of Heavy Metal magazine also featured this noir-sci-fi hybrid, tho I'm blanking on particulars"

you can just blame moebius for everything. he was working the steampunk AND cybernoir stuff decades ago.

altered carbon is dope, as are the two novels that follow it up

lolz

<img src=http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n3/n17700.jpg>;
^ hugo-winner's oddball comic book entry in above mini-genre; basically blade runner, but with bears

dozen x-posts but everyone seems to still be on the same tangent

you can just blame moebius for everything. he was working the steampunk AND cybernoir stuff decades ago.

― scott seward

airtight garage!

dammit

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n3/n17700.jpg

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/garage11.jpg

"airtight garage!"

plus, didn't he illustrate that french series about the little girl in the 20's running away from robots and other new/old monster hybrids? (plus all the other stuff he did that makes the future look old and dusty.)

plus, moebius designed costumes and stuff for alien AND dune, so, basically, he is one of the kings of the dusty future.

yeah Moebius is so fucking amazing. would've been great if Jodo had been able to finish his version of Dune

okay, there is this too:

"Giraud's artwork for the Dan O'Bannon short story comic "The Long Tomorrow" was a key visual reference for Blade Runner."

see, i told you you could blame him for everything.

has anyone seen footage of that dune? i wonder if david lynch did? i never have.

Not sure what the series about the girl in the 20s is (not a JG expert), but The Incal, too.

I haven't seen any footage beyond the designs/drawings/storyboards that are on the Jodo box (and on the web, I presume)

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/Incal2.jpg

this is great, by the way:

http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky.asp

(and he says lucas saw all the storyboards for dune before making star wars. yet another reason to blame moebius for EVERYTHING dusty in sci-fi.)

Just as sad to have missed the opportunity to geek on million-dollar Chris Foss spaceship efx.

new jodorowsky movie has the best dusty cast EVER:

Nick Nolte, Asia Argento, Mickey Rourke, Marilyn Manson, Udo Kier, and Santiago Segura.

here, both men talk about the failed dune:

orson welles. dali. pink floyd. magma. *sigh*

i wish they'd publish those dune storyboards

hey whaddayaknow, stopping by the local Goodwill whilst doing errands tonight resulted in me getting a copy of Altered Carbon for $2!

Why would kids wants to read books these days? For super imaginative stuff, video games, movies, and TV shows exist in high, complex forms, and for everyone else, the pace of life is too fast to spend an hour or two a day working on a novel. It's a rare nerd that enjoys literature for its own sake.

― burt_stanton, Monday, 19 November 2007 18:56 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

rare nerd

i read a good amount of books but if the internet didn't exist i think i would have read a lot more by now, and also have a much less jittery mind.