The Book Thread

[IthilanorStPete]

I reread Watership Down recently. It still holds up pretty well, IMO, though the rabbits are more anthropomorphic than I remembered; there's a part near the beginning where the protagonists are put under arrest, which jumped out at me as a fairly complex concept with a lot of societal assumptions to have in the generally non-anthropomorphic rabbit culture. I think it's reasonable for the kind of book it's trying to be, though. What I also noticed was that the prose felt a lot more like Tolkien's than I remembered (particularly how Tolkien wrote when focusing on the hobbits), which I think is just a consequence of two English authors writing in relatively similar time periods.

While probably less of an issue, I don't think it's completely absent for subjects like that. I suspect at least part of the reason I never got very into math was that a lot of questions about why something worked the way it did was basically answered by "that's just the way it is" which is an answer that has infuriated me ever since I was a kid. I get that I probably wouldn't have been able to grasp most of the answers but some sort of child-friendly simplification would've been plenty. I knew I'd get to the "why" if I studied math long enough, but by the time I had the option I had completely lost interest.

That's definitely a perennial problem with teaching math. Even as someone who thoroughly loved math in school, running into matrix multiplication in high school was an example of that; it's a very weird formula that was presented completely without motivation or context. When I took Linear Algebra in college, and matrix multiplication was presented and explained as the composition of the linear transformations represented by the matrices being multiplied, that made a lot more sense.

[Sapphire Guard]

Not sure where the appropriate place to put this is. It's not worth its own thread, but the prior Star Wars thread is probably best left alone.

So, I read the new High Republic novel, the Eye of Darkness by George Mann.

Spoiler

Show

(Note: I skipped all of Phase 2)
It's... solid, but runs into conceptual problems. The Nameless are pretty dull, they just function as a Jedi off switch, they're even worse than ysalimiri. Stormseeds and Path engines are better, but there's just... not much to work with, although the writer is trying his best.

Stellan Gios had a good story in Rising Storm, but with him gone the cast is thinner. Elzar Mann and Lina Soh talk a big game about freeing the galaxy, but everything they say rings hollow because they both have an underlying motivation of freeing a specific person they care about.

There are about three Jedi in the area of space sealed off by the Occlusion Zone, and each of them is capable of taking on an entire crew single handed, but the problem is getting aboard their ships without being shot down, because the Nihil control hyperspace. Curiously, they don't ever appear to try to link up with local rebels. That's a potentially interesting setup, but I think it needs to be either scaled up or scaled down, the Nihil are still standing despite taking horrific losses all the time. Marchion is doing a damn good job of keeping things running, but that's in large part because he keeps getting lucky and is one bad gamble away from catastrophe.

[Rynjin]

He's 'pissing them away' because he had a nervous breakdown after his kid brother died and never actually recovered from it. The framing device of the novel is that Holden is narrating all of this after-the-fact from what is heavily implied to be a mental institution.

The issue with the book is I'm never really given a reason to...care. Like that's sad and all, but frankly it doesn't even seem to be the actual cause of Holden's behavior. Nobody is really SURPRISED when he acts out, and never were. He seems to have been implied to have failed out of 5 different schools over the course of 5 different years, but his brother died 3 years ago.

But I will say perhaps the "bad time" did come from the fact that we consumed Catcher alongside parts of the J.D. Salinger biography written by his daughter. It's extremely difficult for me to feel empathy for the self-insert of an author who is such an *******. Salinger has all of Holden's character flaws, and by all accounts went through the same thing of flunking out of school(s) for "failing to apply himself" and lacks even such a great excuse.

It comes across as a sad man trying to justify his unearned loathing of the world and everyone in it by creating a scenario in which he's not just a rich ******* who doesn't appreciate everything he's been given, but a poor misunderstood innocent boy to which wrongs are done.

It's much harder to separate the art from the artist when the main character of the art is a self-insert of the artist.

[Rodin]

I'm not surprised anytime people hate a classic because they had a miserable time with it in school. English lit classes, especially in my part of the world, are immensely hit-or-miss.

Sure, a good teacher might teach about a literary movement, a writing choice that the author makes, or how the author develops a theme throughout the book. But it's very easy to slip into spending your entire unit on All Quiet On The Western Front just basically learning facts about WWI, or spending a unit on To Kill A Mockingbird learning about racism of the time. It can kind of turn into a pseudo-history or -social studies class if you're not careful.

Of course, books are a reflection of their time and place, and you need to understand the cultural context to understand why the author wrote it that way. But looking back on my education, a lot of lit teachers took the safe route by just...exploring the author's cultural upbringing and the topics they were writing about, rather than actually teaching us how to recognize, analyze, and draw conclusions about the writing's messages. I remember being 17 and being given a test about The Great Gatsby that exclusively asked me about plot-points (and fairly nitpicky ones, at that) and had nothing to do with the content, themes, context, or writing style of the book. It was 100% purely "prove that you read this book." I think a lot of English lit teachers skate by with this sort of thing, which is a shame, because actually teaching your students to understand written communication and storytelling would be a pretty game-changing educational milestone.

