Meditations

[Anteroinen]

Hah. Here, most of the class just doesn't read the assigned books. Just no.

For example (I feel like I've mentioned this once before but I don't really remember), we read Crime and Punishment in my English class and almost everyone in the class just read SparkNotes and stuff like that instead of reading the book.

Seriously?

People will say the names are hard because they're so Russian, but seriously, all you need to do is fucking look at the letters in the name and just fucking read it!

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? The names were hard? Oh, boo-hoo. Would the book be at all easier if the characters were named John and Annie? That is the most insipid, egregious, infuriating, down-right unforgivable excuse. Not liking the book is at least something, even though it is infuriating too; I still read the waste of paper that is the Catcher in the Rye so it is not a valid excuse.

[The Abacus]

People will say the names are hard because they're so Russian, but seriously, all you need to do is fucking look at the letters in the name and just fucking read it!

That's not a valid excuse to not read a book. If people find that the names are hard to pronounce and don't feel like trying to spell out, they can always at least quickly try – irrelevant of mispronunciation – and come back to it later. It is not an excuse to put down a book just because you come upon something like "Nautron respoc lorni virch."

[Isobel The Sorceress]

People will say the names are hard because they're so Russian, but seriously, all you need to do is fucking look at the letters in the name and just fucking read it!

That's not a valid excuse to not read a book. If people find that the names are hard to pronounce and don't feel like trying to spell out, they can always at least quickly try – irrelevant of mispronunciation – and come back to it later. It is not an excuse to put down a book just because you come upon something like "Nautron respoc lorni virch."

I don't think the pronunciation is the problem (it doesn't really matter if you don't have to read out loud), but the way characters have many different "nicknames": you have a first name (and several diminutive variations for it) a patronym and a family name, and possibly some titles.

I also found the use of diminutives distracting at first, since I was not used to it. It's especially confusing if you have lots of characters in the book, and all of them have over 5 names that are used by different characters.

[The Abacus]

it doesn't really matter if you don't have to read out loud

It doesn't.

the way characters have many different "nicknames": you have a first name (and several diminutive variations for it) a patronym and a family name, and possibly some titles.

I don't know if that was the case or not.

I also found the use of diminutives distracting at first, since I was not used to it. It's especially confusing if you have lots of characters in the book, and all of them have over 5 names that are used by different characters.

I often become frustrated when a book confuses me and cannot follow what the book is talking about.

[Vurn]

Seriously?

xD

People will say the names are hard because they're so Russian, but seriously, all you need to do is fucking look at the letters in the name and just fucking read it!

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? The names were hard? Oh, boo-hoo. Would the book be at all easier if the characters were named John and Annie? That is the most insipid, egregious, infuriating, down-right unforgivable excuse. Not liking the book is at least something, even though it is infuriating too; I still read the waste of paper that is the Catcher in the Rye so it is not a valid excuse.

Ohohohoho duuude, Catcher in the Rye was great.

[Anteroinen]

It was a book about a complaining dude. I do that enough myself, thank you very much.

[borys610]

I think it's good. Very good in fact.

[Raxas]

I feel like people would enjoy these books more if they allowed the students to arrive at their own conclusions rather than trying to get them to interpret the book in their own- and often absurdly over-analyzed- ways. Looking back at a lot of the books that I read and hated I realize now I probably would have been able to enjoy them if they just gave me some room to do so.

[zombyrus]

I don't think the pronunciation is the problem (it doesn't really matter if you don't have to read out loud), but the way characters have many different "nicknames": you have a first name (and several diminutive variations for it) a patronym and a family name, and possibly some titles.

That's totally true, and people have told me that they'd have understood the book a lot better if the teacher had mentioned that everyone's got a patronym for a middle name. The diminutives, though, we were told ahead of time. Rodya, Rodka and Rodion are all referring to Rodion Ramonovich Raskolnikov and there was no excuse for us to not know that in the first place.

That monkey farter video is absolutely hilarious, but oftentimes I have found that the analysis that we have to do in schools actually has enhanced my understanding of things. Usually I need to be prompted to start looking at something as deeper, but once I'm started I can go as far as the best of them. One thing worth noting is that, a lot more than you'd figure, the authors actually do put the weird depths into their books that casual readers would completely overlook.

I liked Catcher in the Rye, but I can completely understand why one wouldn't like it. I spent at least half the book wondering when it was going to start into the "real plot," not realizing that it was already about as real as it got. The story is basically just about a dude who is too much a child to be an adult and too much an adult to be a child, and he is just unable to handle himself and just sort of breaks down, and I can absolutely relate to that because (as I alluded to earlier) if I didn't have such good self-control I'd probably flip my shit all the time. I read this thing about the diction in Catcher in the Rye and how it expresses how Holden doesn't know if he's a kid or an adult because he uses a mix of childish vulgarities and the occasional offhanded formality--essentially he's talking like a kid and an adult mashed incongruously together. It's the sort of thing that I wonder if the author intended, but it definitely goes toward the author's ultimate goal in the book.

Man I just love literary analysis. Maybe that's why not reading the books is so weirdly unforgivable to me.

[borys610]

In my family everybody reads books, so I'm doing so, also.
But I live in a country, where 9smth%(97 as I remember) of people isn't reading any books. They often are even afraid of reading.
Maybe that's because they were forced to read in school, and that's some kind of rebellion? But they are adults now!
After all I think that if school wasn't treating children like idiots, people would be reading. If school wasn't giving to 9-years-old children 20 pages of book, about happy little stork! Or five pages about happy little penguins!