Let us now read about depressed white males with no lives!

[rj_anderson]

Shannon Hale has just written the most insightful and accurate description of what high school and college reading lists do to many passionate young readers that I've ever read. Her experience mirrors my own in many ways, on the high school side at least:

How Reader Girl Got Her Groove Back

But how about you lot on my f-list? Do you find that the books you were made to read in high school and the way your teachers approached them whetted your appetite for reading and literature, or stifled it?

ETA: As is her gift, sartorias has linked to the same essay with much more thoughtful comments and a more interesting topic of discussion. I'll just send you over there, shall I?

Comments

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Chiming in to say this doesn't fit me, either, because nothing and nobody could stop me reading for pleasure - not even law school! I did, sometimes, resent my assigned reading, and may have been turned off to some authors by being made to read them before I was ready (Whitman and Thoreau, for example), but, on the whole, this didn't happen.

Two things: my parents had a lot of the "classics" just lying around, and I read them on my own, without their being assigned. Was fascinated and horrified by 1984 and Brave New World; disliked A Separate Peace; liked, but did not love, Catcher in the Rye; absolutely LOVED Dickens, and also William Golding - when I understood him. He lost me sometimes as a teen.

Second, I absolutely loved a couple of books I was made to read in high school. As I said, I was turned off by Whitman and Thoreau, but I was surprised at how much I liked Moby Dick, a book I'd been avoiding for years. I went on to read Melville's short stories on my own. I did not like E.M. Forster (I've since changed my mind), but liked Gaskell and Hardy. And I loved Shakespeare, though I've come to the conclusion he's meant to be seen and heard, not read. Also Dylan Thomas - ditto. And Shaw as well.

But all through this, and all through the assignments, I kept reading and rereading Tolkien, L'Engle, Lewis (Till we Have Faces was another adult book my sister and I stumbled across as young teens, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet!). And it was as a teen that I discovered Lloyd Alexander and Ursula LeGuin.

So now I'm a teen librarian, and probably at a disadvantage with some kids because I don't really know what it feels like to be turned off by reading. OTOH, I never had to suffer through the phenomenon of the summer reading list. I hate that with a passion. Kids of all ages should be allowed to read what they like over the summer! I really despise these ideas lurking behind such lists: (1) kids, left to their own devices, will not read voluntarily, and (2)if they do read on their own, they will choose to read junk, and will not think about what they are reading unless they are forced to.

Wrong! Very wrong. Since I started in this job, I've seen kids turned off by these lists, and I've heard them cry, "I want to read MY books! I never have time to read what I want to read." Why shouldn't they be allowed to read for fun in school vacation? Don't we want children to read for fun?!

So I guess the short answer is that children should be given time and space to read what they choose to read. It's up to us to give them a wide variety of good books to choose from. Then we should just let them at it. I have no problem with assigned texts in English class, but schools should also make time and space for pleasure reading. Too many don't, and that's probably the source of the problem.

Apologies for the length! I thought this was going to be a short answer - (