The fastest way to get someone to hate a book is to make them annotate it.
I still don't like All Quiet on the Western Front after all these years.
I used to despise Slaughterhouse-Five, too, before I got a change to read it voluntarily.
MY SOUL IS DARK BUT MY HAIR IS COLORFUL — Brahian Pokémon AlchemistHe is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war.
War is God.It's really, really, really hard to enjoy a book/movie when you're being forced to stop every five seconds and look for things like "bird symbolism" so you can mark it down in a list.
That's not analysis. That's TVT bullshit that has no place in a classroom and yet somehow it's the preferred method of teaching kids how to think about books. It doesn't teach anything, it's just mindless categorisation. Picking shit apart every other sentence does not help me appreciate how the parts work together to create a whole, it just tells me that "gee this book sure does like talking about birds a lot. I should write that down in the margins!"
This is part of the reason why, despite having one of the most well-educated generations, it's not a generation that knows how to think. We are taught to learn definitions, but not what those definitions mean, why it's defined as such, and what it means for other things, or us.
MY SOUL IS DARK BUT MY HAIR IS COLORFUL — Brahian Pokémon AlchemistOf course I didn't pay attention to the book. That wasn't the point of the assignment.
Do you see the problem here? I could write the most beautiful, moving poetry mankind has ever seen, but if I tell you instead to count how many e's I use per line, you're not actually going to be reading it.
So, yeah. I just associate that book with frustrating, dry busy work. This is what my literature classes have taught me to associate classic books with.
I had maybe a grand total of two good English teachers throughout my entire education. My senior one, and the one I had in... seventh grade? Eighth? Can't remember. She got pregnant and moved to Boston, though. Bummer.
edited 23rd Jul '14 5:42:39 PM by GameSpazzer
MY SOUL IS DARK BUT MY HAIR IS COLORFUL — Brahian Pokémon AlchemistNo, I'm trying to fix that, at least.
Senior year I had a teacher that knew what she was doing, and I got to go back and reread Slaughterhouse-Five and realise how good it was. And Brave New World, and A Clockwork Orange.
And then I got to analyse and criticise and praise them on my own terms, with no list bullshit. It was fun, and I learned things and gained a greater appreciation of the effort that had gone into the writing and the themes and the characters.
There's a lot of damage that's been done, unfortunately, but it could have been a lot worse, and she made a lot of strides towards getting us to actually read shit, instead of just annotating it.
Then we also wasted twenty minutes trying to explain to the class why no, Twilight is not an acceptable book report subject.
MY SOUL IS DARK BUT MY HAIR IS COLORFUL — Brahian Pokémon AlchemistGood
Also, I believe in literary interpretation
But I like... try to see a work as its own self contained world
that MAY have allusions to reality
but if the symbolism is there, I'll notice it
Like some people say that Moby Dick is a political commentary
uh
well
okay
I would say that it's more about a man's lust for revenge and obsession driving his purpose in life ultimately consuming him along with those he cares about
or like a crew of misfits hunt a big white sperm whale
War is God.

OH GOD READING I HATE READING
BOOKS ARE GHEY
but in seriousness, if they want to get the lazy youngsters to read, coercing them to do so probably isn't gonna help
War is God.