Compare this to classes like Algebra or Chemistry, where your ability to teach the fundamental ideas is a lot harder to B.S. -- because if you don't explain principles A, B, and C to your students, they're just going to be completely incapable of doing most of the learning and work required by the class.

My favorite English test question is from Dandelion Wine, which is Ray Bradbury's most boring novel about Americana. Out of everything in Bradbury's oeuvre, why the heck would you go with that novel?

The question was: What was the name of the junkman's horse?

I was the only one in the class to get this right, and I did so only by guessing wildly at a good name for a broken down old nag (the name was Ned, if you're curious). I looked it up after the test, and found that the junkman only appeared on two pages. He did nothing of consequence, he was a bit of background scene-setting, the written equivalent of an extra.

His horse warranted one line, describing the horse and naming it.

Now, when you're writing an exam that is testing knowledge and understanding of the novel - what is the point of that?

On the flip side, there was The Scarlet Letter, where we spent an entire class talking about the Puritan symbolism of the color green, and the forest being described as green in chapter 1 being a symbol of the devil. Or maybe, just maybe, the forest was described as green because forests are green.

I'm generally of the opinion that high school English classes shouldn't be trying to do deep dives into a work at that kind of depth. Save that stuff for college where your students are motivated to be there and old enough to be able to grasp and appreciate complex symbolism.

[Bohandas]

The issue with the book is I'm never really given a reason to...care. Like that's sad and all, but frankly it doesn't even seem to be the actual cause of Holden's behavior. Nobody is really SURPRISED when he acts out, and never were. He seems to have been implied to have failed out of 5 different schools over the course of 5 different years, but his brother died 3 years ago.

But I will say perhaps the "bad time" did come from the fact that we consumed Catcher alongside parts of the J.D. Salinger biography written by his daughter. It's extremely difficult for me to feel empathy for the self-insert of an author who is such an *******. Salinger has all of Holden's character flaws, and by all accounts went through the same thing of flunking out of school(s) for "failing to apply himself" and lacks even such a great excuse.

It comes across as a sad man trying to justify his unearned loathing of the world and everyone in it by creating a scenario in which he's not just a rich ******* who doesn't appreciate everything he's been given, but a poor misunderstood innocent boy to which wrongs are done.

It's much harder to separate the art from the artist when the main character of the art is a self-insert of the artist.

I don;t think any of that context is necessary to find Holden unlikable or to find the book as a whole unlikable. The book and its protagonist are simply obnoxious. I read it in school without that context and I found Holden to be very annoying.

On the flip side, there was The Scarlet Letter, where we spent an entire class talking about the Puritan symbolism of the color green, and the forest being described as green in chapter 1 being a symbol of the devil. Or maybe, just maybe, the forest was described as green because forests are green.

I'm generally of the opinion that high school English classes shouldn't be trying to do deep dives into a work at that kind of depth. Save that stuff for college where your students are motivated to be there and old enough to be able to grasp and appreciate complex symbolism.

Or better yet, don't teach it at all. The forest example does seem to be the rule rather than the exception.

People who are deeply into literary analysis remind me a little bit of the scene at the end of Carpe Jugulum where the vampires go insane and start seeing religious iconography in random meaningless natural phenomena. And I've had to talk to so many of them that I'm starting to see the kinds of mad things that they see, and I have no desire to be sucked in any further. They are literally driving me insane.

Of course, books are a reflection of their time and place, and you need to understand the cultural context to understand why the author wrote it that way. But looking back on my education, a lot of lit teachers took the safe route by just...exploring the author's cultural upbringing and the topics they were writing about, rather than actually teaching us how to recognize, analyze, and draw conclusions about the writing's messages. I remember being 17 and being given a test about The Great Gatsby that exclusively asked me about plot-points (and fairly nitpicky ones, at that) and had nothing to do with the content, themes, context, or writing style of the book. It was 100% purely "prove that you read this book."

I don;t think The Great Gatsby had any of those things, unless the theme was boredom and the context was teaching books that are well known rather than ones that are actually good. I recall not getting through that book because I had absolutely no investment in either the characters, the plot, or the setting.

Compare this to classes like Algebra or Chemistry, where your ability to teach the fundamental ideas is a lot harder to B.S. -- because if you don't explain principles A, B, and C to your students, they're just going to be completely incapable of doing most of the learning and work required by the class.

The fact that there ARE clearly defined answers probably helps, as does the fact that understanding math and science is important to jobs that advance civilization, whereas the only time understanding the theme and message of a work of fiction will ever be useful is if a movie or book review needs to be padded for space, or else if one is being menaced by a really lame Ghostface copycat.

He's 'pissing them away' because he had a nervous breakdown after his kid brother died and never actually recovered from it. The framing device of the novel is that Holden is narrating all of this after-the-fact from what is heavily implied to be a mental institution.

This is not a huge secret to Catcher but because it's not explicitly told to the reader, it is something that requires a degree of analyitical reading comprehension to be able to fully appreciate.

