Thursday, May 12, 2005

Bock Bock Bock

"Here at the LBC, we're about celebrating books and writers we love..."

I'm still waiting for a struggling book, writer or press to actually be mentioned over at the Lit-Blog Coop. So far all the lit-hens are doing is cackling about themselves.

Wait, Gwenda mentioned Holly Black. Okay, Gwen, you're excused.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:17 AM

    Glancing at the teacher's contribution on the LBC thing, it does rather occur to me that the schools themselves might be responsible for killing off reading as a liesure activity.

    For example, we were force fed Dickens and Steinbeck. All very literary and clever, but bascially a chore. The one is rambling an indegistable, the other downright depressing: "Loser meets chance for escape. Loser loses chance at escape. Loser is ground in dirt."

    If I had not come from a household where people read books for kicks, the experience of school English classes might well have put me off them.

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  2. Taking this further off topic...

    Or what about Moby Dick for that matter which is NOT about rapper/singer Moby and his ahem you know what. So disappointing, I'm sure, to students everywhere.

    I did want to add however, that I was one of those freak students who liked Chaucer, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Moliere, and mythology. Dickens was okay and Steinbeck didn't do much for me, but I found more works I loved than hated in English classes. But I did hate Moby Dick, the only book I never read--I bought the Cliff Notes for that fish carcass.

    Heck I did my H.S. senior thesis on Waiting for Godot and existensialism (sp?) which I don't remember anything about now (I'm not as smart as I used to be).

    Was I really that strange?

    M

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  3. Anonymous12:14 PM

    No stranger than me: I quietly read my way through Marlow and Beowulf while the class slogged through Great Expectations. I also read Malory's Le Morte De Arthur when I was about ten years old

    However, that was my choice.

    Given the state of reading, English classes should spend at least 50% of the available time looking at modern popular fiction and discussing what makes it tick.

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  4. Anonymous3:56 PM

    Great books should be discovered, not made compulsory reading. Hook a kid's attention by giving them a taste of the work, and if the story is solid, they will hunt down the book themselves. Assign it and threaten them with an F if they don't read it, and their curiosity shuts down.

    We used to have a reading program when I was in elementary school where the host would read a chapter from a book on a classroom TV. The program would show illustrations and photos during the reading to suit the text, but mainly it was just a read-to-the-kids program. I can't remember the name of the program, but through it I discovered writers like Jane Austen, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Chaucer and H.G. Wells.

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  5. Anonymous5:02 AM

    >Great books should be discovered, >not made compulsory reading.

    That probably says it all.

    ReplyDelete

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