I maintain that there is no more effective way of dissuading a population from reading recreationally than the tactics American public school system employs. Choose bad (poorly written or uninteresting or arduous or overrated) books, determine the amount that can be read in a week (usually a chapter or two), make students sit and listen to their retarded classmates struggle through an agonizing five minutes "read out loud" session in class, get a quiz or test on specific and unmemorable details...and you've added a pertinant point: choose nihilistic books. And, because this is done under the guise of beneficent "teaching kids to love reading", nobody can stop the process from happening to generation after generation, as we collectively pretend that it's appropriate.
I was lucky that I was into Star Wars books. Not high brow, but they kept my flame alive while I watched almost all of my classmates disassociate reading from fun.
Ugh, I learned to sniff out misery porn in kids books from the time I was a teen. Bridge to Terebithia, The Moves Make the Man, Walk Two Moons, and on it goes. I learned to associate that jokey, funny narrator voice with what I called "the sting in the tail", where you get to the end of the book and the protagonist stands on the edge of the cliff and looks at the remains of the bus where her mother died. Oh yeah, grind the noses of the young in it. The only break in this misery train was Holes, which does have the jokey, funny narrative, but it actually tells a good, uplifting story where the heroes are rewarded and the villains are punished. I eventually gave up on modern kids books and went back to older classics, of which there are plenty.
It was a weird trend in kids books starting about 30 years ago I think. Maybe the authors were too inspired by things like Old Yeller or Ehere the Red Fern Grows. You have to give a sad ending... But why? What's the catharsis or the lesson?
I'm reminded of a book I read probably 30 years ago called Jacob Have I Loved. Awful with that stuff.
It would be interesting to get your take on good books to read to children. I read The Hobbit to my boys (6 and 8) and they loved it. We're currently reading the Chronicles of Narnia and they're loving it as well, but I'm not sure what to read to them next. The Lord of the Rings is on the list but maybe when they're a year or two older. The topic might make for a good video or Substack.
I haven't read the book (I think I may have a paperback of it somewhere), but I've seen the movie adaptation starring Shia Lebeouf and thought it was good.
I read somewhere (I don't remember where so I'm not sure how true) that the average American adult reads 2 books after graduating. When you look at the line up they give you in high school, it's no wonder lol
I'm not sure what "average" means in this context, but I do believe many Americans never read a book after high school and as many graduate college, then never read again. At the same time I wonder how it was, say, 80 years ago by comparison, when there were far fewer other forms of plebeian entertainment.
Actually, Gatsby's fate is a little different, and that little difference is crucial (though maybe not for the reasons Fitzgerald intended). The person who gets randomly hit by a car isn't Gatsby - it's Myrtle. Daisy was driving, but Gatsby takes the blame because he thinks that's what someone who loves Daisy would do - and he gets killed for his trouble. In other words, Gatsby is a simp who sacrifices everything (including his own life) for someone who can't possibly appreciate what he's done for her. When you view "The Great Gatsby" through that lens, it's almost a cautionary tale, and one that a lot of people today would do well to heed.
Yeah I corrected this like 2 minutes after I published it and only realized after hitting the send button.
The last time I read it I felt like it just came out of the blue, too. That transition to the last little act was just a random event. I think I talked about it in the Virgin/Chad video. It's very much still a tale about Fitzgerald's own frustrations, I think.
Because of family relocations, I conveniently missed American literature in high school. No one has ever tried to convince me to rectify that.
I barely read anything in school, which is probably why I still read today. I picked up David Eddings' Belgariad at ten years old and rode on fantasy novels, almost exclusively, for the next 15 years.
It's only now that I'm finally starting to read Literature (with a capital L), but I have absolutely no more interest in nihilism, especially now that I have kids. Life is hard enough without the despair. Now that I'm actually an adult, I realize nihilism doesn't make you more mature. It's just loser talk.
Thanks for mentioning the Giving Tree. Everyone I know "loves" that book, but it always gave me such an icky feeling. Why read that to kids?
David Eddings! He's kind of forgotten at this point but he did some cool fantasy books like the diamond throne back in the day.
Unfortunately it came out that he had abused his children and got them taken away by the state. It's hard to know what to think after things like that.
Kite Runner, Speak, Into the Wild, The Giver, are the biggest ones that come to mind when I was in high school circa 2011. Only to be bombarded by cartoonish stories brought on by the likes of Marvel. The Boomer Truth Regime owes me 16 years of my life back.
I had to read "Kite Runner," too, but I'd take it over "Beloved" or "The Crucible" any day. It wasn't all bad, though - we still got to read Shakespeare three years out of four.
Didn’t read Beloved but, I can relate to not wanting to read the crucible. Especially after you learn the truth about what was taking place during the time it was written. The author and his fans are up their own asses with it.
