Reading loved, reading disliked...

Get lost, Mr. Chips has a post up about what books people can't stand teaching, or couldn't stand being taught.

Now, I'm not a lit. professor, and mainly what I assign to read are the textbooks (that I chose myself) and also the occasional article or section-of-a-book that seems particularly relevant.

(I used to read some of the essays out of "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold - one of my favorite books - to classes, but I've started getting "boredom waves" off of the students the last few times - and in fact, in my non-majors class, the last time, several people assumed it was an interval in which to check their text-messages. So no more. I mean, I like to expand people's horizons but there's a point at which you've led the horse to water, it's looking at a butterfly, and you can't quite get away with saying, "Drink, damn you!")

It makes me sad because I do think ASCA is a wonderful series of essays and I know people who have said they were inspired to get it out of the library and then read the whole thing in a weekend after hearing a little bit of it. But those people seem to be few and far between these days. (One of the problems may be that Leopold is of an earlier generation and he makes references to the Bible and Shakespeare and classic myths in his SCIENCE writing, and in his time it was expected people would "get" that, and there are some people today who roll their eyes over that, who go "Miss? Miss? Do we have to know why he's talking about some guy named Samson?" To quote Professor Kirke: I do not know what they are teaching them in these schools.)

(Argh! There is a very combative, "challenged" couple out in the hall. They cannot find the stairway. They could not find the student lounge earlier - I tried to help them but apparently it was not what they were looking for. They are ARGUING with my colleague over the location of the stairwell.

I really don't mind the whole "mainstreaming" thing, but when you start shouting at the person who's trying to help you...then there's a problem.

One member of the couple is legally blind on top of whatever other impairments he has; I have talked with another colleague about him - she has to take extra time and copy everything to giant size. She doesn't mind doing it, but you know? I'd think that would be something that the disability services on campus would be willing to handle.

Maybe it makes me a horrible person but I jumped up and closed my office door when I heard them coming back. There are just some interpersonal interactions I'd rather not deal with).

Anyway. I was thinking back to college and highschool lit classes. Took four years of English in high school, a year of Great Books in college.

I remember reading a lot of the ancient Greeks. And now, looking back on it, I'm glad I did - it gives me a grounding and a "place to stand" where I understand a lot of the literary allusions. (And I'm also willing to accept the assertion that there are something like 12 basic plots out there, going back to the Greeks, and every story tends to be more or less a variation on one of those).

I mean - I know enough to laugh my fool head off at the "Hey, M*****F*****" line (where Josephus greets Oedipus) in "History of the World, Part 1." (And seriously: I normally don't like that kind of language in movies but that is the ONE time when the line is literally appropriate. It's kind of too bad they have to cut it in broadcast presentations of the movie...)

I do aspire to go back and re-read some of that stuff. I saved my big Compendium of Plato from Great Books, and I went out and bought the "new" Fagles translations of Iliad and Odyssey when they came out. (Someday. Someday I will read them). I even saved my Herodotus, thinking (after reading the selected sections for Great Books, it would be kind of a lark to read the whole thing someday).

We also read some Shakespeare in high school - "The Scottish Play" (and yes, we also learned the superstitions associated with it), and Taming of the Shrew (an odd choice, when you look back on it; I think it was mainly because the teacher wanted an excuse to show us "Kiss Me, Kate" at the end of the semester) and King Lear (which is probably one of the SADDEST of the Shakespeare tragedies I've read, at least on a "human" or "family" scale).

And I enjoyed those. They were not easy - but we did get the books that had the "glossary" on the facing page, so that we could easily get the words that were unfamiliar. And all the teachers agreed that a good way to learn the import of Shakespeare was either to SEE it acted out or to act it out ourselves....so we'd get assigned scenes, in small groups, and have to learn them and act them out. I remember for King Lear, I had to play "en travestie" - I was the dude who ripped out the guy's eyes (my memory for names is horrible; I just remember it was the eye-ripping scene). We planned it out very carefully - the guy to have his eyes removed was seated with his back to the class and I had palmed a grape in each hand before the scene...so I crushed the grapes and threw them on the ground. Got a big reaction out of the class...

But a lot of the things, effort was put in to make them fun and vivid and to give us the desire to read more and read deeper.