I think I must have missed part of the intro when I read it. To me (from what I remember of reading this like 25 years ago) it was very apparent that there was something seriously wrong with this character, but it came off as if he had been written that way by accident, like it seemed like he was meant to have been merely a little bit eccentric but that the author had done a bad job of it and the character came off as full blown insane as a result

[Rynjin]

I don;t think any of that context is necessary to find Holden unlikable or to find the book as a whole unlikable. The book and its protagonist are simply obnoxious. I read it in school without that context and I found Holden to be very annoying.

He's definitely still unlikeable without that context, mostly because I am and have never been a person who finds a "realistic depiction of a panic attack" to be something to go gaga over.

I think I must have missed part of the intro when I read it. To me (from what I remember of reading this like 25 years ago) it was very apparent that there was something seriously wrong with this character, but it came off as if he had been written that way by accident, like it seemed like he was meant to have been merely a little bit eccentric but that the author had done a bad job of it and the character came off as full blown insane as a result

Not sure it's ever explicitly stated in the book, I obviously haven't touched it since HS. But it's heavily alluded to with the way he has canonized his brother who never shows up onscreen and is involved in a flashback that ends with the protagonist lashing out violently and hurting himself in grief. The brother is constantly referred to as an "angel" and not much else, there's no information about him except from when he was a little kid, so it's implied he never grew up.

[KorvinStarmast]

I finally got a copy of The Eyes of the Dragon, a Stephen King book that takes on medieval era stories.

It's a beat up old paperback, and I am keeping it. Easy to read, enjoyable from a variety of different angles.

I had heard a story some years ago that his next book, Misery, was in part inspired by a vehement, and negative, fan reaction to his taking on that genre rather than his usual horror stuff... but I am not sure if that is true.
EDIT: Hmm, it appears that the origin of that story is King himself, so I guess it's solid.

[Bavarian itP]

I finally got a copy of The Eyes of the Dragon, a Stephen King book that takes on medieval era stories.

It's a beat up old paperback, and I am keeping it. Easy to read, enjoyable from a variety of different angles.

I had heard a story some years ago that his next book, Misery, was in part inspired by a vehement, and negative, fan reaction to his taking on that genre rather than his usual horror stuff... but I am not sure if that is true.
EDIT: Hmm, it appears that the origin of that story is King himself, so I guess it's solid.

Man, I don't envy celebrities at all.

[Rockphed]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to still dispute this. I never had a bad time in English class, and I always hated Holden Caufield. He comes across as a character written by a man who has never met a teenager and certainly doesn't understand how they think, likely because he lacks any amount of basic empathy (as evidenced by the way he treated his family). The only thing I ever felt reading Catcher was annoyance, and the only thought it left in me long term was a seething rage that bubbles up inside whenver I hear the word "phony".

Great books are often presented in unappealing ways in English class, for sure. But Catcher is simply an unappealing book. It's about the vague emotional torment of a character I never identified with even as an angsty, abused teen. Which may have been the issue, really. As someone with what I felt were real problems at the time, Holden's incoherent whining was pretty well primed to piss me off to no end. Holden's problems are all self-inflicted and stem from the root problem that he's a dumbass and a slacker, at least one of the two he could fix if he wasn't so up his own ass about everything.

Edit: I think the other thing that gets me, and always got me, is the abject GALL this little ****stain has to be handed so many prime opportunities on a silver platter and just piss them away because he actually has to work just a little bit for them. This guy was set up for success his entire life so far. And no just the boring kind of success; no he has the opportunities and potential connections to do ANYTHING HE WANTS with his life, and just throws it all away because "school isn't fun", and then runs away from the consequences of his own actions. You know how many people I know in my life who would've strangled this worthless waste of air for a crumb of the potential opportunities he has handed to him? And there were even more of them in the time period the book is set.

Just the very IDEA I'm supposed to sympathize and identify with this privileged ******* kid ****ing up his own life while I and most of the people I knew at the time were struggling to just get by is and was sickening. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I hate this book.

I was a slacker who was wasting my time in high school and I found Caufield insufferable. I think I only managed to get a couple chapters in before I gave up. It was like he was a combination of "what stupid stuff do I wish I had been able to pull off in high school" and "how can I make a character as unlikeable as possible".

I am currently reading The Forged Prince (be Michael Laird) to my kids. I would probably be reading The Horned King, but I cannot get it either from my library or on the e-book lending service I subscribe to. I also read the two currently extant sequels (The Torc of Tethera and The Queen of Deceit) because I wanted to make sure I would be willing to read them to my kids before I started reading them. I like the vaguely Welsh mythology, though I think some of the plot is a bit of a stretch.

I recently read the first 6 books of The Fall of the Censor by Karl Gallagher. (Technically, they are all the books he has written so far.) They are mil-sci somewhere below David Drake or David Weber, but they have a compelling story and an interesting premise. The first book (A Storm Between the Stars) reads a bit like Firefly crossed with Honor Harrington.

Earlier in the year I reread Persuasion, which I think is Jane Austen's best book. While a lot of the plot of the book hinges on two head traumas, the primary romance does not progress because of it. Frankly, I think the world would be better off if we had a history of Frederick Wentworth's adventures at sea. Then again, he could very well have been Aubrey or any other two-bit British naval hero during the Napoleonic wars.

I read The Secret Garden at least once and maybe twice this year. I was trying to read classic literature to my children to get them to go to sleep.

