5 ms·

Funnily enough, pretending to read a book will almost always make you better at these conversations than actually reading the book. This is something I learned

Funnily enough, pretending to read a book will almost always make you better at these conversations than actually reading the book. This is something I learned the hard way back in school. Whenever I actually read the book/chapter/article I would almost invariably do way worse on the quiz or essay compared to when I "cheated" by only reading a couple of summaries or reviews. In fact, I really enjoyed reading Eco's Name of the Rose, but I didn't get OP's palimpsest reference and even after looking it up I still don't remember the exact context where this came up. I remember the novel more for it's retelling of early Franciscan history and the proto-Protestant movements in medieval Europe, and not so much for the whodunit mystery plot. The reason is that a book has so much content that every reader will have a completely different takeaway and will remember different parts of it. However, most of the so-called classics have an semi "official" interpretation and "memorable quotes" that you're supposed to bring up. That's not to encourage people to skip reading books, though. Reading some books can be a very pleasurable experience in itself in the same way that you wouldn't get the same experience from just reading the plot of a musical play or watching it in fast-forward.

technothrasher 4y ago
The best grade on a book essay I got in High School was for a book that didn't even exist. We were supposed to read a book of our choosing and write about it. I couldn't be bothered (ok, ok, I wasn't the best student), so I just made one up and the teacher commented that it was the best essay in the class. As an adult, I've now read a lot of the classics I was supposed to have read in High School, and wish I could go back and tell my knucklehead past self to just read them, as they are actually very good.
- quercusa 4y ago
  >wish I could go back and tell my knucklehead past self to just read them, as they are actually very good. I doubt it would have done any good. There's so much in those great books that teenagers won't appreciate. You might read Moby Dick at that age and think it's a just story about a guy chasing a whale, with a lot of digressions.
  - robocat 4y ago
    > teenagers won’t appreciate I’m middle-aged, read a lot, but Moby Duck is just about chasing a whale to me. I just don’t recognise the metaphors and deeper meanings, unless somebody with a word rotator mind explains it (or I read the Cliff’s notes - which I didn’t get either).
    - technothrasher 4y ago
      I just felt bad for Melville when I got to chapters where he introduced his classification system for whales. He seemed so excited by it, and it's unfortunately obvious with the passage of time that it was very wrong.
    - bsder 4y ago
      Oh, great. Now I'm picturing Daffy Duck saying: "I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing." I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head all day long.
    - hither_shores 4y ago
      Moby Dick is what it looks like: the whalers are whalers, the ship is a ship, the whale is a whale. "Deeper meanings" are not as characteristic of literary fiction as your high school English teacher might like you to believe. But whereas stories on the pulpier end of the spectrum create characters to meet the demands of the plot, Moby Dick's plot is a delivery mechanism for its characters. Ahab, for instance, is exactly what he appears to be: a person obsessed with getting revenge on a whale. But Melville's portrayal of Ahab is psychologically rich enough to contain many elements which are common to questionably-attainable obsessions in general, and this is what people are usually talking about when they talk about literary symbolism. Ahab's relationship with the whale isn't a metaphor for man's search for meaning any more than it's a metaphor for my struggle to get my coworkers to stop throwing denormalized garbage in the schema - but it resembles both of them, and many other things besides.
      - quercusa 4y ago
- bsder 4y ago
  The main problem is teachers not adjusting the books to the personality of the student. I often wonder if many US high-school English teachers don't actually read anything outside of their curriculum literature. The glory of English literature is that it varies widely. Want a swashbuckle? Got it--here's "Ivanhoe". Want a soap opera? "Tom Jones". All manner of surreal? Roald Dahl. Incredibly dark humor? Late Mark Twain. Even when someone says "I don't like author <X>.", if someone explains what they don't like, you can often find a different story that they like just fine. By contrast, forcing "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wuthering Heights" onto a ninth grade teenager who digs surreal humor is just going to make them want to give up on reading completely.

technothrasher 4y ago

The best grade on a book essay I got in High School was for a book that didn't even exist. We were supposed to read a book of our choosing and write about it. I couldn't be bothered (ok, ok, I wasn't the best student), so I just made one up and the teacher commented that it was the best essay in the class. As an adult, I've now read a lot of the classics I was supposed to have read in High School, and wish I could go back and tell my knucklehead past self to just read them, as they are actually very good.

quercusa 4y ago
>wish I could go back and tell my knucklehead past self to just read them, as they are actually very good. I doubt it would have done any good. There's so much in those great books that teenagers won't appreciate. You might read Moby Dick at that age and think it's a just story about a guy chasing a whale, with a lot of digressions.
- robocat 4y ago
  > teenagers won’t appreciate I’m middle-aged, read a lot, but Moby Duck is just about chasing a whale to me. I just don’t recognise the metaphors and deeper meanings, unless somebody with a word rotator mind explains it (or I read the Cliff’s notes - which I didn’t get either).
  - technothrasher 4y ago
    I just felt bad for Melville when I got to chapters where he introduced his classification system for whales. He seemed so excited by it, and it's unfortunately obvious with the passage of time that it was very wrong.
  - bsder 4y ago
    Oh, great. Now I'm picturing Daffy Duck saying: "I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing." I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head all day long.
  - hither_shores 4y ago
    Moby Dick is what it looks like: the whalers are whalers, the ship is a ship, the whale is a whale. "Deeper meanings" are not as characteristic of literary fiction as your high school English teacher might like you to believe. But whereas stories on the pulpier end of the spectrum create characters to meet the demands of the plot, Moby Dick's plot is a delivery mechanism for its characters. Ahab, for instance, is exactly what he appears to be: a person obsessed with getting revenge on a whale. But Melville's portrayal of Ahab is psychologically rich enough to contain many elements which are common to questionably-attainable obsessions in general, and this is what people are usually talking about when they talk about literary symbolism. Ahab's relationship with the whale isn't a metaphor for man's search for meaning any more than it's a metaphor for my struggle to get my coworkers to stop throwing denormalized garbage in the schema - but it resembles both of them, and many other things besides.
    - quercusa 4y ago
bsder 4y ago
The main problem is teachers not adjusting the books to the personality of the student. I often wonder if many US high-school English teachers don't actually read anything outside of their curriculum literature. The glory of English literature is that it varies widely. Want a swashbuckle? Got it--here's "Ivanhoe". Want a soap opera? "Tom Jones". All manner of surreal? Roald Dahl. Incredibly dark humor? Late Mark Twain. Even when someone says "I don't like author <X>.", if someone explains what they don't like, you can often find a different story that they like just fine. By contrast, forcing "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wuthering Heights" onto a ninth grade teenager who digs surreal humor is just going to make them want to give up on reading completely.