A week ago, I wrote about the Suck Fairy, a name for that sad experience that occurs when we re-read a book we liked quite a lot sometime in our past and find that it now sucks. There could be all kinds of reasons this could happen, all of which could come under the umbrella of the Suck Fairy visiting the book while we were gone and filling it with suck.
But what about when we re-read a book from our past, one that we weren't all that crazy about, and find that somehow it has improved? Did the Good Reading Fairy come while our backs were turned and fill that bad puppy with reading goodness?
I thought of this after reading Why Everyone Should Re-read the Books You Were Forced to Read When You Were a Teenager at The Owl's Skull. Jessica McCort recalls reading Huckleberry Finn as a junior or senior in high school. She says she hated "this book with every single fiber of my being. ... I didn't understand its humor. I didn't understand much of the political environment in which it was embroiled. I hated the fact that women/girls didn't seem to come off extremely well... I thought Huck was a pretty horrible character, and Tom Sawyer ... don't even get me started on him."
She re-read it during her junior year of college. "...on the second go around, I loved the book. I thought it was uproariously funny. I was pierced by both its humor and its humanity (I still hated the last several chapters, I have to say, but for very different reasons than why I didn't like the book when I was in high school. And I still didn't like Tom, but I came around to Huck)."
Jessica then offers a list of books she didn't care for in the past and that she'd be willing to give another shot. They all appear to be classics. And, as she said, they were all assigned reading.
Jessica's post led me to mull on a couple of points.
- Somewhere in my reading these last few months (I apologize that I cannot recall where) someone raised the question of what society gains by forcing teenagers to read classics they are known, as a group, to dislike. I focused on Jessica's Huckleberry Finn example because I've heard before that it's not embraced by teenagers. I didn't care for it much, myself, when I had to read at least part of it as a teenager and can recall some scenes I enjoyed when I was older, but even then it's one of those books that I'm glad to have knowledge of because of its impact on what came after it, but that's it. In fact, I wonder if Twain/Clemens isn't an author who is beloved these days more because of his reputation than because of enjoyment or real knowledge of his work. And, let's be honest, was my son the only teenager who spent all his freshman or sophomore year of high school dreading having to read Shakespeare in the spring? No, Shakespeare didn't end up becoming a favorite writer.
- When as an adult we re-read a classic we disliked as a teenager, was the first reading and probably instruction a factor in the Good Reading Fairy experience? Or is it simply that at that later time of life we were experienced enough to appreciate the book, period, whether we had some earlier knowledge of the book or not? The earlier reading was meaningless, maybe worse than meaningless since disliking a work at fifteen could mean we won't even consider reading it at twenty-five or thirty or fifty-five.
Twelve or thirteen years ago, I attended a symposium I remember nothing about except that the professor explained that until the end of the nineteenth century literature was not part of a standard American school curriculum. Rhetoric, the study of speech and writing, was more common. Literature became part of the "English" curriculum in order to assimilate children of foreign families, to teach them to value what Americans valued, the works of authors writing in English. (This knowledge left me a little horrified about having been an English major in college, but let's not get into that.)
What's the point of "English" class these days?
- Is it to insist that young people read The Odyssey, Julius Caesar, Moby Dick, or any of the classics Jessica McCourt recalls reading and disliking? Should we be holding up the works of dead, white, English speaking writers as having some value above all others? And if we should, is forcing adolescents to read this stuff working?
- Is it to encourage life-long reading so that young people become literate citizens capable of understanding writing in all fields of study, thus making them better able to make decisions affecting their lives? Will the works of dead, white, English speaking writers achieve that end?
Those people who believe knowledge of the classics is essential may fear that if young people aren't forced to read them, whether they're at an age when they can appreciate them or not, they risk never being exposed. There's no knowing what they'll study in college or be attracted to as adults. But if pre-eighteen-year-olds just can't recognize the wit in
Huckleberry Finn and how it fits into the historical context in which it was written, or have enough reading background to recognize its influence on American literature, will their exposure to it do them any good?
How many people who disliked Huck in their youth go on to read it again? The Good Reading Fairy can fill classics with all kinds of reading goodness. If we never re-read those books we didn't like the first time around, we'll never find it.
Roger Sutton recently had a post at Read Roger in which he expressed frustration over reading books and finding out, without warning, that they aren't complete. They're the first in a serial. Oh, yes. I've had that happen so many times. He concludes, "Thank goodness Tolkien had already finished The Lord of the Rings before I got to the end of The Two Towers and “Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy.”
