Ludic Reading and the Gatsby Wars of 25 by Charlie Martin
So, some dispatches from the Great Gatsby War™. This is really another border skirmish between people who read what they’re told, and people who read for pleasure. I’m going to suggest that the “read what you’re told” people and the “read for pleasure” are missing an essential point, and that is that you have to learn to read for pleasure too. The core issue here is that the “read what you’re told” people don’t understand that, or just don’t care, while those of us who do read for pleasure are unhappy not just that our stuff isn’t being read, but that the “read what you’re told” people are actively discouraging reading for pleasure, whether they know it or not.
I learned to read sometime before 1960 in Alamosa, Colorado, which is pretty much the definition of a little tiny prairie town. It had a college (Adams State College then) that was primarily a teacher’s college, and its main claim to any sort of standing as a town being that with a population of all of 7500, it was the closest to a major metropolitan area closer than Taos, two hours away. And Taos was a little bitty artist’s colony.
Still, I started reading early — I can’t really remember a time when I couldn’t read. Most of what I read at first was comic books, but when I was about 8, I progressed to Tom Swift, Jr, thanks to a couple of books I received for Christmas. But by then I was hooked.
But I also knew I wasn’t supposed to like that stuff. My parents really didn’t like me reading comic books and I had to beg for quarters to walk to the Arapahoe grocery store to buy them. Two of them at a tine, they were 12¢ each then. And the “appropriate” books in the tiny corner bookstore were all “appropriately” boring for an 8 year old boy. Besides, I read much better than the kids books at the time.
Time passed, and I continued reading for pleasure. Soon enough, I read well enough to start in on my father’s books, of which he had a crapload, being a pleasure reader himself. I read many of the Hornblower books, and then, because I liked sea stories, my father handed me Moby-Dick. I remember I made it as far as the chapter on Whiteness before I said “what is this crap?” and put it down. But there was lots more to read — I managed to buy a couple more Tom Swift’s with birthday and Christmas money, and then — foreshadowing music please — my father, tired of me begging for more to read, handed me Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. And from then on I was a science fiction fan, reading all the Heinlein I could get ahold of — Heinlein at least was actually in the Alamosa public Library. That was followed by Asimov, Clarke, Poul Anderson, all the greats. I was thoroughly hooked, reading probably 50 or 100 books a year.
The whole time, teachers were telling me I should read good fiction, or histories, or dry as dust biographies. (Not all of them were dry as dust — I remember a biography of Jim Thorpe, who I liked because he was an Indian just like me.)
The thing was, all those good books they handed me were only good in the sense that they fit into the prescribed lesson plans, with quizzes and discussion questions and 15 or 30 page a night reading assignment on which you would be tested.
Honestly, it was downhill from there. I didn’t read as many comic books — my parents had thrown away my two-foot stack when we moved from Alamosa to Pueblo when I was nine — but by then I’d discovered paperbacks, and not long after that Analog Magazine. Which I carried with me and read whenever a chance came up.
Teachers were still trying to get me to read good books. A ninth-grade teacher gave me a paperback copy of Arundel by Kenneth Roberts. I tried but it was full of people doing silly things.
And then I got started on Ayn Rand in high school. Which I loved. And which was also not good literature. My poor English teacher literally fleered when I gave her a book report on Atlas Shrugged.
In grad school, I was reading Hemingway short stories, and my friends who were English grad students tried to get me to read Faulkner and Fitzgerald, including — you knew it had to come up sometime — The Great Gatsby. And I was still looking at it and saying “why?” while they told me how deep all that stuff was.
However, I now had a solid grasp of why I didn’t like them, at least. I was reading for fun. If I wanted to read something with problem sets, I had linear algebra.
About then, I ran into Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, by Victor Nell. It was a study of the psychology of reading for pleasure, something he called ludic reading — which just means reading for pleasure but is far more scientific being drawn from latin ludus, “to play.” It’s a very interesting book — over the years I’ve owned several copies as they got loaned out or sold during a massive book cull — that identifies two main approaches to ludic reading. Type A is reading to calm anxiety, to escape from the ordinary world; type B is reading to engage so deeply with a narrative that it heightens imagination and deep immersion.
I have my doubts about the distinction, but what’s most interesting to me about type B is that measurement with EEGs, heart rates, and eye movement indicated that type B readers were entering a state very much like a hypnotic trance. In fact, Nell called it a “ludic trance”.
Another characteristic of this ludic trance was that if someone was interrupted, it took time for them to return to the ordinary world. It was literally an altered state.
The point I found most interesting was that there was one thing that could pretty certainly prevent ludic reading: being told ahead of time that you’d be tested on the contents. Needing to remain conscious of the text prevented becoming immersed.
I think this is the root of the Gatsby Wars. When a teacher assigns The Great Gatsby today, it’s with the expectation that students are going to have to answer questions about it. While it’s clear some people do find pleasure in reading it — H.L. Mencken, the great cynic, called it “nearly perfect” — but that expectation of being tested on it breaks the trance for most.
In other words, turning it into an academic exercise probably destroys the experience for many people.
A lot of the Gatsby Wars have been focused on people on one side, like Larry Correia, pointing out that they sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies to people who are reading for pleasure and contrasting that, people sneering that mere genre authors think their books should be taught as literature, har-dee-har-har.
But Larry, and Brad Torgersen, and others on that side of the controversy aren’t actually insisting that their books are Literature, as much as they’re protesting that reading for pleasure has been discounted.
We can check that. First of all, a lot of the books that are taught as Literature today were at the time great commercial successes. People were reading them for pleasure. Dickens’s readers literally crowded the docks of New York City waiting for the next installment of Master Humphrey’s Clock anxiously waiting to find out whether Little Nell was dead.
Shakespeare, often mentioned by some as not being a fun read, I think gets that status from a combination or two factors: first, it really is written in an archaic dialect of English to which a reader needs to adapt; and second, when it’s assigned in class, it comes along with that dread ludus-killer, the questions on the test.
But people did go to Shakespeare’s plays for pleasure — he was famously derided by the elites of the time but he made enough money off the plays to establish an estate in Stratford — and people today read him for pleasure, and go to his plays for the fun of it. (At least sometimes. I’ll rant about what modern productions do to his plays another time.)
I actually started reading Shakespeare for pleasure thanks to an English teacher in High School — Mrs Kelly, not the one who fleered at Atlas Shrugged, which was a shame as I’m sure she could have managed a majestic fleer — who made the class read Julius Caesar out loud, going a few lines at a time from student to student. A lot of my classmates clearly thought it was a stupid thing to do. Gringo kids read in a dull monotone, and the Chicano kids’ accents became much more pronounced, nearly to incomprehensibility. But some of us, the theater kids, got into it, and discovered it made much more sense when read aloud.
And I think that, finally, is the key to the Gatsby Wars. It’s not whether or not Gatsby was a good read — some people thought so, but it was a commercial flop and didn’t take off until it was being assigned in literature classes — but whether or not the teachers teach these books, and other books, as being fun to read.
According To Hoyt 
First hee hee
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Not enough coffee to comment.
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🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵Does this help?
😁
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I spent 40 years of my life lucid reading for enjoyment and escapism. I read everything, fiction, nonfiction, etc…
I was never able to enjoy the “classic” American literature due to the horrid and hateful English teachers in high school. I tested out of any college English requirements, so I was spared a round two of treating stories like a frogs on a dissection table. Thank God I was exposed to Shakespeare before school had a chance to spoil the joy.
After thousands of works of fiction, I’ve burned out my fictional lucid reading and visual watching. My tastes have shifted 95% towards biographies, history, science, technical and spiritual. My library reflects the fascination of the actual universe instead of the imaginary.
Reality has become much more interesting as I mature. Creating through hobbies, entertaining family, and gaming with friends replaces the lucidity. Dreaming is reserved for sleep time when not overwhelmed by apocalyptic nightmares.
An occasional pure escapist work does sneak into my life. It has to be epic like an awesome steak meal, not pulpy fast food. Like nuggets of precious metal in a mountain range of low grade waste, these bright moments are rare. Last work consumed that met that standard was from John C. Wright.
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God save me from having my favorite book be made into a school reading assignment.
Author wishes on a monkey’s paw that everyone reads his book: It gets picked up as a school assignment so everyone hates it.
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I avoid every single book/author I encountered in secondary English punishment classes.
The one exception is Shakespeare’s plays, since I was already familar with the more popular of his works before “The Machine” tried to turn them into gray pabulum. Plus drama class was actually educational and rewarding instead of a death march.
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There were books I liked before reading them in English class and (long) after. Not during, except for Shakespeare, who is that amazing.
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I remember one session in 10th grade English where we were taking parts in Julius Ceasar and I got Cassius. I lit right into it and everyone stared at me afterwards.
That happened a couple of times in high school when we did dramatic readings. I could read emotion, but I couldn’t act.
It remains a good way to get kids involved.
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I am an adult. Today I read things that are not for pure pleasure: technical manuals, political screeds, “news,” psychology, the various misadventures of current anthropology on occasion, and so on. For pleasure it can be anything from theory (I’ve read economics for pleasure and fiction as a duty before) to utter silliness.
In a very real sense, my own fiction is utterly silly nonsense. But it also happens to be the sort of utterly silly nonsense that I enjoy reading, bizarrely enough. Does anyone else do that? Read their own stuff for fun sometimes? Perhaps I am the odd one out.
In any case, there are ways to sneak some enjoyment into dull reading. For the active imagination, histories are rife with fertile fields to help the mind grow in all sorts of enjoyable ways.
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I write my stuff primarily for me, so yeah, I do read my own stuff for fun.
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I do this, too. Especially if I’m in a sad mood, as it usually cheers me up. :)
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“But it also happens to be the sort of utterly silly nonsense that I enjoy reading, bizarrely enough. Does anyone else do that? Read their own stuff for fun sometimes? Perhaps I am the odd one out.”
Well, I guess. Because apparently no one else wants to read what I’ve written….
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Yep. Only reason I’m published is because I wanted a physical copy.
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No, but recently I found my stuff is fun. (I’m trying to get back into series to finish them.) Who knew?
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Sory to hear it. I’m 70 and still like reading for fun.