[Bohandas]

Not sure it's ever explicitly stated in the book, I obviously haven't touched it since HS. But it's heavily alluded to with the way he has canonized his brother who never shows up onscreen and is involved in a flashback that ends with the protagonist lashing out violently and hurting himself in grief. The brother is constantly referred to as an "angel" and not much else, there's no information about him except from when he was a little kid, so it's implied he never grew up.

On that note, has anyone else picked up on the (I assume unintentional) implication that Skeeter and Summer from The Muppet Babies died while they were kids?

[warty goblin]

I was forced to endure Catcher in the Rye for a bookgroup when I was young, in between an endless parade of Newbury Award winning books about Important Isms, as in this book is 100% about Racism, or Sexism. Character, in these books, is unnecessary, there is only relationship to the Ism. Plot? Ism happens, all the plot you need. The most extreme example was a racism book where each chapter covered a run in with some new side character, and in order to display nuance, every other side character was racist. And I mean literally every other character, if Joe from Chapter 2 was racist, Bob from Chapter 3 wasn't, but Alice in Chapter 4 was racist, and so on. I tried to skim read these as quickly as possible, so I could get back to more subtle and restrained books with some actual nuance, like RA Salvatore novels.

Even in this lineup of literary tedium, I really hated Catcher in the Rye. To be clear, I don't require the protagonist of a novel to be likable, sympathetic, relatable, or a good person. I just require them to be interesting, and there was nothing interesting about Holden Caulfield. Admittedly the angle the adult leading the book group went with to try to sell us on the novel was that he was, like, alienated, man, and wasn't that deep? No, he's a whiny little jerk, this isn't interesting or deep, it's just a surface level personality defect where a character should actually be. I think backfilling how he's (maybe) in the mental hospital because his brother (maybe) died at (maybe) some point is doing the same thing, except with tragedy and mental illness instead of being a boring little jerkwad for no reason because, like, society, man. So what? He's still a boring jerkwad, vague tragic backstory and/or mental illness isn't a character, they're things that happen to characters. And Holden Caulfield is still the sucking chest wound of characters, just an unpleasant and fatal wound in the core of the novel.


Anyway, my assault on Book Mountain continues.

Finished HMS Tiger at Bay. This is a good one, well worth the read if you have battlecruisers on the brain.

Am wading through the second Aurion book, which is so nineties you can just see A Game of Thrones on the horizon, waiting to end this genre's entire business. It's entire protagonist-worshipping, lazily world built, lurchingly plotted business. This isn't so much good as it something I can read on auto-pilot while falling asleep. Eminently skippable, if you're looking for turbo-levels of nineties fantasy done well, read Elizabeth Haydon.

When not passing out onto whatever I'm reading, I'm having a go at the Complete Earthsea collection my fiancé got me for Christmas. The individual books are short, but there's a lot of them, so it comes in at a wrist-straining 1000 pages in big hardbound, so it takes a while. But it's quite good, I vaguely remember reading A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Ataun in the extremely distant past, but no detail.

[Mx.Silver]

On the flip side, there was The Scarlet Letter, where we spent an entire class talking about the Puritan symbolism of the color green, and the forest being described as green in chapter 1 being a symbol of the devil. Or maybe, just maybe, the forest was described as green because forests are green.

Yeah, forests are generally green. So if an author wanted to introduce the idea of 'green' into a story, one way that they could do that would be by having a forest in that story. Sure, that may not be your preferred way of reading that (which is fine), but given that the story is named after a symbol and literally has a colour — a complementary colour of green — in the title, I'm sure you can imagine why someone might think that'd be worth looking at

Even in this lineup of literary tedium, I really hated Catcher in the Rye. To be clear, I don't require the protagonist of a novel to be likable, sympathetic, relatable, or a good person. I just require them to be interesting, and there was nothing interesting about Holden Caulfield. Admittedly the angle the adult leading the book group went with to try to sell us on the novel was that he was, like, alienated, man, and wasn't that deep? No, he's a whiny little jerk, this isn't interesting or deep, it's just a surface level personality defect where a character should actually be. I think backfilling how he's (maybe) in the mental hospital because his brother (maybe) died at (maybe) some point is doing the same thing, except with tragedy and mental illness instead of being a boring little jerkwad for no reason because, like, society, man. So what? He's still a boring jerkwad, vague tragic backstory and/or mental illness isn't a character, they're things that happen to characters. And Holden Caulfield is still the sucking chest wound of characters, just an unpleasant and fatal wound in the core of the novel.

as a note: Holden's brother doesn't "maybe" die: he explicitly, in-text, died when Holden was 13 (from leukemia iirc).
Holden's status as being in a mental institution by the time he's narrating events is inferred, since we know Holden is somewhere he will eventually 'get out of', that this place is somewhere where he's had to talk about himself to adults on more than one ocassion, that his parents had previously talked about sending him to a psychiatrist, etc. There are other places you could read it as being (e.g a correctional facility; military school; 'being the narrator of a novel', if you're feeling spicy) but as answers to the question: "where exactly is Holden narrating this from?" go, 'mental institution' is a pretty straightforward one to assume.