Lucky you - “Beloved” is an interesting idea told in the most tiresome way imaginable. Plus, we’re supposed to sympathize with the main character when she does something unforgivable to her children.
And totally agree about “The Crucible.” I was already on my guard when Arthur Miller admitted right there in the author’s notes that he changed some historical details. Knowing the context just makes it a million times worse.
Oh I forgot about all that! That book is still in the curriculum! Meanwhile, the works of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis are collecting dust in the back of the public school libraries… SMH
As a high schooler I was taught the crucible was about the horrors of "McCarthyism" - as an adult I found out McCarthy was correct and Miller was a communist, and also that the Salem Witch Trials didn't go that way at all.
I tried reading The Grapes of Wrath, but I couldn't get past the third chapter. It was misery porn to an extreme. My father, a boomer, put it best. "All the books were depressing. Just depressing."
Late comment, but your mention of The Giving Tree is apropos. I have young kids and someone gave it to us (a "classic" apparently?). I read it once and thought it was super weird. Then read it again and thought, "This is awful." Threw the book in the trash.
100% agreement. Basically, 20th century literature abandoned Tolstoy's dictum: all literature worthy of the name must be Morally Serious. You cannot present wickedness willy nilly. You need to always be careful with it. It needs to be morally framed.
For example, in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina we get to witness selfish decisions by selfish people, but it is all very meaningful, all within the framework of free will and moral culpability.
Furthermore, Tolstoy also offers the reader a counter example, illustrating how making good, moral decision leads to a good, moral life. In the end, the reader leaves both harrowed and uplifted. Extremely good novel, and nothing like the misery porn of 20th century.
My 12th grade English teacher extended the course so that I would have to read Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." I'm not exaggerating; she told the class that. I was in the one row that hadn't had to read it, and she wanted me to suffer through it, so everyone got an extra book report. I hated that book and everyone in it; it was even worse than Wuthering Heights, with which I grimly started off the year. From the first "retard perspective chapter", I could tell it was pretentious and immoral trash, even though I was at the time a pretentious and immoral atheist. If I could burn every copy I would.
I maintain that there is no more effective way of dissuading a population from reading recreationally than the tactics American public school system employs. Choose bad (poorly written or uninteresting or arduous or overrated) books, determine the amount that can be read in a week (usually a chapter or two), make students sit and listen to their retarded classmates struggle through an agonizing five minutes "read out loud" session in class, get a quiz or test on specific and unmemorable details...and you've added a pertinant point: choose nihilistic books. And, because this is done under the guise of beneficent "teaching kids to love reading", nobody can stop the process from happening to generation after generation, as we collectively pretend that it's appropriate.
I was lucky that I was into Star Wars books. Not high brow, but they kept my flame alive while I watched almost all of my classmates disassociate reading from fun.
Ugh, I learned to sniff out misery porn in kids books from the time I was a teen. Bridge to Terebithia, The Moves Make the Man, Walk Two Moons, and on it goes. I learned to associate that jokey, funny narrator voice with what I called "the sting in the tail", where you get to the end of the book and the protagonist stands on the edge of the cliff and looks at the remains of the bus where her mother died. Oh yeah, grind the noses of the young in it. The only break in this misery train was Holes, which does have the jokey, funny narrative, but it actually tells a good, uplifting story where the heroes are rewarded and the villains are punished. I eventually gave up on modern kids books and went back to older classics, of which there are plenty.
It was a weird trend in kids books starting about 30 years ago I think. Maybe the authors were too inspired by things like Old Yeller or Ehere the Red Fern Grows. You have to give a sad ending... But why? What's the catharsis or the lesson?
I'm reminded of a book I read probably 30 years ago called Jacob Have I Loved. Awful with that stuff.
It would be interesting to get your take on good books to read to children. I read The Hobbit to my boys (6 and 8) and they loved it. We're currently reading the Chronicles of Narnia and they're loving it as well, but I'm not sure what to read to them next. The Lord of the Rings is on the list but maybe when they're a year or two older. The topic might make for a good video or Substack.
"The only break in this misery train was Holes"
I haven't read the book (I think I may have a paperback of it somewhere), but I've seen the movie adaptation starring Shia Lebeouf and thought it was good.
It’s a very close adaptation - the author of the book, Louis Sachar, wrote the screenplay.
I read somewhere (I don't remember where so I'm not sure how true) that the average American adult reads 2 books after graduating. When you look at the line up they give you in high school, it's no wonder lol
I'm not sure what "average" means in this context, but I do believe many Americans never read a book after high school and as many graduate college, then never read again. At the same time I wonder how it was, say, 80 years ago by comparison, when there were far fewer other forms of plebeian entertainment.