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:waggles hand:
I wouldn’t add the “pure” to the pleasure in the discussion– it makes for more sides than is needed.
Various information sources, including philosophy? Critical reading of a document to figure out what they said– and what they only implied, in a manner that would make it hard to hold them accountable for it?
A job well done is also pleasure. Working to build up skills is pleasurable, especially if you can see the route, and see the return on it.
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I spent most of my free time today on a website of Austen novel chronologies, trying to figure out things like who was born when (and therefore, latest possible dates for marriage of their parents, that kind of thing). Could I hypothetically use that in some practical way in my writing? Maybe? I got the idea from watching Dickensian that you could make a pretty interesting soap opera out of the Austen parental characters as young singles crossing over with each other, but what I was doing today was just enjoying the nerdery and adding to it. :)
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On reading my own stuff- that’s waht I mostly read before bed, now. Especially if I’ve lost the “spark” that makes the characters feel like they’re alive.
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I refuse to feel embarrassment on behalf of past-me. I was struggling with Shakespeare in high school English class and told my teacher that I must have a bad translation (“wherefore” means “why”?!?). Yeah. I did that. After being mocked, perhaps less than I deserved, I made the effort to understand my own language, albeit an archaic variant. These days, that sort of thing requires me to read out loud or it’s just too painfully slow to decode. (The Star Wars in Shakespearian English audio books are awesome.)
I’m definitely a ludic reader. I always have been. I’m the same way with TV and movies, which I don’t much care for because they’re too short. Netflix and binge watching was a godsend to me. For whatever reason, I find the April series incredibly compelling. Several times, I’ve started reading it in “testing” mode to try to figure out why. I always end up sucked into the story.
My ability to read technical books has almost deserted me. These days, I’m more of a Zoomer guy: Look up the needed tidbit on Teh Intertubes. I used to be a consumer of those technical doorstop (vault-stop?) books and I still think that’s a better way of learning, but it’s not a better way to accomplish the task at hand.
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On the technical side:
I can use the Intertubes for some projects and subjects, mostly work related, but I’m finding more often I have to go to the primary documentation and suss out the real solutions and background since Stack Overvomit, search engines, and LLM AIs have hidden or distorted or dreamed the facts even on supposedly simple technical topics.
So I find myself collecting actual project documentation, blog postings and books from knowlegable developers.
I’ve built my digital technical library from free and low cost sources over the past several years. It has served me well in several work and personal projects.
Now I don’t read each book in cover to cover, but I can go as wide or deep as needed. Sometimes I need several different sources to figure out what is needed since authors have a variety of experiences and your needs at the moment don’t alway match theirs.
Case in point: Setup of an RDMS assumed that you would either use a cloud dis-service or Focker. Also that you may have a experienced DBA assisting you with configuration and security. Took the Intertubes, primary documentation and three separate books to setup an instance that I was happy with.
After going through the research and pain “The Hard Way”, I don’t feel gulity putting said software on my resume.
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I did the same. I have a book on C/C++, that I’ve bought at least twice (one got “lost” somewhere). Never read it cover to cover. But it is well creased from searches. The remainder of my tech library got left at the job I retired from. Whether anyone uses them? Who knows. I don’t have a clue. I knew I’d never use them again. When I started my programming obsession, in ’83 (having come to it late), never thought I’d burn out. After 30+ years, I did.
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I can read C code, and have applied a patch when the source-as-provided wouldn’t compile. (Forget C++, never learned it, have no need.) Writing it, not if there’s an alternative. Too many years gone by.
If I want to do a simple “program”, I’ll first look at a B-shell script. If it gets more involved, perl comes out. I have both the Camel book as well as the Cookbook. My last two projects worked on my large MP3 library. The first one copies albums either solo or in groups, while the second one generates playlists for the Linux XMMS mp3 player. All of 120 and 240 lines for each. My last professional job had a program that was pushing 8000 lines for the main .c file.
“I’m not getting paid, and I’m the customer. I’ll do it as simply as I can.”
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At it’s base C++ is C. Simple as that.
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Or was. I did my master’s thesis project in C++ from a tape that Bjarne sent me. At the time, C++ was a proper superset of C and would compile a valid C program without errors. Not so much now.
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I’ve been out of programming now for (OMG!) 9 years. Haven’t programmed straight *C for, 5 or more, years beyond that. Embedded *C++ two fewer years. *C# was the last “C” type tool used.
1996 – 2002 very immersive C and C++ programming. C was for the Percon DOS Falcon unit. C++ was for controls getting around Visual Basic 6 control limitations and double byte character sets usage, storage and retrieval for UPG v2.5 released 6/2002 (Universal Program Generator). I’ve mentioned this program before. It was retired in 2010 (-ish) by DataLogic (Percon -> PSC -> DataLogic). Falcons are now Windows based and therefore C#, SQL programmable, and able to access networks, so “anyone” can program. Way more complicated than that but what do I know? Heck the DOS Falcons were programmable by anyone. Except for the fact that no one programs for DOS anymore 🤷 (trust me, I’m was good, but not “no one else can do this ‘good’). Thus why there was a program generator to generate C code for non C, non DOS programmers 😁. But as stated by the internal DataLogic local group “are not in the business of application programs”. Note “Percon” was restarted in late **2010 by two manager engineers from the old Percon/Spectra Physics (the two companies traded employing engineers back and forth until merged after PSC bought Spectra Physics, then Percon).
(*) Intermec handhelds. Very, very, simple inventory count/use program. No, none, verification of data on the handheld (happened after transferred to larger system), or direct access to network database.
(**) Almost seven years into the “new” job, was not going to talk to a startup. Have no idea what is going on with them now.
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The object-orientation stuff was excessive to what I needed, and the test equipment I was programming spoke C, so C++ was not necessary. One of these days, I need to sit down and figure out Python. I have a temperature recording widget, and there’s a Linux program (in Python) to deal with it, but it does badly with Fahrenheit values. Since my brain thinks in Degrees-F, I want to fix it. After more important things get done.
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I was late to object programming. I understand the concepts and can write the programs. But ask me (especially now) to list the technical terms? Not happening.
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100%
What I did was list the application, brief description of app, my *role, tools used. Which implied depth knowledge of said tools. No, not always. Could have, but not needed and therefore didn’t.
(*) In someways detrimental because “unbelievable” no matter how true. Because I did design, write, deliver, and support, brand new software based on user requirements. Or design and full rewrite in place of the first two (seriously, when you gut 1/2 not working, and add replacement, plus more so that more than 2/3 is your code, “full rewrite” applies). Notice no “part of a team” (had that too, but for lot of applications that part was missing).
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As I grew up reading the King James Version of the Bible, reading Shakespeare wasn’t that big a deal. It’s a matter of familiarity.
Since one of my learning disabilities is a short term memory built by Swiss cheese makers, my subconscious adaptation was to shove everything into long term memory from the start. Which meant that when given a choice, I always opted for the memorization assignment. It made HS English classes marginally less tedious that they had assignments that could have been tailor made for me.
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THIS. (Yes, for inexplicable reasons my Catholic family had a translation of King James… And even in Portuguese the language plays better. ;) )
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Yes! The KJV of the bible makes Shakespeare very accessible. I taught Shakespeare to middle schoolers once upon a time and one of the first things I did was to have them just listen. The rolling poetry of the language spoken aloud does more to capture minds than a quiet reading. You catch the gist quickly and then can enrich your understanding learning vocabulary and the allusions and metaphors lost to modern generations. An excellent movie or stage production should always follow up a reading for young audiences.
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As my favorite college prof pointed out – Shakespeare didn’t write books – he wrote plays, and what we are reading are simply scripts.
Scripts are boring as hell to read to oneself, especially when they have practically no stage direction other than entrances and exits. The best way to “read” Shakespeare is to either grab a group of people and hand out parts for a table reading, or watch the movie (Olivier is best, although Branaugh is a close second) and follow along in the script.
Also, under no circumstances should anyone introduce Romeo and Juliet to a bunch of 9th graders as something they should be able to relate to, since they’re the same age as the protagonists.
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I ‘m fond of Derek Jacobi’s version.
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For those who need introducing to older English, it would be wiser to start with more modern writers and work back. I picked up all I needed that route.
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It’s expectation management: If I’d been told to read The so-so Gatsby, or The thoroughly forgettable Gatsby, at least I’d have gone in to it with the right mindset.
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I love the line in the movie Ashby where the English teacher assigns, “Catcher in the Rye, a story about a whiny narcissist who deserves everything that happens to him.”
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In the gender split of liking books, I find that Catcher in the Rye is almost universally hated by teenaged girls. They’ve had to deal with too many real-life versions of Holden Caulfield.
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That I didn’t know, but it makes perfect sense.
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In other “classics” news, I remember being gobsmacked when a colleague expressed sympathy for Willy Loman. I’ve seen several performances of Death of a Salesman and left each one wondering why anyone thought it had any redeeming social value.
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I left each one thinking the writer needed an helicopter ride. Because — whispers — he did. As in, card carrying.
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If my English teacher is to be believed, the title is ironic. Gatsby outwardly has it all, but in truth he’s anything but great. (Honestly, not a bad theme. It’s just attached to a mopey story.)
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I’m currently reading book 12 of Missy the Werecat (More Missy Adventures at West Point). It’s as bad as it sounds, but I like it. It’s so incredibly naive and young adult (although explicit sex snuck in at some point). It makes me nostalgic for the halcyon days when I, too, believed in Truth, Justice, and the American Way (and teenage sex). I even get to laugh at myself when something super ridiculous (she’s a werecat – at West Point; the entire thing is ridiculous) happens and I ask myself, “you’re reading this?”
Because of the authors here, I no longer give honest Amazon ratings (apparently four stars is a bad rating). My rating system is “five stars if I’d read the next book”. You can only blame yourselves that Missy is getting the same number of stars as y’all.
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Okay, i’m curious — I’m currently working on a YA series and the characters are fixin’ to have wild sex. An orgy. (It’s a fertility cult.) I’m kind of thinking to do it offstage. How much sex can a YA book have?