Again, you don't have to like the book if you know any of this ("I don't find the protagonist compelling" is a perfectly reasonable opinion to have), but it can be relevent information to get right for discussions of the book.
Especially if someone was trying to insinuate that someone else with a positive opinion of the book was being, well, phony




Anyway, looking onwards to the new year: I've got LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness and a number of Edgar Allen Poe stories to re-read (including Fall of the House of Usher), a copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy I won from a secret santa, plus book club homework — and that's before starting on the Aliya Whiteley dive. So it' looking like a busy couple of months at least.

[Bohandas]

I was forced to endure Catcher in the Rye for a bookgroup when I was young, in between an endless parade of Newbury Award winning books about Important Isms, as in this book is 100% about Racism, or Sexism. Character, in these books, is unnecessary, there is only relationship to the Ism. Plot? Ism happens, all the plot you need. The most extreme example was a racism book where each chapter covered a run in with some new side character, and in order to display nuance, every other side character was racist. And I mean literally every other character, if Joe from Chapter 2 was racist, Bob from Chapter 3 wasn't, but Alice in Chapter 4 was racist, and so on. I tried to skim read these as quickly as possible, so I could get back to more subtle and restrained books with some actual nuance, like RA Salvatore novels.

Even in this lineup of literary tedium, I really hated Catcher in the Rye.

Highschool reading lists in my experience almost seem like somebody's attempting a low tech version of the experiment from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Like it's the worst books they could find and they want to see if anyone cracks.

EDIT:
I just remembered. Someone did crack. Wasn't some famous murderer obsessed with it or something?

[IthilanorStPete]

Highschool reading lists in my experience almost seem like somebody's attempting a low tech version of the experiment from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Like it's the worst books they could find and they want to see if anyone cracks.

EDIT:
I just remembered. Someone did crack. Wasn't some famous murderer obsessed with it or something?

Based on what Wikipedia has to say, you're probably thinking of Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon.

[KorvinStarmast]

Another Holden hater here. Put up with the book in 8th grade, and I never have to read it again.

A Wizard of Earthsea, on the other hand, is a joy to read.

[Rynjin]

Anyway, looking onwards to the new year: I've got LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness and a number of Edgar Allen Poe stories to re-read (including Fall of the House of Usher), a copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy I won from a secret santa, plus book club homework — and that's before starting on the Aliya Whiteley dive. So it' looking like a busy couple of months at least.

Can't go wrong with LeGuin!

Highschool reading lists in my experience almost seem like somebody's attempting a low tech version of the experiment from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Like it's the worst books they could find and they want to see if anyone cracks.

I enjoyed most of the books I had to read for school. Most of Shakespeare is interesting, particularly Othello (I got to "play" Iago during the read-alouds, which was really fun), To Kill A Mockingbird is very much a classic for a reason, Ender's Game is another book where you really have to ignore the author exists but is great (as are the sequels), etc.

Catcher in the Rye is the really big one that stands out in my head as "I HATED this", not just being mostly forgettable like Esperanza Rising or something.

[Bohandas]

I have gotten into the habit of keeping a written list of things I've read, so I am cheating a bit. I am also in two reading so I am using some 'old material' in the list post too.
A few of the list includes were reading club books. Including Swashbucklers, which is the reason why I read all of it instead of bailing-out before the halfway mark — which it turned-out everyone else in the reading group had done


Yeah. One other thing about Skyward Inn is that it's under 300 pages long, so it's not even a big time investment.







I actually like Woolf a lot as an author, but if she's not your speed then, yeah, her stuff really isn't going to be a lot of fun for you.





Okay, that's entirely your prerogative. Taste's subjective, after all.

Not going to go into a big internet fight about it since, as I said, I've seen that sort of take a lot and also because you already didn't get to enjoy it so from my perspective you're already suffering enough¹


I will touch on one thing though, because I think it ties-in to why I called the award what I did:


He's 'pissing them away' because he had a nervous breakdown after his kid brother died and never actually recovered from it. The framing device of the novel is that Holden is narrating all of this after-the-fact from what is heavily implied to be a mental institution.

This is not a huge secret to Catcher but because it's not explicitly told to the reader, it is something that requires a degree of analyitical reading comprehension to be able to fully appreciate. This isn't a dig at you, nor at anyone who didn't like the book, contrary to what a lot of the internet might lead you to think, "I don't get it" isn't a reaction to be ashamed of (nor are getting something and liking something the same thing, it's entirely possible to do either one without the other). The point is: that sort of reading is a skill that has to be learned, beyond basic literacy; not a marker of whether someone's 'smart' or not. Ideally it's the skill English classes teach, but in practice it doesn't always work.

Why is thst something worth teaching? When is anyone ever going to use this skill? I mean, maybe if they were a book reviewer with a very specific kind of audience it would be helpful, but otherwise I don't see when anybody's ever going to need to analyze theme or metaphor or any of that other nonsense. Even a student who grew up to be a writer would be better served by a writing class than a literature class..