I first read Kafka in high school; being the sweetness-and-light type, I might not have read him on my own but I found his work fascinating and horrifying and kind of moving.

We also did a lot with poetry, including us being encouraged to write our own. (Most of what I wrote embarrasses me now, but I think that's kind of the function of high school poetry - to get all that banality out of you at a young age).

One year, I had a teacher who LOVED Flannery O'Connor and the Southern Gothic writers in general (I think we also read "We have always lived in the castle" that year, wonderful creepy book. I re-read it recently). I would never have read O'Connor otherwise...and I liked O'Connor, after reading her; I liked the inflexibility of her vision, her uncompromisingness. I liked that she STOOD for something, even if her characters were at times unlikeable, and I probably would have found O'Connor herself a difficult person to like.

There were other things we read that were not so successful. Another year I had a teacher who was either a big Salinger buff or who figured "16 year olds LIKE Salinger so even the ones who aren't avid readers will read this."

And I liked Salinger, at 16. Tried to re-read "Catcher in the Rye" a few years ago and found myself wanting to slap Holden upside the head. And I wonder what I saw in him now...kind of like any of the pimply faced boys I lusted after in high school, seeing their pictures now makes me cringe in horror at my taste as a teenager.

The worst experiences though centered around Huck Finn.

We read "Huck Finn" but we couldn't just read "Huck Finn." Maybe it was to deal with some kind of state law involving books that contained the "n-word," but we also had to go through all of the horrible tiresome "issues" surrounding the book. We also had to read (I am not making this up) some Scholastic-published book that dramatized the effect Huck Finn had on some inner-city school classroom. It was eyerollingly bad, kind of an "Afterschool Special" set down on paper. And it just kind of sucked the life out of Huck Finn for me.

Look. Twain was not a racist. A reasonably intelligent person can get that from the book. Especially from Huck's "Well, I'm goin' to Hell, then" assertion (when his choice was presented thusly: turn in the escaped slave or go to the devil). Why, for the love of literature, make us read a bad watered-down "depiction" of people getting upset and other people saying there was nothing to be upset about? I mean, gosh.

The worst novel though, for me, was Kate Chopin's "The Awakening." I have blocked out most memories of the book other than (a) it was tiresome and (b) here was this woman with what seemed like an ideal life and yet she could not even be a tiny bit grateful that she had healthy children and a roof over her head and a husband who loved her and she was wealthy. My friends and I used to moan and roll our eyes and say we wished she had walked into the ocean on the very first page of the book, so that we would be spared the agony of it.

I guess I'm lucky - based on the other commentators - that I was spared Moby-Dick in high school (I do have a copy on the shelf but I've never even cracked it), and Hemingway (read a few of his short stories on my own, found them kind of depressing).

Never "had" to read any Dickens, either, but I rather like Dickens. The silly names, the long descriptions - it's good literature for me, I like getting lost in it.

I wonder how many "hated" books that you "had" to read would not be "hated" if you came to them on your own? I read Middlemarch a few years ago - on my own - and I LOVED it. It is one of my favorite books ever. (In some respects? It is the "anti-Awakening"- people made bad choices but they deal with them rather than maundering and drooping and ultimately doing themselves in). But how would I have reacted if I had had to read it and write essays on it - and if I had had to read it at the rate of 200 to 300 pages a week (the standard Great Books rate)? I probably wouldn't have been nearly as happy or got nearly as much out of it - as it is, it took me over a year to read it, going back and re-reading earlier passages, spacing it out slowly, reading other books while I read it...

I wonder - how much of college/high school "literature" turns some people off of reading? I briefly flirted with becoming an English major but then I realized I'd be expected to analyze novels or poems (sorry, "Texts") to death, to suck all the joy and life I felt on reading them away, and I couldn't quite face that. So I became a biology major; a biology major who still likes Dickens and still has a shelf full of books she believes "every educated person should read at least once in their lives":

Moby-Dick
The Brothers Karamazov
The Red and the Black
A Tale of Two Cities
Heart of Darkness
In Search of Lost Time (or whatever the most current translation is called)
War and Peace
Gulliver's Travels
...

and those are just the ones I've not read yet.