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Okay. I am an adult. Probably a bit of a prude. What happens in the bedroom stays in the bedroom (even if does not taking place in the bedroom). I do not read it. I will skip over it. Make the implication, fade to black. Let the fallout afterwards be not explicit. If something happens later that I missed the implications of because I skipped that scene, I may or may not go back and skim to figure it out, I won’t be happy.
FYI. I’ve taken to skipping books I might otherwise enjoy if I get a whiff of explicit sex scenes if not already deep into a series. Two examples of series I have continued reading: Clan of the Cave Bear, Outlander. Even Outlander, read the first one, did not pick up the entire series again until the 5th, went back and re-read books 1 – 4, and have been picking up newest as they come out. Given it is 4 – 5 years between each book, it was probably 15 – 20 years between first read, and re-read (Outlander was already in paperback when first read). Clan of the Cave Bear? I should have skipped at least the last 2 or 3.
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The other thing is IMO if you make it explicit, you’ll lose readers. You’re showing your age. For you — and to an extent me — any hint of sex was tantalizing because forbidden.
The kids these days are awash in it. Way more than they want. And they fear things “going bad” immediately.
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There’s also the issue of the scene living up to expectations. Anything concrete is almost definitionally less perfect than the mind conjures up on its own, so if the scene is meant to be a great experience for the characters, it’s best to leave it tacit so it can’t disappoint.
It’s the same reason you should never have a character actually tell the funniest joke in the world, or share any excerpts of the (in-story) perfect novel, or show what’s in the Pulp Fiction MacGuffin suitcase. If the reader/viewer doesn’t agree that it’s the best thing ever, the immersion is ruined because you promised it was.
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This.
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There are only so many ways to depict ‘insert tab A into slot B’ and a lot of them are deeply, deeply cliche, and frankly boring to read about. Generally speaking, leaving the details up to the reader’s imagination will be the best bet, as they’ll get exactly what they want.
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I’ve been reading a lot of romances– fantasy and scifi, because that’s where they actually do world building, and I want to see what it is that makes them sell– and I notice that a lot seem to be 1) doing a checklist of actions that Party A does to Party B, and Party B to Party A, with mostly the variation being what order it’s in; 2) they keep having to crank it up when it’s the specific actions.
Vs the ones where it’s about the reactions and vague on the specifics where they don’t have to keep cranking up the actions because it’s connection-with-target vs physical-sensations.
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Which ties into a comment yesterday about the degenerate French aristocracy (or any elite) having g to crank up the physical acts because they’d abandoned any belief in anything outside themselves.
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Precisely. And it’s why series that have a Monster of the Week have to keep cranking up the dial as well, though the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series did have one season end with an episode *after* they dealt with the Big Bad, and it was mostly about them processing what had happened.
“What is the plural of apocalypse?” is a very telling phrase. You want to keep surfing along highs and lows, or you’re going to get to an unsustainable place.
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Contrast that with action scenes. There are a ton of them, in book after book, yet they’re almost always onscreen. Why doesn’t the same rule apply? Because the circumstances vary: different locations, characters, weapons, and tactics to keep things fresh. Whereas there’s only so much you can do with two naked human bodies.
…which also explains paranormal romance. It’s “What if Jackie Chan had a grenade this time?” but for sex scenes.
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Never found it tantalizing.
Not a voyager.
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dep729 said
I suspect you (or perhaps autocorrupt) are channeling our dear Hostess and her skill at spooneristic typos.
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Oh, that makes sense. I was puzzled
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It’s the word for someone with wanderlust. Which is definitely a real kink and not something I just made up right now.
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Not a competition. Honest. I can autocorrupt words with the best. Without the excuse of English as a second language.
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Oh, I do this in EVERY language. It’s a brain glitch, I swear.
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Ah, autocorrupt. I used it in Atlanta Nights, carefully accepting a wrong suggestion for every word. I have heard high praise for my chapter’s malapropisms.
I think that in the sentence, “It was orthogonal” I meant “octagonal.”
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she meant voyeur :D
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Thanks.
My google failed, badly!
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figured as much :-) .
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It’s like my readers are fluent in typo….
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LOL
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Short version: Imply and summarize for an R, not X, rating.
I think it depends on the readers versus the characters.
Missy and friends enter West Point about halfway through the series (I’m not looking it up). She’s a senior in Book 13 (finished book 12, yesterday). That makes her and her friends 21, which is plenty old enough to be having explicit sex. And, to be fair to the author, the explicit sex does take place in committed relationships, not one-night stands, which happen but are not detailed.
What age are the readers? Are they middle schoolers who want to grow up to be Missy? Are they high schoolers who want to go to West Point? Are they old (like me)?
Other than explicit lead-in (e.g. feeling an erection through clothing), my opinion is that explicit sex should be left out – young adult or otherwise.
“There are only so many ways to depict ‘insert tab A into slot B’ and a lot of them are deeply, deeply cliche,”
This is true – and it only gets worse with groups. In real life, someone always gets shorted (pun intended), at least so I’ve heard :) Trying to write that “interestingly” may be more than you bargain for. Perhaps a compromise. Write it as if you are watching a mostly dark room. There will be some flesh, but it’s mostly vague outlines and movement. If you’re following the “invoke all the senses” rule, there are also noises and smells, the description of which will probably drive away even more readers.
My current WIP, as much as there is one, involves gay werewolves and I’m having the same discussion with myself. My current plan is to write the sex as it comes up, then remove most of it for publication. Depending on my mood at the time, that varies from “insert sex scene here” to explicit details. For my own reading, explicit is fine. However, if publication ever happens, I do want to make some money and explicit gay sex will drive away potential readers.
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Guilty.
I’ve read the series too. I’ll re-read at some point.
Pure escapism. The very premise of Werecat makes it ridiculous.
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“Still, I started reading early — I can’t really remember a time when I couldn’t read.”
ANOTHER ONE!!! Can I get a HELL YEAH from y’all??
I too can’t remember a time I couldn’t read. My first-grade teacher was a stone b[HONK] who lectured my mother about teaching me to read “too early.” (Mom majored in doormat and is very susceptible to Arguments From Authority, so she didn’t answer back. But it’s not like you can unteach someone reading.)
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Maybe not, but I’m sure our current ‘education’ establishment will give it a go.
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As best as I can recall, I started reading in first grade with the (in)famous Dick, Jane, and Sally books. Subsequent reading was forgettable, including the programmed bit (read a short piece, take a test on it. Arggh). Don’t recall much until around third grade. One of my older brothers had problems reading, and phonetic flash cards were around for K-2. Helped me get a leg up, though vocabulary was an issue. Crashed and burned the first time though Starman Jones in 5th grade, but reread it later.
In third grade, I joined the Cub Scouts (not for long–being the sole Odd in the group was a showstopper), but I kept the subscription to Boy’s Life. The Time Machine stories started a love for SF, and the school-sponsored paperbacks got me a copy of Robert Silverberg’s Revolt on Alpha C. By then I was hooked.
Christmas presents were YA (abridged?) versions of various classic books. Robinson Crusoe was one, as was Huck Finn. I must have read Tom Sawyer somewhen; at least the plot elements are in memory. Mom also got the Reader’s Digest condensed books, and they were fair game. Still, SF was key. The town library had good SF sections (Juvenile and adult), and I was a frequent visitor.
Read (as required) and didn’t enjoy The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye in high school. IIRC, Silas Marner was worse. Some of the other books were kind of fun, like Spoon River Anthology. Got a good dose of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, MacBeth, Merchant of Venice
College Freshman Rhetoric, we did Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. I think it was supposed to be billed as anti-technology. Whatever, though it caused me to acquire KV’s short story collection (Monkey House), which had some good work in it. Read a couple more of his novels Slaughterhouse Five (sounds better auf Deutsch, Schlachthaus Funf) and was bored by The Sirens of Titan.
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My reading didn’t take off until the end of first grade, when I got my glasses. I was below grade level at the beginning of summer and above it at the end. My mom was always glad that dad couldn’t make that eye doctor appointment, so they took me instead.
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I know I was reading when I was 3, but I’m not sure exactly how much earlier. I think my mom’s baby books record that, among other milestones.
It was a good thing, because it helped my parents find out that I was extremely nearsighted. (I had astigmatism too, but they needed the eye doctor to find that out.)
My brothers also learned to read early, so it wasn’t a big thing in my family.
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Also, my mom was an elementary school teacher by trade, and had a ridiculous number of beginner books around the house, and everybody read to us. So it would have been shocking for us _not_ to learn to read early.
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I went the other way: when my third grade teacher noticed I was having trouble reading the blackboard she suggested my parents take me to the eye doctor.
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Third grade for me too, because they were trying to teach me cursive.
My handwriting never recovered.
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Me too (on the not remembering to learn to read). I could clearly read (simple Dr. Seuss, Go Dog Go etc) at 4 in preschool. Mom said the ladies thought I had just memorized the books they tried me on until they fished out an older book and I made a fair attempt at that (I do not even remember this). I do remember being bored stiff in first grade as the Dick and Jane books were way too simple and didn’t have any story as such. I was reading Tom Swift Jr, (mentioned by Mr. Martin above) in late second and third grade. My two favorite books were the D’Aulaires Norse and Greek Myth books with their beautiful illustrations and gentle (and slightly bowdlerized) versions of the myths. I think my name was in each at least 1/2 dozen times.
Hey Wayne St Cyr, sounds like our first grade teachers were from the same mold. Mine was about as pleasant as the Wicked Witch of the West (and not as good looking as Ms. Hamilton). My Mom and Aunt both had had here and they liked her almost as much as I did. Didn’t help that I was a bored know it all sitting and squirming.
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Sounds like my first grade teacher. And yes, I was reading around age 3, because my parents read to me and I picked it up. No book around the house was safe from me, including the encyclopedia. Or Dr. Spock, which I thought was interesting and read more for the medical bits.
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I’m weird I guess. I have some memories of being taught to read by my mother while sitting in her lap looking at the picture books. Of course, I also have some memories of the trailer we lived in when I was 1 to 2 years old too.
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I only learned to read at 4. So, yeah, I have memories.
As far as I can tell I learned by getting people to read me comics. The short wording, with the vivid picture created associations. And I MUST ADD Portuguese is RIDICULOUSLY phonetic. So it’s embarrassing I didn’t learn earlier.