[Rynjin]

Why is thst something worth teaching? When is anyone ever going to use this skill? I mean, maybe if they were a book reviewer with a very specific kind of audience it would be helpful, but otherwise I don't see when anybody's ever going to need to analyze theme or metaphor or any of that other nonsense. Even a student who grew up to be a writer would be better served by a writing class than a literature class..

Media literacy is an important component in being able to analyze text for meaning and intent.

All text. Your co-workers emails, propaganda, advertising, etc.

[Bohandas]

I mean, I guess it's important if you don't want to enjoy what you're reading for what it is and want to pretend you're the protagonist of a conspiracy novel or some hackneyed dystopian science-fiction movie like They Live or The Matrix instead

[Rynjin]

I mean, I guess it's important if you don't want to enjoy what you're reading for what it is and want to pretend you're the protagonist of a conspiracy novel or some hackneyed dystopian science-fiction movie like They Live or The Matrix instead

You can enjoy what you're reading and understand what it's about at the same time.

As for the second part, I really don't know how to unpack all that. Suffice to say that if you think you're not being manipulated by media, you're being manipulated very, very hard.

[Rodin]

Yeah, forests are generally green. So if an author wanted to introduce the idea of 'green' into a story, one way that they could do that would be by having a forest in that story. Sure, that may not be your preferred way of reading that (which is fine), but given that the story is named after a symbol and literally has a colour — a complementary colour of green — in the title, I'm sure you can imagine why someone might think that'd be worth looking at

Except there's very little to suggest that "green is the devil" is what Hawthorne was going for (quite the opposite, in fact, with the green letter A being worn by her daughter to symbolize nature and purity). The massive discussion on the symbolism of the forest in the very first chapter of the book is a guaranteed way to put a high school class to sleep, and is far less important than dealing with the Puritan themes and the look into the lives and times that the novel has to offer. It's literary criticism at its worst, reading far too much into incidental descriptive terminology and, a-ha, failing to see the forest for the trees.

High school classes shouldn't be going into such in-depth literary analysis that the class hates reading. Learn the analyze the broad themes and underlying meaning, absolutely, but going into the nitty-gritty of the meaning of colors is far too in-depth when there is a ton of literature to cover. There was an immense amount of classics that we never covered in school or if we did they were relegated to "summer reading" and were never discussed in the classroom. Wuthering Heights, most Shakespeare other than Romeo and Juliet, 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies - all of these would have benefitted being covered in class for the extremely important life lessons they teach instead of a minute analysis of 1920s flapper culture from The Great Gatsby.

There's a lot of important books to read, and if you're covering Dandelion Wine instead of Fahrenheit 451 you're doing something wrong as an English teacher.

[Bohandas]

Sending a message would take resources away from designing a film or TV show to appeal to the largest possible number of potential viewers, and that's not somthing I think that the mainstream film and TV industries would be willing to do regularly. Which is as it should be. And when there is a message it's very hamfisted because the message is only there because the producers think that the massage itself will sell tickets, either because people will support it or else because it's controversial enough to get them free publicity.

Or did you mean like product positioning or something?

In any case they didn't teach us how to recognize either propaganda OR product positioning in literature class. If that's what the class is meant to be teaching then that's what it should teach explicitly. And if they want to teach people about propaganda they should be teaching from periodicals and blogs instead of literature; those are the main soapboxes that the liars and the cranks preach from, not stuffy old books that nobody has ever ever read willingly

[Mx.Silver]

Can't go wrong with LeGuin!

Damn right.

Why is thst something worth teaching? When is anyone ever going to use this skill?

Well, everytime I read things, because it actually lets me enjoy things more (and enjoy more things). And better appreciate things whether I like or dislike them, while also letting me better understand and articulate what it is I like or dislike. Because, counter-intuitive as this might sound, it gets you closer to understanding fiction as, well, fiction — the craft, the structure, the way narrative art actually works.
You don't need it to be able to enjoy things, obviously, but it very much doesn't hurt. Like, you're talking a lot about how this would somehow 'ruin' books for you or 'drive you mad', but that's not my experience of it at all. Kind of the reverse if anything.


Anyway, happy new year everyone. Let the good books keep coming.

[Mechalich]

Catcher in the Rye is the really big one that stands out in my head as "I HATED this", not just being mostly forgettable like Esperanza Rising or something.

Catcher in the Rye is an extremely polarizing novel. Tons of people hate it, but tons of people also love it, and I can acknowledge that even as someone firmly in the hater camp myself. It seems to hit on something of a fundamental divide in worldviews. People whose first response is 'what happened?' seems to hate it, while those who first response is 'what does it mean?' love it (this is obviously a simplification). Holden is, objectively, a scummy wasteful excuse of a human being, but potentially he has some kind of insight into the human condition because of that and this speaks to some people, especially some teenagers, searching for meaning in their lives (the search for meaning was clearly important to author JD Salinger, who struggled quite substantially with wartime trauma resulting from WWII service and wrote Catcher shortly thereafter). Significantly, this fraction of humanity includes an awfully high proportion of the kind of people who become literary critics and English teachers, and a very much lower portion of the kind of people who become engineers and scientists. In my opinion, this makes it a very poor choice for required reading in high school classes, since a huge portion of the students will respond very negatively to the novel which means they are even less likely to actually read it than usual, but the English teaching community seems unable to realize this.