I didn't have that experience with The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Interrupted Tale by Maryrose Wood. I had that experience with The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Mysterious Howling, which was the first book in this serial. The Interrupted Tale is the fourth. I've liked them all, but The Interrupted Tale took a long time to get into. These books have a very distinctive voice, one I enjoy, but it's not a very natural one.
I enjoy binge-reading adult mystery series. While I was reading The Interrupted Tale, I started thinking that binging might be the way to read serials, too. How great it would have been if I could have read all The Incorrigible Children books one right after another. There would have been no "getting to know you" period for each book. I could have just lived in the serial.
So what do those of us who enjoy binge-reading a serial after it's concluded or a series after there's plenty to binge on need to do? As Roger pointed out, we often don't know that a book we're reading isn't a complete story. Once we've accidentally stumbled into a serial, do we just put reading the rest on hold for years until the serial has been completed? And when we are aware of a "new trilogy," do we avoid it and make a list for sometime in the future?
Hmm. Perhaps I'll have more on this in the future.
I thought Pierre Bayard sounded very interesting when I first heard of him last winter. Now his book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, is available in this country.
Bayard had some interesting things to say in an interview in The New York Times Book Review. (Though the interviewer, Deborah Solomon, sounds as if she wouldn't agree.)
For instance:
"I think a great reader is able to read from the first line to the last line; if you want to do that with some books, it’s necessary to skim other books. If you want to fall in love with someone, it’s necessary to meet many people. You see what I mean?"
Yes, Pierre, I do. I have learned that there are books I feel I need to familiarize myself with for professional reasons even though I can't possibly bring myself to read them from first line to last. Familiarizing myself with them, having some knowledge of them, enriches my life and shapes how I think of other books in relation to them. Reading every line of them would have killed me.
And:
"You suggest in your book that schools destroy a love of literature, in part because they don’t allow skimming. Yes. Sometimes I help my son write book reports. Guillaume — he’s 14. It’s terrible. The questions are so specific about the names of characters, dates and towns where the heroes went that I am unable to answer the questions. It is the model of reading in France. A kind of scientific reading, which prevents people from inventing another kind of reading, which should be a form of wandering, as in a garden."
I wouldn't go so far as to say schools should allow skimming, but I agree that they aren't doing anything to encourage reading with those assignments that involve finding mindnumbingly pointless details in works of fiction. After going over a page of that sort of thing relating to a sixth-grader's Witch of Blackbird Pond homework, I remember thinking, Gee, I loved that book when I was a kid. I must have been out of my mind.
Not only did the boy in question hate the book, his homework assignment ruined it for me years after I'd read it. Think about it--the schools are destroying the love of reading retroactively.
I can't wait to see if Bayard's book gets taken up by the press and what reviewers have to say about it. Reading the reviews would be sort of like reading the book, right? Another kind of reading?
My failure to take instruction on how to read is well documented in this blog. I am still attracted to books I hope will improve my comprehension, though. I'm always worried I'm not quite getting it. Or, in some cases, not getting it at all. I'm always hoping that I will one day be more than I am.
Well, after reading Think you know how to read, do you? by Tom Lutz, I'm considering throwing in the towel. He does a review of a number of books on the subject, and, to be brutally honest, I sometimes had trouble working through even what he had to say forget about making my way through any of the titles he reviewed.
But what I did get from his essay (assuming I knew how to read it) is that a lot of people who write books on how to read books are just a little bit elitist. I mean, according to Lutz, many of these books are written by academics who don't even like each other forget about readers like myself who see the expression "the text" and find our minds filled with white noise. And then they appear to be very into telling us not so much how to read but what to read. Many of these how-to books include reading lists.
You wanna bet whether or not those lists include Buffy novelizations? Danielle Steele? John Grisham?
Lutz quotes one author, John Sutherland, as saying, "How can we identify the 10 percent, or less, of fiction available that is not crap?"
When I see something like that, I think, Yeah, I do want to be able to identify the crap books in the market--so I can go out and read them!!!!
Is it any wonder my family members struggle in the academic world? I think there's something wrong with our genes.
Mary Leonhardt did a great cover story in School Library Journal a few years ago detailing how schools kill the love of reading. I gave a copy to every teacher and administrator I thought was remotely likely to read it, but it didn't engender the revolution I was hoping for.