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I never understood the hatred of the Great Gatsby. It wasn’t *that* bad. I have read it a few times voluntarily.
I much prefer Louisa May Alcott or L. M. Montgomery, of course.
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Agreed. I reread it every few years (last was February 2023) and find something different in it each time.
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It’s the overboiled brussel spouts of secondary education designated American “litter-ture” exposed to students, where reading isn’t for fun but indoctrination. All part of the US junior prison system.
It’s pumped up to be some great standard, taught to as to elicit a narrow standard set of responses like a test subject. The message is “You should love/respect this work, if not, at least parrot the right answers to get the grade, then memory dump this if not needed.”
If I recall correctly, I received the desired marks on my essay, passed my finals and I don’t recall a darn thing about the work to make me want to read it again or view any movies based on it.
At least it wasn’t as bad as “Sister Carrie” being taught by a male hating crone.
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Same. Read the requirement as fast as possible, pass the required tests or book report. Immediately forgot whatever. Read what I wanted to read while everyone else caught up. Said personal reading did not impart what PTB wanted because my reading theme is always independence, defiance, and non-compliance.
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Oh, man, Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy because it was supposed to be good. It was not good.
OTOH, at least it had some crime in it.
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“There’s no crime in this book!”
“That book’s very existence is a crime.” :-P
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I really do think it’s a large part the “reading to be tested” thing. That said, I find Fitzgerald boring overall.
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I think to enjoy The Great Gatsby you need some sort of early cultural marking I don’t have. Either because raised abroad, or because well, weird. To me it was words on a page. Never came to life and entirely forgettable.
And to Herb’s point: of those three I ONLY EVER LIKED HEINLEIN. Block is “Stop reading this. No one is paying you to.” I.e. I can read it, I just can’t enjoy it.
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I liked The Great Gatsby for the narrator, The Catcher in the Rye for the narrator and the title metaphor, and The Scarlet Letter for the purple prose. But I don’t remember all that much of them, and I haven’t reread them to see how they hold up.
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I read The Scarlet Letter in 10th grade English, never reread it. But when I took the AP test, I had to write an essay on a piece of literature and even though I’d just spent a school year reading Cervantes, Milton, Dante, Michaelangelo’s bonnets, icky required Faulkner, Joyce, my mind went totally blank and I wound up writing on The Scarlet Letter.
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Dumping on the rubes and feeling ‘superior’ is the whole point of Literary Snobbery. :-P
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Dumping on the snobs and feeling ‘superior” is the whole point of Genre Superiority at this point.
We have genre writers doing to Gatsby what Literary Snobs do to our books. It’s not any more attractive.
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This was the first round that pissed me off as someone who does enjoy Gatsby and re-reads it every few years. It pissed me off for one reason.
A multiday line by line Twitter fisking of Gatsby is no different than when one of the “you must read this” asshats does the same to your favorite Heinlein or Lawrence Block novel.
And those of us who like Gatsby (and Heinlein and Block…those two weren’t random choices) are going to react the same way.
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Ok, when I saw the picture with the article before even reading the title my first thought was “Who The Heck Fires a Cannon FROM a Library?????”. Like, no matter what that place is going up in flames! /silly me
I got bored with the Great Gatsby when I had to read it for High School English, along with most other assigned books. And got in trouble at times because I would rather read than go do the sports ball stuff.
I didn’t want to read when I was young, then my parents gave me a couple of comics, and my Dad was unhappy from there on, I think I went from comics to comics and books, to comics, books, and anything to feed the habit and why are you bothering me?? I have reading to do! Very quickly.
Some books I just bounce from, even authors I love. I have tried to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” several times, and I bounce a third of the way through every time. Don’t know why, I just hit a point and I’m out. Only RAH book I have that issue with, but it’s there.
And Shakespeare’s plays need to be done out loud, otherwise it doesn’t work. It’s the rhythm of the spoken language that makes it work, at least that’s what my 2 cents say.
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I also bounce off authors I love. I’ve only read the Cat Who Walks Through Walls once, for instance. Just didn’t catch me.
I can’t stand Heyers historicals
And there’s a Ringo Series I bounce of off. I mean, it’s okay, it’s just…. words on a page. I put it down and forget.
Oh yeah, and the ONLY Butcher I like is Dresden. The rest? Words on a page.
I’m not saying they’re bad, note. they’re just not for me. Whatever it is that attracts people in them, doesn’t do a thing for me.
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Stranger, I read a time or three in the V1.0 version. I bought a hardback of V2.0, sampled a few pages, and it’s in a Round Tuit TBR status. Since I got a Kindle in 2014, I find I have to make a special effort to get into a dead tree book. Some of my old favorites have been repurchased as eBooks, at least partly due to the fact that lunchtime on market day is when I have an uninterrupted opportunity to read. Easier to put the Kindle in the satchel (bike messenger bag from when I rode a lot), knowing that the sleeve (from Tandy) will protect it from minor accidents..(Unfortunately, the latest version of the Kindle Fire is a bit too big for the Tandy sleeve, and it’s a bit more fragile-feeling than the Mark I version. OTOH, the old one still works, so it’s my offsite Kindle until it dies. No more suitable sleeves from Tandy, last I looked.)
Some of the Heinlein books want to be reread a few times, while others I read once and that’s quite enough. Many of the juveniles are like the latter, though Farmer in the Sky and Starman Jones are calling. In the adult novels, I Will Fear no Evil doesn’t raise any urge to reacquire.
Of the later works, Job is one I have difficulty with, I suspect due to RAH’s apparent hostility to things religious. Cat wasn’t a (much of) a problem, though encountering one of many of LL’s offspring was a bit jarring. Sunset and Friday appeal and hit the TBR list.
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Get one of the bright colored, rubber-like, rugged Kindle Fire cases that are meant for little kids. I’ve dropped that one multiple times, and it’s still going. (“Amazon Kid-Proof Case” was the name, back when.)
I also have gotten good results from the Roiskin case, which has a kickstand, and a weird but useful handstrap made of Velcro. Also very rugged.
My old Tuatara case was also awesome and had a good kickstand, but I don’t think they make those anymore.
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Both of those Kindles are largish. OG was 8.9″ screen, and the new guy is a half inch bigger, so when tablet computers were that size, the Tandy did well. It was a very snug fit, but I was able to stretch the leather just enough. Not practical for the new Kindle; not as much glass in the screen so I’m not willing to risk killing it.
Staples sells tablet cases, so that’s yet another option. Don’t have any desire to get the raw leather and punch lots-o-holes to do a custom one. The new Fire is great at home, so until something happens, I won’t mess with success.
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I certainly understand the ludic reading/totally immersed in the book thing, having read fiction that way my entire life. I don’t get people who can be reading something they are enjoying for exactly fifteen minutes then turn off the light – if I am into a book I have trouble just stopping.
But the “can’t remember good books for the book report” was not me. I remember at one point when I was out of new stuff to read, I think probably in my late teens, I had to consciously decide to forget what had happened in a paperback I wanted to read again (I think it was something by RAH) so I could enjoy rereading it. As far as I recall, before that I could look at any couple pages, go “oh I’ve read this”, and remember pretty much everything from any fiction book I had enjoyed.
I wished in college I could just switch that back on for textbooks. No such luck.
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–
Same.
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I used to be able to do a fair approximation of that for *everything* I read, but it got excised from my brain in a surgery about 17 years ago. (teh sads)
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eh. hitting my head a few times did that.
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Alamosa? Nice. I spent the summer of 1994 there. I quite enjoyed it.
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On purpose? :-)
It is a nice little town. 212 Main Street was my father’s store. 60 years ago.
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Been through Alamosa many times, and Taos. Lived in Campo, CO for 2 years, and Dove Creek CO for 2 years.
As for reading, I have a cassette tape marked 18 April, so I would have been 21 months old solidly reading Dick and Jane books.
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Ah, just outside Alamosa was my first speeding ticket in 10 years. ‘Twas in the age of the 55 limit, and as I left town, got a bit heavy on the go-pedal. Mr Officer was coming into town with radar active, and he got me at 70mph. (Probably a “fair cop, but society is to blame”.) OTOH, the fine was affordable…
My next trip through Colorado was going through the Eisenhower Tunnel in a carburated truck. Going downhill, I was a bit enthusiastic, and touched the brakes when I saw the police. Just got a warning for that.
After that, I switched to Wyoming for trans-Rockies driving.
Great Sand Dunes (Nat’l Monument at the time, circa 1984) was nice, but the wind! Keeping my tent from blowing away was a challenge. The next day was at Mesa Verde. Loved that place.
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Great Sand Dunes … was nice, but the wind!
Pretty much how they got there.
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A-yup. I was familiar with the dunes along Lake Michigan, not as much wind (or not all the time) and wasn’t considering the really big dunes and how they got that way.
Seriously thought about re-stowing the tent in the truck and sleeping in the back.
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The Oregon Dunes south of Florence. There are other locations on the Washington/Oregon ocean stretches that have sandy beaches and sand dunes (Long Beach), just not as extensive. It is rarely not windy. Sand is always invading Hwy 101.
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I’ve been to the Oregon Dunes, but growing up, the Indiana Dunes (SE Lake Michigan) were a common day-trip, and we spent a few vacations along the Michigan dunes. (Since the campsites were on the lee side of the dunes, it was easy to think of it as “not very windy”.)
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Oregon coast, in general, the words “not very windy” is a rare gem. Does not take far off the Beach or Dunes to get *away from the constant hard blowing cold wind. But no wind (it is Always C O L D) on the beach or dunes is rare.
(*) Florence or Reedsport themselves are usually not windy, or as windy in the winter. Nor was Baker BSA Camp (across hwy 101, east ~1/2 mile east). But climb the dune across from Baker access road, and the wind made itself known.
Hubby has a story he tells about his first week in Corvallis and meeting his dorm-mates. First note, he was raised in Lemon Grove out in the (then) outskirts of San Diego. Transferred in from San Diego State (???). Everyone gets moved in. Dorm-mates say “How about making a run to the beach? (Waldport or Newport, he doesn’t say, not important). Mr. From-San-Diego wears shorts, no-sleeve-T, flip flops, and no jacket or sweatshirt … Pause for dramatic effect … and (come on fellow Oregonians who live close enough to the coast to know what follows) proceeds to freeze (that is the BSA/team sport version, adult version has swearing).