There's a lot of important books to read, and if you're covering Dandelion Wine instead of Fahrenheit 451 you're doing something wrong as an English teacher.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure you're doing something wrong if you're covering either of them, because Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most pretentious and self-righteous pieces of literary self-aggrandizement even produced by human hands.


Returning to actual reading recommendations, I recently plowed through The Travels of Ibn Battutah (the 2002 Macmillan Abridged Edition), and it really stands out as an eye-opening and invigorating account of life in the Islamic world and India in the 14th century as well as fairly raw entry into the mindset of an upper class (Ibn Battutah was a qadi, a judge of Islamic law) member of said society and openly mystical frame of reference with which even the highly educated approached reality at the time. The text, in translation, flows well and is exceedingly readable, and also doesn't hide any of the cultural traits we now find rather peculiar. Ibn Battutah is often referenced in comparison to Marco Polo as they lived and wrote only a few decades apart, and having read both the texts very much complement each other as descriptions of the world in this era. Very much recommended to anyone with an interest in primary sources from the period or an interest in world-building in the quasi-medieval timeframe.

[Melayl]

Or did you mean like product positioning or something?

In any case they didn't teach us how to recognize either propaganda OR product positioning in literature class. If that's what the class is meant to be teaching then that's what it should teach explicitly. And if they want to teach people about propaganda they should be teaching from periodicals and blogs instead of literature; those are the main soapboxes that the liars and the cranks preach from, not stuffy old books that nobody has ever ever read willingly

You didn't get taught that in high school English? We certainly did. Granted, that was 30+ years ago and our English teacher was beyond excellent (and was also the Jounalism teacher, so she had a eather vested interest in her students learning how to parse the meaning in such things).

[Bohandas]

You didn't get taught that in high school English? We certainly did. Granted, that was 30+ years ago and our English teacher was beyond excellent (and was also the Jounalism teacher, so she had a eather vested interest in her students learning how to parse the meaning in such things).

I think we might have had maybe one week of that, if that.

Catcher in the Rye is an extremely polarizing novel. Tons of people hate it, but tons of people also love it, and I can acknowledge that even as someone firmly in the hater camp myself. It seems to hit on something of a fundamental divide in worldviews. People whose first response is 'what happened?' seems to hate it

I think you've put your finger on it. Nothing ******* happens, or at least nothing coherent or significant that I can remember. It's all just word salad.

while those who first response is 'what does it mean?' love it (this is obviously a simplification). Holden is, objectively, a scummy wasteful excuse of a human being, but potentially he has some kind of insight into the human condition because of that and this speaks to some people, especially some teenagers, searching for meaning in their lives

I don't think that's a good thing for schools to be pandering to. That time would be better spent studying the "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" soliloquy from Macbeth and/or Edgar Allan Poe's The Conqueror Worm

[Ionathus]

Yeah, forests are generally green. So if an author wanted to introduce the idea of 'green' into a story, one way that they could do that would be by having a forest in that story. Sure, that may not be your preferred way of reading that (which is fine), but given that the story is named after a symbol and literally has a colour — a complementary colour of green — in the title, I'm sure you can imagine why someone might think that'd be worth looking at

Yeah, symbolism is this whole muddled mess of a topic, and it shows up in both blatant and subtle ways in every work. There's an old meme about symbolism that I think sums up a lot of people's opinions on the topic: the idea that you can clearly pick apart and analyze everything an author is implying through imagery is a pretty common one in high school English classes, and it gets mocked pretty mercilessly in certain circles.

For the record, I'm of the opinion that nobody, not even the writer, can know what they're saying with a given work. Symbolism isn't the secret "answer" to a book, because there's never just one interpretation, and because seeing or not seeing what an author was "going for" isn't necessary to get value out of a story. It can certainly make the experience more rewarding, but it's not like you've failed at reading a book if you didn't notice some of the themes involved.

Reminds me of a great quote from Flannery O'Connor:

Spoiler: collapsed quote

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People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.

(speaking of LeGuin, she wrote something very similar in the anniversary foreword for Left Hand of Darkness! It's perhaps my all-time favorite author foreword.)

Those are pretty closely my thoughts on theme and symbolism. It's useful to learn to look for and recognize connections that the author is making, if only for the benefits to your experience as an audience member, but it's also widely helpful for developing your interpersonal communication skills.

Anyway, looking onwards to the new year: I've got LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness and a number of Edgar Allen Poe stories to re-read (including Fall of the House of Usher), a copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy I won from a secret santa, plus book club homework — and that's before starting on the Aliya Whiteley dive. So it' looking like a busy couple of months at least.

No joke, The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite books of all time. Such a unique setting, a unique storytelling approach, a compelling story, and some gorgeous prose. I only read it in the last few years but it's stuck with me -- and (despite her regrets about its outdated-ness) it feels extremely relevant even today as gender identity becomes a more and more mainstream topic.

Why is thst something worth teaching? When is anyone ever going to use this skill? I mean, maybe if they were a book reviewer with a very specific kind of audience it would be helpful, but otherwise I don't see when anybody's ever going to need to analyze theme or metaphor or any of that other nonsense. Even a student who grew up to be a writer would be better served by a writing class than a literature class..

