Crime and Punishment and The Odyssey are two of my favorite works and I struggled to read Moby Dick in my 40s. I finished only out of a grim determination and with ( frankly ) a lot of skimming. Happy am I that I was never forced to read it for the sake of my GPA.
I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.
> I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.
I think it really depends on how it is taught. Also in my 40s, I recently read The Sun Also Rises while on vacation - I just had the feeling I wanted to read a "classic" book, and somehow I didn't have to read that book in high school. I hated the book. I kept waiting for a smidge of effort in wanting to make me care at all about any of the characters, and I just never found it. It was like being forced to go through someone's vacation photos for 10 hours straight, where most of the photos were of alcoholics drinking.
But still, I'm glad I read it. I wanted to understand why Hemingway is considered a literary giant, and his writing style (especially his dialogue) was new and innovative at the time, and influenced lots of other writers. If teachers could help explain books in context (e.g. why is Moby Dick considered a classics novel to begin with) I think a lot of students would better appreciate what they're learning.
Hemingway is hard because people demand explicit. The story behind the obvious is what makes The Sun Also Rises so powerful. It defined the lost generation. It was the 1920s version of Clerks.
I’m sure people read Hills Like White Elephants expecting to find an elephant in the story. Of course there is — a big one right there in the room.
You should be a teacher :) I love that quote, and it's exactly what I'm talking about. Without the context of what the lost generation is/was, and without understanding how the generational trauma of WWI had such a strong influence on the interwar period, you lose a ton of understanding about how the book was so influential.
Not forcing kids to struggle through books they don’t care for creates generations of adults who think they can’t or simply won’t do anything that is hard or that they don’t want to do.
They shouldn’t only be reading these challenging works, but they should be reading some of them.
granted, in my case it was reading in a second language which has its own challenges, but the main point still stands. if i hadn't been able to breeze through that second book i might have come home with the impression that i just can't read english well enough, or that i hate reading english or that english writing is just bad. if i had read that second book first i would probably have realized that hemmingway is just no fun to read, like your experience with moby dick, and i would have asked to pick another book. i don't think that the second book was easier because my english improved by then. if that were the case i should have been able to improve while reading hemmingway, instead of struggling with it to the end.
I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.