FWIW the deep shelf off of most of the Oregon Coast and the wind make for great surfing, and wind surfing. But you Must be wearing a cold water suit, and be an excellent swimmer. The water is C O L D, the rip currents are viscous, and do not forget that deep, deep, drop off.
There can be nice days on the beach with light wind, usually fall and spring. Very few. But it happens. Lore is, if it is Hot in the valley, it is windy on the coast. Winter & Spring? Well most of our valley weather storms roll in from the west.
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Growing up we went to the coast often. But more often to eastern Oregon, or N. Umpqua (almost every weekend, unless hunting). Until I was to start college. Then mom & dad got a boat and salmon fished out of Windy Cove Reedsport (well named FWIW). Eventually commercial fishing for about 20 years (other neighbors were doing the same, as much as a social club).
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When I first moved to the Left Coast in 1974, I took the scenic route to drive from the Midwest. Went up to Minnesota, stayed at Lake Itasca one night, then took US2 west to Glacier Nat’l Park. It was late May and I wasn’t due to Silicon Valley until mid June, so after getting rained out at Rainier, I made it to the coast. Took US101 through Oregon and hit Harris Beach by Brookings.
I wasn’t aware of the Chetco Effect (SW Oregon’s version of the offshore winds–think of Los Angeles’ Santa Anna winds having a nice sister), but the several days I was there, that was the condition. Highs in the mid-60s to 70s, little wind, it was perfect.
The conditions held as I went further south. State park by Fort Bragg, CA was very nice. Went back there in the ‘aughts midsummer, and we froze. Our Lab-Aussie hated it. We came back north and stayed at Harris Beach for a night. The winds died down and it was pleasant, though not the full Chetco effect. OTOH, the mill near the park was running a swing shift. Sleeping was, aspirational that night. Tent trailer, so no sound reduction. Not sure if any mills are active there now, what with the barred/spotted owl mess and major fires.
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My best friend in school went to San Diego State, 1970-74. His dad was an engineer in the Midwest and retired to San Diego, so my friend went there. Good school, from what I’ve seen.
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I also don’t remember when I started reading. I do remember being insulted at age 6 or 7 being asked by a lady if I could read
I had a Junior High English teacher that would borrow one of my SF anthologies (maybe a Hugo Awards?) and pick one story for me to write a report on after I had finished the class reading assignment (way ahead of the rest of the class). She only got miffed at me once when we were reading The Most Dangerous Game. I had not read it yet, but being a follower of Heinlein, knew immediately what that game would be and said so. She thought I had read ahead.
I did bemuse my College Lit teacher on discussions of The Metamorphosis. Of course the discussion was all about it being a metaphor for alienation, psychological issues etc. My input was maybe he actually turned into a bug. To his regret the teacher asked how that was possible,
To his credit he did give me an A in the course despite my takes on “great literature” (Wuthering Heights: Bad things happed to people that deserved it, none of them the things or people, interesting in any way)
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Wuthering Heights is comedy. You ain’t convincing me otherwise.
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Yay!! I too told a professor that the story made more sense, were Gregor really a bug. I went more the fantasy route, and noted that it would have fit perfectly into The Twilight Zone.
He didn’t hate me, but he did mark me down for no sufficient reason. Ha.
Fortunately it was in a summer enrichment program, and didn’t really affect my grades.
The entire program was sort of a Stern Warning that college wasn’t going to be All That. I don’t think they intended this, but it was.
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The thing about Metamorphosis was that being a bug was not interesting. At no point does he brush on what being a bug is like. It’s all about being not-human and disgusting.
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The only book I ever rebelled against was A Day No Pigs Would Die. I knew more than enough about Shakers and farming to be able to pick it to pieces and did so when my teacher asked me why I didn’t want to read it.
When we read Othello, we each took a part and read it; I insisted on doing Iago, and if we’d had scenery, I’d have been chewing it to pieces. My teacher got into it with me (he was reading Othello’s part) and we had a wonderful time hamming it up.
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Well, if it was a commercial flop and didn’t take off until being assigned as Litrachoor, that’s a huge red flag that it probably sucks — and if it doesn’t suck, the evidence that it’s well-written probably lies solely in its success at sucking joy out of the world and making you feel like crap when you’re done.
That said, I read Gatsby in college (having been told that it was a stellar example of the writing style of its time and knowing nothing else about it) and enjoyed it. Fitzgerald did a great job painting a scene, setting a mood, and animating the characters. It’s not the type of story I normally enjoy and I’ve never had the desire to read it again, but it’s supremely well-written and was enjoyable enough.
The thing about this good literature/bad literature argument is that it’s almost entirely subjective. Sure, you can pick out markers of good storytelling and effective use of language, but other than that, good/bad and love/hate live entirely in the interaction between text and reader.
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“the evidence that it’s well-written probably lies solely in its success at sucking joy out of the world and making you feel like crap when you’re done.”
Ethan effing Frome.
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Hmm, before that it was one of the paperbacks distributed to GIs during WWII. They’d read anything because they were so short on books.
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Y’know, that would explain the Deep Meaning thing.
Same way that after 5,000 viewings of the same kid’s show, stay at home moms will develop deep theories and canons in a desperate attempt to save their sanity.
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Growing up, I missed meals because I was so immersed in a book, not coming out of the daze until my mother hauled on my arm to send me to bed. I read during recess. I read during lunch. I read while riding the bus, and missed my stop more than once because of it. I read while walking home. I grabbed my book as soon as my homework was done and only put it down when required to do chores.
In high school, sophomore year, we were assigned Lord of the Flies. Go home and read the first chapter. The next day I went into class and stepped up to the teacher. He knew my family were readers. He’d known my older brothers when they’d come through his class. I could see the wariness grow in his eyes as I approached.
“Mr. Bradburn… is it okay if I read a little ahead?”
By now the wariness has devolved entirely into resignation. He knows what is coming. He’s met my brothers. He’s seen me reading under my desk in his very class.
“[Last name], how much is ‘a little’?”
“I finished it last night.”
“Damn it, [Last Name]! I was counting on you to help me with the class discussions!”
I am definitely a type 2 ludic reader. As the meme goes: I often pretend I have insomnia, when what I really have is a good book and insufficient respect for tomorrow.
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Ha! Same. I had a B+ average in English classes not because I lacked the ability to get an A, but because I finished the assigned reading in nothing flat, spent class time reading novels under my desk, and had a tendency to miss the minor assignments because my mind was literally somewhere else.
I was so terminally bored in high school English that it took me almost 10 years afterward to get past it and recognize that I actually LOVED the subject. (And then I was dumb enough to go to grad school, where that love was slowly beaten back out of me…but not entirely; I belatedly realized what I’d gotten myself into and quit before they could finish the job.)
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I got a B+ in English several years in a row. Teacher told me she’d love to give me an A, but my speeling was so atrocious she couldn’t.
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Dang. Me too.
That and reading, for me, did not translate to writing well. Or I missed something in classes because, you know, I was reading … Oh, and it was not because I wasn’t writing, I was. When teachers took exception to my reading in class, I wrote. Teachers thought I was taking notes. Nope. Writing. Not writing well. Not showing to anyone, ever. But I was writing.
Wasn’t until I well after I was writing technical stuff, either because I needed to refresh, or for people who never read it, and here for comments, that my writing has improved. It takes spell check for the reason why my spelling is so horrible (not auto corrupt. I do not allow auto correction if I can turn it off. If not, I watch like a hawk.) When you know it is the wrong word, auto spell check is whining, and you can’t get spell check options to show the correct word? Yea, that is a clue. Pronouncing it wrong, or weird pronounce so that spelling is “one of those things your memorize”, probably both. So I fail spelling, even now at age 68.
While I try, I still fail at writing. I know my sentences can run on. Proper paragraph breaks? Mystery to me. Proper punctuation? Another mystery. In college I had papers of “Content: A, Execution: F, Grade: F”. Not helped that a lot of the spelling errors (not all) were typos (real typewriter). I couldn’t produce a clean type writer written anything if my life, let alone a grade, depended on it.
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When in doubt, Google it to check spelling. It’s the only spell checker that can get 98% for me. Yea, I can stump even Google. oye.
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Yes. When Google does not work, I have stumped it too, I rework the sentence.
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Thankfully, my parents told me that yes, I had to read the stuff that the teachers assigned, but that when I was done I could read anything else I liked. DragonLance? Go for it. Ian Flemming? Bond is a man-whore, but the action scenes are exciting, run with it. Anne McCaffery? Oh, start with this one! Analog? Gotta wait until dad’s done with that issue, then you can have it. StarTrek novels? StarWars novels? RoboTech novels? (The Rick-Lisa-Min-mei triangle was old before the first book was over…)
This kept me from ever reaching the ‘reading sucks’ stage that a lot of junior high and high school kids eventually reach. I was just firmly in the ‘if the teacher has to force you to read it, how good can it actually be’ camp.
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I had A in all language arts despite doing all of the above AND writing novels in class. I had the very great good fortune of being eidetic before multiple head injuries. AND also having the ability to pile the verbiage to eye-glazing levels.
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My chances at an A were always scuttled by those darn zeroes. A+ on anything I wrote, A on every “did you read this” test (if I had read it, that is)…and great big blank spaces in the grade book where I just couldn’t be arsed, forgot the assignment existed, or hadn’t even realized there was one. My mom is a very conscientious sort, smart AND a diligent student…practically a saint, really…I’m afraid I drove the poor woman to distraction.
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I remember the nightmarish quiz about the last night’s reading. I had read the entire book in one gulp and if the teacher hadn’t mentioned something I would have had no idea.
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Please, please don’t try to teach people to read by making them read what they “should”. You cripple them for life by doing that. My first reading material was comic books, and I’ll even confess that for many of them, I didn’t bother reading much of the text. After that it was Baseball Digest because I loved baseball as a kid. Fortunately the Catholic school I went to had bookcases in the back of the room stuffed with Heinlein juveniles.