Media literacy is an important component in being able to analyze text for meaning and intent.

All text. Your co-workers emails, propaganda, advertising, etc.

I was going to respond to your earlier comments about The Great Gatsby, Bohandas, but this conversation wraps into that one nicely. I'll echo Rynjin 100% here.

Themes and metaphors aren't some secretive, exclusive club. Writers and literary analysis critics aren't hiding in backrooms, smoking cigars and guffawing to each other about all the peasants who "don't get it." (Partially because those two groups have never once gotten along in all of history, but still ) The theme of a book isn't even necessarily a conscious thing that a writer sets out to do, all of the time -- sometimes it's subconscious, other times it doesn't even "exist" for the original writer, but a later reader with a different worldview can make connections the writer never did, and hey, if it's meaningful to the reader then that counts. The Flannery O'Connor quote above is pretty applicable here, too.

As Rynjin said, understanding how to look for connections in a story (which is all a "theme" is, really) is pretty useful for daily life. It helps you to understand the people around you, what matters to them, the world they come from, what they mean by the words they use, and how you can better select the response that will make the most sense to them. I think schools could be doing a better job at that, almost universally, because the form it currently takes is often way too simplistic (because simplistic is easier to teach and grade). But that doesn't change the fact that there's a reason we keep talking about this stuff.

Put another way: every single story has themes, in the same way that every food has flavors. Some of them are extremely simplistic, some of them are extremely complex, snobs love to use their encyclopedic knowledge to condescend to others, and neither is truly "necessary" to consume their respective sources. You can eat a meal (or read a book) without paying any attention to the subtext involved. But learning to recognize those flavors (or themes) can be a huge help for sharing your experience with others, seeking out similar things in the future, or even trying your hand at making something new that plays with those flavors.

[Bohandas]

Media literacy is an important component in being able to analyze text for meaning and intent.

All text. Your co-workers emails, propaganda, advertising, etc.

My problem is that there seem to be an increasing number of people prone to seeing meaning and intent and important -isms and political messages in places where they clearly aren't. Like that thing a while back where people were saying that orcs were some kind of racist allegory.

I would rather live in a world where all literature is transparently vapid and nobody thinks about what they're reading then in one where there's nothing left to read at all because it's all been condemned as evil by modern day Savonarolas

Like, you're talking a lot about how this would somehow 'ruin' books for you or 'drive you mad'

Not would, have. I've talked to so many of these people that I'm starting to see messages and allegory and rhetoric as well, including in things that I know FOR A FACT don't have the observed meaning - that they have either a totally different meaning or no meaning at all - because I'm the one who wrote them (I sometimes do creative writing or csrtooning as a hobby). And in other things that I didn't write but which I also know for a fact don't have the observed meaning because they predate the thing they appear to be allegories about. But I can see the downer things they see now and it's horrible. I'm not so far gone that I believe them, but I can see them. They;ve dragged me into their bad trip

[Batcathat]

My problem is that there seem to be an increasing number of people prone to seeing meaning and intent and important -isms and political messages in places where they clearly aren't. Like that thing a while back where people were saying that orcs were some kind of racist allegory.

While getting into that particular example would probably derail the thread, I think it's safe to say that people disagree about what meanings are "clearly there" or not. I would guess they haven't increased in numbers so much as become increasingly visible thanks to things like social media, but I doubt anyone could say for sure.

Not would, have. I've talked to so many of these people that I'm starting to see messages and allegory and rhetoric as well, including in things that I know FOR A FACT don't have the observed meaning - that they have either a totally different meaning or no meaning at all - because I'm the one who wrote them (I sometimes do creative writing or csrtooning as a hobby). And in other things that I didn't write but which I also know for a fact don't have the observed meaning because they predate the thing they appear to be allegories about. But I can see the downer things they see now and it's horrible. I'm not so far gone that I believe them, but I can see them. They;ve dragged me into their bad trip

I'm not sure why this would be a bad thing. Something can be a good allegory for something even if it's not intended as such. Now, obviously there's a difference between "this is what the author intended" and "this is a possible interpretation", but as long as people don't get their own opinions mixed up with objective fact (which people do, of course, because humanity is just the worst like that) I don't think there's anything wrong with the latter.

Let's say I paint an abstract painting intended to represent the folly of man, but when you look at it you see a cute kitten. Are you somehow enjoying the art incorrectly?

[Bohandas]

I'm not sure why this would be a bad thing. Something can be a good allegory for something even if it's not intended as such. Now, obviously there's a difference between "this is what the author intended" and "this is a possible interpretation", but as long as people don't get their own opinions mixed up with objective fact (which people do, of course, because humanity is just the worst like that) I don't think there's anything wrong with the latter.

Let's say I paint an abstract painting intended to represent the folly of man, but when you look at it you see a cute kitten. Are you somehow enjoying the art incorrectly?

Ok, granted. I suppose the problem isn;t with seeing meanings in general. It's with seeing rhetoric and important -isms. And especially with seeing rhetoric and important -isms when I'm trying to relax.