Actually, Gatsby's fate is a little different, and that little difference is crucial (though maybe not for the reasons Fitzgerald intended). The person who gets randomly hit by a car isn't Gatsby - it's Myrtle. Daisy was driving, but Gatsby takes the blame because he thinks that's what someone who loves Daisy would do - and he gets killed for his trouble. In other words, Gatsby is a simp who sacrifices everything (including his own life) for someone who can't possibly appreciate what he's done for her. When you view "The Great Gatsby" through that lens, it's almost a cautionary tale, and one that a lot of people today would do well to heed.
Yeah I corrected this like 2 minutes after I published it and only realized after hitting the send button.
The last time I read it I felt like it just came out of the blue, too. That transition to the last little act was just a random event. I think I talked about it in the Virgin/Chad video. It's very much still a tale about Fitzgerald's own frustrations, I think.
Because of family relocations, I conveniently missed American literature in high school. No one has ever tried to convince me to rectify that.
I barely read anything in school, which is probably why I still read today. I picked up David Eddings' Belgariad at ten years old and rode on fantasy novels, almost exclusively, for the next 15 years.
It's only now that I'm finally starting to read Literature (with a capital L), but I have absolutely no more interest in nihilism, especially now that I have kids. Life is hard enough without the despair. Now that I'm actually an adult, I realize nihilism doesn't make you more mature. It's just loser talk.
Thanks for mentioning the Giving Tree. Everyone I know "loves" that book, but it always gave me such an icky feeling. Why read that to kids?
David Eddings! He's kind of forgotten at this point but he did some cool fantasy books like the diamond throne back in the day.
Unfortunately it came out that he had abused his children and got them taken away by the state. It's hard to know what to think after things like that.
Kite Runner, Speak, Into the Wild, The Giver, are the biggest ones that come to mind when I was in high school circa 2011. Only to be bombarded by cartoonish stories brought on by the likes of Marvel. The Boomer Truth Regime owes me 16 years of my life back.
I had to read "Kite Runner," too, but I'd take it over "Beloved" or "The Crucible" any day. It wasn't all bad, though - we still got to read Shakespeare three years out of four.
Didn’t read Beloved but, I can relate to not wanting to read the crucible. Especially after you learn the truth about what was taking place during the time it was written. The author and his fans are up their own asses with it.
Lucky you - “Beloved” is an interesting idea told in the most tiresome way imaginable. Plus, we’re supposed to sympathize with the main character when she does something unforgivable to her children.
And totally agree about “The Crucible.” I was already on my guard when Arthur Miller admitted right there in the author’s notes that he changed some historical details. Knowing the context just makes it a million times worse.
Oh I forgot about all that! That book is still in the curriculum! Meanwhile, the works of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis are collecting dust in the back of the public school libraries… SMH
As a high schooler I was taught the crucible was about the horrors of "McCarthyism" - as an adult I found out McCarthy was correct and Miller was a communist, and also that the Salem Witch Trials didn't go that way at all.
Elia Kazan got shunned from polite society in Hollywood because he dared to point that out.
"Plus, we’re supposed to sympathize with the main character when she does something unforgivable to her children."
I've never read "Beloved", so I looked up the plot to see what you meant. It reminded me of the true story from about 1 minute into this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoNEvwwJZTw
I tried reading The Grapes of Wrath, but I couldn't get past the third chapter. It was misery porn to an extreme. My father, a boomer, put it best. "All the books were depressing. Just depressing."
I think grapes of wrath is probably better than Of Mice and Men, but it's definitely still up the misery porn category.
Good God, have you ever read "The Pearl"? It's even worse than GoW and OM&M.
You missed out on the sexually obscene booba ending.
Late comment, but your mention of The Giving Tree is apropos. I have young kids and someone gave it to us (a "classic" apparently?). I read it once and thought it was super weird. Then read it again and thought, "This is awful." Threw the book in the trash.
100% agreement. Basically, 20th century literature abandoned Tolstoy's dictum: all literature worthy of the name must be Morally Serious. You cannot present wickedness willy nilly. You need to always be careful with it. It needs to be morally framed.
For example, in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina we get to witness selfish decisions by selfish people, but it is all very meaningful, all within the framework of free will and moral culpability.
Furthermore, Tolstoy also offers the reader a counter example, illustrating how making good, moral decision leads to a good, moral life. In the end, the reader leaves both harrowed and uplifted. Extremely good novel, and nothing like the misery porn of 20th century.
My 12th grade English teacher extended the course so that I would have to read Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." I'm not exaggerating; she told the class that. I was in the one row that hadn't had to read it, and she wanted me to suffer through it, so everyone got an extra book report. I hated that book and everyone in it; it was even worse than Wuthering Heights, with which I grimly started off the year. From the first "retard perspective chapter", I could tell it was pretentious and immoral trash, even though I was at the time a pretentious and immoral atheist. If I could burn every copy I would.