High school taught me nothing about poetry except how to appreciate a good line. It was in college, oddly enough in a class on “The Poetry of Rock Lyrics” taught by the Shakespeare professor, that enlightened me to the beauty of poetry. Fortunately for me, my mind never focused on “taking notes” when reading fiction for classes, but poetry was different. We were taught to approach poetry as if it were an algebra problem, finding the right answer to what the poet meant. In that college class I learned to appreciate the evocative power of metaphor and to learn that one could not “solve” a poem, but one could let one’s mind flow and surf a poem in all its imaginative glory.
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That college is still there in Alamosa, which I found to be a charming little town. We were camping just outside the town last summer while visiting Great Sand Dunes National Park, and my wife felt sick on our second morning, bad enough she wanted to see a doctor. The clinic we went to was across the street from the college, and I spent two hours pushing my daughter’s stroller around the area while we waited. We must have gone past the college a half-dozen times. Turned out to be a chest cold exacerbated by wildfire smoke inhalation from our visit to Estes Park a few days prior. We all were sick on the way back East. Yuck.
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It’s a University now, thank you very much. Me being a prodigy, I attended classes there when I was eight, and old Dr Kay taught me to run the planetarium. If you remember the town, we lived at the corner of 3rd and West. Both my mother and I were born in that clinic when it was the Alamosa Community Hospital.
I’m so old.
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Read for pleasure all the time, except for X, which seems like reading for spite.
Never read Gatsby; did read Catcher – which was OK, because I was attending a New England boarding prep school; Salinger got most of those scenes right. (IIRC I liked Perfect Day for Bananafish)
English teacher would play an act or two of the current play from the Royal Shakespeare Company recordings. Hooked! I love that stuff. I’d crack up at some of the ‘groundling chow’ Will threw in while the rest of the class would be snoozing. Usual set of Caesar, Macbeth, Merchant and Hamlet. For non-Shakespeare I recall we did Death of a Salesman.
What school really wrecked for me was poetry. They made it like I had to read circuit diagrams of the radio to listen to music. (Air Force taught me to read circuit diagrams, later!)
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@ JohnS > “English teacher would play an act or two of the current play from the Royal Shakespeare Company recordings.”
If those were the vinyl records, we probably had the same set. Listening to them for pleasure (ludic listening?) plus a well-nurtured love of the KJV made my HS Shakespeare classes a breeze.
Plus we got to watch the Zeffirelli films of “Romeo and Juliet” and the Taylor-Burton “Shrew.”
PS to Charles: I looked up “Arundel” and it actually sounds kind of interesting.
For historical barn burners, nothing beats Rafael Sabatini.
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Those nice movies did not exist in 1963-67! (R&J was 1968, TotS was 1967, but later, I think,) Nor did the Kenneth Branagh versions yet exist.
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Mom said I asked her to teach me to read when I was 3. She said no because I would be too far ahead when I got into school. I started kindergarten and all the other kids had done preschool, so I was behind from the start.
I got into reading in 2nd grade. I decided I wanted to be just like my big sister, who loved reading, so I walked into the school library and pulled a book at random off the shelf.
I read The Forgotten Door end to end, and by 3rd grade I was reading on a college level.
If my parents wanted to punish me they didn’t ground me from playing or friends, they took my books away. I got in the habit of stashing books in odd places.
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I get too immersed in fiction, to the point that people around me get worried about what appears to be an anxiety attack or something during fight scenes and dramatic action (fast breathing, elevated pulse and heart rate, that sort of physical reaction), and I have to “back out” of the book to assure them that I’m fine, just reading. Do that often enough, and you stop reading that sort of thing with other people around. Sigh.
I still read anything that doesn’t get away fast enough, other than celebrity and politician biographies and autobiographies, and X-rated material. I need those brain cells, and s-x gets boring quickly, especially when it has nothing to do with the plot or character development. Mysteries … I don’t read many modern ones, but I can’t pin down why. They just don’t interest me all that much. Rumples tail in a shrug.
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I’ve been comfort rereading for a while now. Could the issue with mysteries be sex? I think of fictional detectives I’ve enjoyed:
Philo Vance: disliked his cynicism, enjoyed the puzzles. An utterly sexless character. And when romance figures in the story among suspects/minor characters, it’s the cynical, harsh, well-armored characters who tend to come together.
Ellery Queen: sometimes tormented character inclined to follow a pattern (pick the criminal, believe he’s exonerated the criminal, find he was right all along). Intellectual up to a point; when he changed into a more relatable guy he also got women troubles but never, so far as one can tell, actually consummated a romantic relationship. Of course, the fact that the stories were written by multiple authors contributed.
Poirot: enjoyed the puzzles and the relationships among characters but again, another apparently sexless detective. (Also, when I recently reread two novels, both of them had the same plot).
Lord Peter Wimsy: the exception to the rule, being a man of almost matter-of-fact sexuality. But, once more, enjoyable characters in interesting relationships and worthwhile, complex puzzles. Plus the bonus of two (three if you count Thrones, Dominations ) stories where the mystery and the romantic relationship are perfectly matched.
About the only series I’ve followed recently was The Cat Who… books and I assume they are “cozy mysteries.” They sprawl more and depend on a certain amount of dues ex machina for their resolutions. Q.willweran, like Lord Peter, is sexually active but the actual sex takes place off-page and is merely implied. (When a man and a woman spend a weekend sharing a room at a nice hotel, it’s unlikely they spent all their time playing chess). But they became unsatisfying toward the end and I haven’t been even slightly tempted to try another.
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“(Also, when I recently reread two novels, both of them had the same plot).”
I recently acquired Cards on the Table, which lampshades that by having the novelist Ariadne Oliver make a comment about it and Poirot pointing out her two books which had the same plot. (She was delighted that somebody noticed, since one was a murder mystery and one was not.)
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I don’t like Poirot that much. I love Miss Marple.
Also, try Rex Stout.
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Picked up the first Nero Wolfe novel and growled when it ended with Archie noting Wolfe had let a man go to his death because otherwise he would have had to leave his apartment to testify at the trial. (The man involved had killed the murderer’s father in a crime of passion). Manipulating the murderer to commit suicide is borderline, but letting him kill again, even when you understand his motive…well, that’s a turn off.
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Oh yeah. The morality is at best gray. It gets better through the series, but they’re still enjoyable.
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Well, Ms. Braun was older when the first Cat Who was published. As the years wore on, her writing got increasingly rambling and I’ve heard that the last published book was pretty bad. (The one they WOULDN’T publish, the mind boggles.) I own many of the first ten or so but then they started to go downhill. So I don’t anticipate ever owning the entire series.
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I did read the last one and I wonder if it was ghostwriter by someone who who hoped to take over the series. Polls (Qwill’s lover) went to Paris with zero warning, his home was torched (and no effort made to find out who did it), he showed no real signs of grief over either event and started cosying up to a female lawyer.
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The problem with The Cat Who… mysteries was that they eventually ceased to be mysteries. There was usually a murder and a nominal attempt at solving it, but primarily the goal was for Braun to write little vignettes about the folk of Moose County and tell us what cute things Qwill’s cats were doing. In the last one I read, The Cat Who Talked Turkey, there wasn’t even an attempt at detecting; Qwill was so uninterested in the murder that we never even found out the victim’s name. And while I don’t begrudge those who liked them, I didn’t love Moos County enough that I wanted to hang out with those people while they did nothing.
I think a lot of mystery series eventually devolve into that, and some start that way. I think mystery as a genre has the “Abbess Phone Home” problem where some would-be literary writer shoves a crime into their slice-of-life novel and tries to sell it as mystery.
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And the murderer is always — spoiler —
The business owner. No, seriously.
Older son loved these till he was about ten. When he went off them, I got rid of them.
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Agreed.
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You have read Chesterton’s stuff, right?
Both Father Brown, and … I can’t remember what the collection was called, but he had some near-current scifi.
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Yep, forgot Father Brown and shouldn’t have.
There was one, The Guild of Queer Trades (not sure that’s the right title) where one of the trades involves setting up a role playing scenario. The protagonist receives a mysterious letter and finds himself kidnapped, rescuing a charming young girl, and so forth….only to learn it’s all a show and the letter went to the wrong address, so he had someone else’s adventure. (The young woman, realizing he’d thought he was truly in danger and rescued her anyway, made it clear she wanted to, ah, deepen that relationship).
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That sounds like one of Agatha Christie ‘s Parker Pyne stories.
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Club of Queer Trades.
There was also The Man Who Knew Too Much, where the title character was always detecting who the murderer was, in the very upper crust, and never getting the usual ending because no one would believe it, or it would cause too much ruckus, or whatever. A happy ending was one where the murderer had killed a blackmailer for good reason and everyone suspected escaped, or the murderer accidentally killed himself, and they manage to hush it up in time.
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To TXRed: Just wanted to say that I am currently binge-reading the entire Familiar Tales series because I enjoy them so much. I read them as they came out. Same with Familiar Generations. After I finished the most current book in the latter series, I read those all again. And thought, “I really want to re-read the first series”, and so I am – have four to go.
Thank you for the excellent world-building and wonderful characters that are easy to love and care about. Tell Silver the box for her familiar should be labeled “Return to Sender.” Also “This Side Up”. On all six sides. ;-)
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I think that kind of “emotions that are visible to bystanders” reading used to be more common, because there are a fair number of comedy scenes in books where a bystander is observing someone getting into a book on a train, or on a lunch break.
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My hobbyhorse for “required reading” is– what is the point?
I don’t mean this in terms of dismissal, I mean it quite literally. What is the specific purpose in the reading you are assigning? The way to do it effectively is going to be radically different, based on that.
If the point is to work on your ancient Greek, watching an animated version of the entire Trojan war and related works is going to do a bad job of it; if the purpose is to broaden exposure to cultural touchstones, then get a dramatic rendition — apparently sumdood is doing a version on youtube, and between that and Overly Sarcastic Studios I’ve got a kid whose grasp of those beats most adults.
Shakespeare, but with the additional options of “reading stage directions” and reading archaic language. (Which I actually find easier than translating the heard-word.)
The Oedipus Cycle?
Maus? (For those who missed it, that’s a mouse-based graphic novel which is iffy for college students, being about the experience of Jews in Nazi controlled Poland. It was being pushed as the sole document for teaching grade schoolers about WWII at a school in some southern state, and the media breathlessly reported that they were banning an anti-Nazi book. I’d have to look it up, but I think it was for 3rd grade.)
WHAT IS THE POINT?!
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Let’s have a vote; should TMBR*, like TPTB, become a commonplace?
It seems to be a Universal Truth (TM).
*The Media Brainlessly Reported
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I’m a bit more suspicious.
I don’t think it was brainless at all- given the timing.
Was not too long after Russian backed groups were throwing an abject fit to try to pin the Nazi camps in Poland on the Poles, at which point the media got upset that someone would think “Polish concentration camps” would be at all objectionable.
Keep in mind, part of why the USSR “needed” to control Poland was how Nazi infested they were.
And then we have Ukraine, which is also declared to be hopelessly Nazi infested.
….
Yeah, I’m quite suspicious. Including now being suspicious about why a graphic novel with mice made quite so big of a splash when stuff was much more controlled by Soviet-friendly folks.
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Shorter:
*picture of Russian official sweating and doing a nervous giggle* Why, of course all the mass graves in areas we were in are Nazi caused. Who else would have engaged in mass murder?
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Side note: I hate that American culture thinks that all animation and comics must, of course, be for kids. Of course, it was Japan that decided to have a Ghibli double-feature with My Neighbor Totoro and… Grave of the Fireflies. (The former is a wonderful kid-friendly family feature. The latter is the decline and death of a young sibling pair in the wake of WWII food shortages in Japan, and is apparently as much if not more depressing than it sounds.)
Maus is actually an interesting exploration through the memories of the artist’s father, and doesn’t shy away from some of the difficult aspects, including how people could keep themselves safer through masking behavior and that even stigmatized groups can look down on other groups without seeing the contradictions in their behavior. But definitely not something I’d throw at youth indiscriminately.
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It has bunnies on the cover! Watership Down must be for 8 year olds!
This is animated! ‘Hentai’ must be Japanese for kid’s shows!
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Watership Down was my favorite book when I was eight, but nobody considers me normal.
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I flipped between Erma Bombeck and Patrick McManus, mostly.
There’s a big difference in tone between “target demographic” and “who is able to read and enjoy it.”
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Can confirm. Grave of the Fireflies is at least as depressing as it sounds. Good movie, but rough. In This Corner of the World covers some of the same historical material and starts out lighter, but it’s set in 1940s Hiroshima, so…
Reminds me of the time I took the plunge on Schindler’s List then decided I should watch a comedy as a palate cleanser. Not knowing what it was about, I chose Life is Beautiful. Both great movies, but oof.
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A ha! (Slaps the table so hard that books and glasses jump in the air in fright).
This explains why I found Moby Dick wonderful and exciting and sometimes hilarious, and almost every person I’ve talked to who read it didn’t like it at all. I read Moby Dick for pleasure. Most people can’t get immersed, because they’re reading to take a test. I was in that book so deeply I could taste the salt spray on my lips.
Wonderful essay, Charlie. Thank you.
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I finally figured out to just skip the Whiteness chapter, just like I usually do with “This Is John Galt Speaking” in Atlas Shrugged. At some point I decided it was an old drunk’s tall tale.
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Having never read Moby Dick I decided I needed to read it (Having read Billy Budd that rose to tolerable and Bartleby the Scrivner which was essentially a not bad shaggy dog tale with a dad ending I figured it couldn’t be that bad). I can see why Moby Dick is raved about by literary types. It is totally groundbreaking for its time in the various ways Melville expresses things. Chapters on Natural History in a novel, chapters laid out as a play etc. he is busting the mold left right and center. That said I found it hard to stay in the story as sometimes the artifice of the writing kicked me out of the story. And it has a very HIGH reading level for a modern reader. I have a fairly large vocabulary but there were 3-4 times I had to resort to the built in Oxford American in the Kindle to get the precise meaning word(almost unheard of for me). And there was one case the Oxford American (with like 50 K entries) didn’t have the word unsurprisingly it was related specifically to whales and whaling and I found it on the internet it may have been at the Mystic Museum website. Glad I read it, not going back.
To be honest little “literary” fiction holds my attention. Some of Twain, some of Hawthorne. More modern stuff like Faulkner and Hemingway I find annoying. I do enjoy Shakespeare staged well (E,G, the Hollow Crown series of Henry IV I and II and Henry the V) even with a bit of ersatz staging (Joss Whedon’s As You Like It, and yes Whedon is an absolute jerk, but as the saying goes even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time). In my case I think it is because on average the “literary” types like fiction that leans in harder on character than on plot. If I sense nothing happening I tend to lose interest. E.G. I enjoy Asmov’s original Foundation trilogy. But sadly Asimov wrote rather cardboard male characters, and his female characters (e,g, the female lead in Foundation and Empire or Susan Calvin in I Robot ) verge on being men in drag. But the story Holds my attention even if Psychohistory is insane and the Mule verges on Deus Ex Machina (And Seldon literally is one).
My main concern with reading/literature for up to the 8th grade is that you DO NOT want to make reading so unpleasant that you turn people off from reading. Yes teach the concepts of plot, character, Protagonist, the hero’s journey and character development. I think the desperation to use female or minority authors and to try to accentuate the liberal (i.e. socialistic/ communistic views) leads to the choice of rather depressing texts. It is good to be exposed to that, but perhaps hold it until High school and have something else.
When I was in my weird hippie high school an enthusiastic young teacher fresh out of college did a class in “Dystopias and Calamities” Texts included 1984, Alas Babylon, This Perfect Day and There Will Come Soft Rains with other selected bits and bobs. We actually had some decent discussions, but by the end of the trimester all 8 of us all kind of wanted to slit our wrists even one girl who was Pollyanna by nature. When you do the equivalent of that for 8-12 years instead of 3 months it is no wonder students hate reading.
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My cynical little coal of a heart has been warmed a tad by this.
There’s now a magnet school in Pasadena that was named after Octavia Butler. (Which seems fair, because she was a horror writer and public schools are horror shows.)
But the school library is having a Science Fiction Festival this year, on March 21 from 3-6 PM. The festival is free and open to the public, but you have to fill out a terrifyingly dystopian application online, in order to attend.
The first event will be “Design a Droid,” sponsored by George Lucas’ new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening in 2026. The 501st will also be attending.
Other events include a fungus science talk, coding a robot, acting out the trailer for a non-existent sf film, a spectroscopy talk by astronomers, a city planning game designed by landscape architects, kaleidoscope making, sunspot observation, a world-building activity, uses for GIS mapping, problem solving, a poetry reading, a chance to win a robot, a screening of an “interactive film,” and a JPL talk about temperature sensors.
There will be a free book fair with free books, swag, and school supplies. Snacks will be sold, with proceeds going to the school and school programs.
The winners of a science fiction contest for kids will be announced. There will be a cosplay contest for kids and a cosplay workshop.
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You have to be screened six ways from Sunday to do anything related to a school these days, particularly in California.
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Yeah, they’re not wrong to be careful. That’s part of the dystopia.
But it is awfully cool stuff.
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Also, hooray, I learned a new word today! (Fleer) That always makes for a good day. In addition to a great essay!
I started reading at 3, and was at a high school reading level by kindergarten. Mom handed me fantasy books because–at least at that time, in the early/mid 80s, fantasy was still a relatively “safe” genre for an overly precocious child. So by the time I hit that “you must read this assigned book” I was long since hooked on reading for pleasure. Also, I discovered when a freshman in high school and they forced us to read Great Expectations…look, I read the first third, the last third, and got a “B” on the test. So if it was really awful, I found that skimming worked, because the tests were lame. (And I’d figured out the correct “code” and buzzwords they all wanted in the essay portions of the test anyway.) Only ever had one English teacher who acknowledged that the books weren’t fun–but we had to read them anyway. (She forbade me from jumping in on class discussions, because usually I’d just sat down and read through the book in one sitting to get the torture over with, so she already KNEW I knew the answers. I wasn’t offended–it allowed me to continue reading my own book for fun.)
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So there are the comments! OK. Always as a kid I remember the summer reading lists the schools provided and how I largely ignored them. Over the years I have read a few of them.
. I avoided Lit in college while a history major. But high school provided a junior year survey coverage of American Lit and a senior year of English Lit. Very thorough and I read the parts of the books that were NOT covered in class! Invaluable in the 1967-9 period. 99% of my basic knowledge of Lit comes from that. The rest is from tangential reading. The history bent means I’m always thinking of what’s going on inside and outside the story and most people don’t do that.
Now Gatsby turned out to be an assigned book, as was Babbitt in 1967-8. Gatsby was already dated while Babbitt had clearly recognizable suburban bathrooms. But Gatsby was controversial as in some parents objected. Problem for me was in novels Things Happened but they seemed artificial.
Fortunately i reread Gatsby in 1974-5 maybe because another bad movie remake had just come out and PBS had a (sponsored) series Films of the Gatsby Era. I got more to the story in second reading plus the Library’s copy also included The Last Tycoon I think it was.
So glad to see that Gatsby is still covered. Interesting to see how schools and colleges handle it. The Younger Set needs to learn the Past is a Foreign Country–they do things differently then! One wonders if any of our movies survive as long as Shakespeare? I do know from theatre and literary histories that genres DO fade away.
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OT: CrewDragon has been recovered from the sea, and all seems well. Happy kitty dance, happy kitty dance!
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The slow motion imagery of the splashdown is stunningly beautiful. And they were met by dolphins.
(The fact some folks suggested Trump would invite the dolphins to the White House made me grin).
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I learned to read about 4 years old, because my older brother brought home stuff from school. I never remember a time when I couldn’t read, or something that I was unable to read because the language was too complicated–comprehending it was another matter, mind you!
In elementary school, I was reading on a High School level. My family all read: Dad liked L’amour westerns and the like, I don’t remember what Mom read, but it wasn’t romance or other steroypical “chick-lit.” We’d go to the library and each kid would check out 20 books or so, and we’d often read each other’s book pile. The library summer reading programs were easy for us– “Read 20 books and get a prize? Done!”
I read a lot of non-fiction, history and military stuff mostly. I was primed for Sci-fi by a lot of YA work which is adjacent to it — Alvin Fernald, Danny Dunn, etc.
I began reading Sci-Fi because my older brother brought it home, often in anthologies. But I never really hit Ludic reading as described earlier in this post until Tolkien. I was aware of the Hobbit, but I didn’t read it until 6th grade. I went looking for more, and started with the Two Towers (Fellowship was not in the library at the time). I finished RoK, and all the appendices, then went back and checked out Fellowship. (It cleared up a few questions I had).
My world changed. I had never been so moved or involved in a story, and as a budding poet, I found the language wonderful. I blame Tolkien for many of my interests after that. ;-)
My bête noire was Melville’s Billy Budd, assigned in high school. I hated it…it was such a drag. The Great Gatsby was like child’s play, compared to that. I always disliked the (actually racist) notion that people wouldn’t read stuff that they didn’t “find themselves” in.
I didn’t read to find myself and validate my problems, to be “seen”. I read for the Ludic fix, more than anything else.
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If a book is interesting, reading it is enjoyment. Fiction, nonfiction, tech stuff. If the author is good (and has some humor) it is good. I pace my reading. Bedtime reading is something interesting but not riveting to keep you awake all night reading (like archeologic and anthropologic dig reports). Dozing contentedly off is good.
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The Gatsby wars are based on-as far as I can tell-snobbery.
If you personally can’t be an English professor at an Ivy League school, you can damn well read like one and teach your students what you’re reading, because that means you’re Teaching The Hoi Polloi The Proper Books, because you’re special.
And if that snobbery means that kids start to hate reading anything? Or wanting to write anything? It just means that they are weak, foolish people that would have never amounted to anything at all in the writing fields.
(I was lucky, I never had to read Gatsby or Catcher In The Rye or any of the other “appropriate” books until I was long out of college. And I was the sort of kid who would read anything, in lieu of dealing with human beings.)
There’s been some attempts at throwing shade by “literature” writers on commercial writers like John Ringo and Larry Correa and it’s…not gone the way the “literature” writers think it should. Mostly because people are pointing at them and laughing.
Oh well, I may never be a “literary” writer, but at least my books will have covers on them where you can see the front of a girl looking at you, rather than the new current thing of Girl Looking Out Over A Scene, where we only see the backs of their heads.
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“If someone can kill your joy in reading, then you were never really a reader in the first place.”
Quote un freaking quote.
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Brought to you by the same people who say that “If you can manage not to write after being totally scr*wed by every publisher, agent, and fellow writer in the business, then you were never really a writer. Even though you put out deathless books loved by all.”
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Any and all abuse then being retroactively justified because you weren’t really a member of the group.
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I’m so glad I didn’t have to read Catcher in the Rye in high school. We had Pride & Prejudice—it was a girls’ school. And the teacher showed us the 1980s BBC version, which helped me (and probably a lot of other people) to see where the snark is, because early 19th-century British class snobbery that’s trying to be subtle really doesn’t come through easily to late 20th-century teens. (The 1990s A&E version is much to be preferred IMO, though a lot of people prefer the 1980s Elizabeth. And… the Kiera Knightley one is a mess from any historic perspective, but if you like it, good on you.)
On that note, if you’ve ever struggled with authors from a particular historical period, sometimes it’s the time dilation. Austen *is* very funny—if you can read the social cues. If you can’t, it’s going to be thoroughly boring. There’s a reason the movie Clueless did so well—it took Emma and translated it for 90s audiences.
I’m still surprised that nobody’s done up Northhanger Abbey as a movie. It’s a gothic spoof, Jane Austen’s earliest novel, and honestly still makes me think of Georgette Heyer.
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I guess somebody did make a movie after all. Didn’t make much of an impression, I guess.
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I prefer the A &E version. The movie should be drowned in its bath.
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What a lovely new-to-me phrase, ludic reading! I looked it up and ended up reading all of Chapter 5 of “The Magic of Reading”, by Bill Hill, MS-Bookmaker. noblemule.gitbooks.io/the-magic-of-reading/content/
I am a ludic reader with a vengeance! I log all of the books I read, mostly so that I can track authors and series I like, and also because it is easy to forget when I last read something, and, okay, I like logging accomplishments.
Last year (2024) I read/logged 375 books. (Note, I don’t log any book I don’t finish.) I was slacking off somewhat from 2023, when I read/logged 434 books, an accomplishment I do not feel compelled to exceed in the future.
I am somewhat behind on books so far this year, but then I am spending much more time reading Instapundit since before the election, and following more links. And of course reading ATH and all or at least most of the comments. ;-)
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Yet another Trump insight because of the, “He’ll invite the dolphins to the White House,’ bit. I don’t know if he actually said, “We can build a tank, a big tank,” for them, but it would be in character because the man is a master of deadpan humor. He can say things like that with a straight face. And if you’re a left-wing pedant who takes everything Very Seriously, you are going to freak right out because you’ll think he’s really going to build a 1000-gallon tank for the Oval Office.
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Like the recent story making the rounds where Trump offered his bed to someone on the condition she didn’t tell Melania.
Literally true, leaving out all the context that make it a totally innocuous story, and showing that they don’t understand his humor.
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They also made the mistake of including the woman’s name.
She was very pissed off!
Not she was pregnant and Trump made the offer with her husband standing next to her.
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I can’t blame her.
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Turning telling the pre-eclampsia lady “look, there I have a room n this plane with a really nice bed – go lie down” into trying to hook up with her has to be one of the more vile things the news twerps have done lately.
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I’m glad it’s something so egregious that the rebuttal is spreading faster than the original story.
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I think it has more to do with where you are in life when you read a book. The problem is that sometimes kids are forced to read a book when they are not ready for it. My personal opinion is that there are periods in a person’s life when a particular book speaks to you the most. If you read it before that point, it doesn’t make sense. If you read it after that point, then it’s all “been there done that.”
I look back to college when I hung out with a bunch of folk who loved Hermann Hesse novels. I read a couple and they were OK, but one thing struck me. If I had read them as, say, a freshman in high school, they would have been gibberish. Now that I’m an older adult, I thumb through them and they seem sophomoric and a bit puerile. The same thing is true of a lot of Shakespeare. While the big themes are not necessarily age limited, a lot of the nuggets in the text are best appreciated as an adult. It’s why you can reread something multiple times and get something “new” out of it each time.
When I was in high school I was forced to read Othello. I made it through most of the book thinking that the hero was Iago. Here was a guy who was wrongfully harmed by an arrogant, thoughtless rich villain, and all he wanted was a little justice. I was shocked when my teacher told me that Othello was the “good” guy and Iago was the “bad” guy. Now that I’m older, my perspective has changed. A little.
When I was a little kid, my father would read to me at night. He read a lot of the Hornblower series by CS Forester. This would have been when I was, oh, 10 or 11. I loved it, but it was all cannons and swashbuckling and such. The real things in there about the horrors and war and the politics and society and marriage washed right over me. I re-read the series a couple of years ago and it was a completely different experience.
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I remember trying to read Dune sometime in my early teens and bouncing. Six months later I picked it up, raced through it, went back to the beginning and started over. I was ready for it.
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Both Dune and Lort of the Rings I read the appendices first, and only later read the actual book.
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I could never get into Dune. Still can’t. Though to be fair I haven’t tried in 10 years. I have guesses as to why, but….
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The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings I originally bounced on. But later, when older, got immersed.
Dune I read as a HS sophomore. Read it later. Eek, I missed implications on most of it!
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I read Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin when I was a teen, and it was okay. Read it again in college and suddenly everything clicked into place—because having the experience meant I looked at everything differently. (It’s set at a college in the early 1970s, for those who don’t know.)
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Wow, Charlie! Reading this, I thought I was reading a biography of my own childhood: learned to read at 4, was forbidden to have comic books, (I bought them and hid them, or borrowed them or read them on Boy Scout campouts) and read whatever I could lay hands on that sounded like fun. Got addicted to Tom Swift Jr. at age 8, and after picking our local library clean begged money from my folks for cheap paperbacks from the corner drugstore and later a bookstore I could bike to, which is how I discovered Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. I went to an all-male magnet high school, and we handed ratty SF paperbacks around the lunchtable for all the four years I was there.
I’m now 72. A lot of my friends in my age cohort would say almost the same thing. I’m guessing that this was the ISO Standard Nerd Ludic Reading Upbringing in our early years. Getting my grandmother’s 1920s Underwood typewriter when I was 10 added ludic writing to the equation. The two ludics interacted in ways I won’t go into here, beyond saying that if I hadn’t begun reading the Space Cat books when I was four or five, I wouldn’t have sold my first SF stories while I was still a college undergrad.
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I was also an early starter and a fan of the ludic trance. I knew that I shut out the world when I was reading but, at the age of 11, I finally realized how severe it was.
I was in 6th grade and reading a book (under the desk) when I came to the end of a chapter. I thought it might be close to the end of the day so I paused to look at the clock. I was the only student in the classroom. Class had been over for a half hour. All of the desks had been straightened and the chairs overturned on top.
My teacher, grading papers at his desk, smiled and asked, “Ready to go home?”
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I bought The Number of The Beast at 9 am of the day it was released in Portugal. Then I went to the train station to wait for the train home. When I next looked up, it was 4 pm, I’d missed upteen trains home, and I called mom to tell her I was not in fact dead.
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I read Macbeth in 9th grade, HATED IT.
Years later, when substituting for an English teacher for several days, I heard the students reading it aloud, and suddenly realized – Macbeth wasn’t a King-King!
He was his time’s equivalent of Tony Soprano.
He and his guys stole what they could by force, whacked them if necessary, and their only morality was to ‘their side’.
Macbeth’s torture was drawn by his remorse at killing his mentor. He LIKED the guy well enough, just not more than he wanted that position.
Like Tony, he was unable to reconcile that betrayal, and desperately wanted to not have done it.
Naturally, as most men do, he blamed his wife for the whole thing.
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Most tribal kings were.
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Most nobility were.
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TBF I’ve known women like her.
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‘Twasn’t Laird MacBeth trying to scrub imaginary blood off his hands, after all…
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