Yesterday’s post focused specifically on books I read in high school. but I noticed, reading your responses, that I have read some of those other books, though sometimes not for class (I did read and love Brave New World for class, though, I’d totally forgotten!) and some for a class other than one in high school. I read To Kill a Mockingbird in middle school (loved it) and Frankenstein in college (ditto).
A few of you (JJ and Katherine) mentioned hating “puritan literature.” I’m not sure what you mean by that. I remember (vaguely) doing a Puritan section in my American lit class, even though most of what we read (Hello, The Crucible, which I also loved) was not necessarily written by Puritans. We also read The Scarlet Letter, which I liked fine but is not my favorite, and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” which I promptly forgot until I got to Yale and had a good giggle over the fact that the mascot of Jonathan Edwards College’s mascot was a spider. What is the puritan lit you’re talking about?
I am very curious what Sharon’s Yonkers high school did have her read, I think Emilia probably made Carrie Ryan’s day by saying she liked The Forest of Hands and Teeth better than Farenheit 451, and I’m so jealous of Rhiannon’s roaring 20s party! I want to throw a Gatsby party now!
I think our reading tastes, as a blog community, are very similar. There’s a lot of love for Shakespeare on yesterday’s post, and Dorian Gray, 1984, and Jane Austen. And I’m glad to see I’m not alone in my dislike of Wuthering Heights, even though most of you think I should try the other Brontes anyway. (This is similar to even Steinbeck haters telling me to go for East of Eden. And I feel like I should, given that it’s Poe’s favorite book.) Perhaps it is unfair of me to think that I’ll hate one sibling’s work just because I hated another’s.And LJK set my mind at ease about my inability to recognize what was going on in The Sun Also Rises. I was always worried I was the only one in the dark.
(There’s a reason for this. I was shocked — shocked, I tell you — when Darcy proposed. I got much better at reading comprehension as high school went on. But I can still never guess “whodunnit” in a mystery, which is probably why I don’t usually enjoy mysteries.)
What I thought was very interesting is how some people (like Lenore and dragonfly) loved everything they were assigned to read and other people (like Rhiannon and Phoebe) had the joy of reading sucked out of them by the act of study. I loved studying literature and the more I learned the tools by which to interpret what I was reading, the more I enjoyed it. Though, like Phoebe, I hated being told that “X symbolizes Y” and that this was the only way to read something. I loved it when I got to college and learned in my literary theory class that a lot of people think that kind of crap is… well, crap. Viva la intentional fallacy!
(Yes, this is the only time I say that. As a writer, I rue the day I learned that I just had to accept that the something I want to say in my work doesn’t really so much matter.)
Do you think that students’ resistance to reading certain things is:
a) a product of teaching styles? (stop telling children what “green” means!)
b) a product of what they are reading? (stop forcing children to read particular bad titles — which is of course a slippery slope)
c) a product of individual students’ reading tastes?
April 21st, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I had a particularly bad English teacher in 7th grade who nearly snuffed out my love of literature with her multiple choice tests asking for our opinions – where only one answer was right..(example: How do you think Scrooge felt when…). But then I had the BEST English teacher in 8th grade who helped me appreciate the classics. So for me, a) was 100% a factor and maybe some of b) since I don’t remember ever having to read something really rotten (Even if Dickens’ Hard Times put me to sleep about 100 times, I still liked finishing it) and also c) since I am pretty open-minded about what I read, and will forgive a lot if the writing is really stellar.
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April 21st, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Ah, Puritan literature. Hawthorne’s SCARLET LETTER does not count, and neither does “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Hawthorne wrote his novel more than a century after the Puritans (an ancestor of his was a judge during the witch trials, which haunted him and his family for generations: they added a “w” to their name and he wrote THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES). “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was during the Great Awakening.
Puritan literature (as we studied it in junior year of high school and then later in American Lit in college) included Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, and William Bradford. A lot of first-hand accounts of early settlement, as well as some poetry. Most of it was nonfiction (and as I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of poetry). Most of the papers I wrote on them were about their beliefs, how predestination determined their world view, etc. etc. DULL. For me, anyway.
As for your other questions, I’m not sure I have an answer. I was blessed with some truly amazing English teachers, those who encouraged discussion (even tangential ones!) instead of lecturing. No one ever said “X symbolizes Y” and I was always pressed to find meanings and themes even they overlooked. I was rewarded for thinking differently. But I realize not everyone had the same experience as me. But because I had such great teachers, I went on to study English lit in college; I doubt I would have pursued it if I didn’t. (Although, who knows? I’ve always liked to read.)
I was really interested in seeing what people were assigned to read in high school as it seemed so different from mine. I don’t think I read anything by anyone more recent than the Lost Generation. In our “free reading” (which was something of a misnomer as we still had to write papers on them for credit), we were allowed to pick whatever wanted. I ended up choosing Aldous Huxley, Dodie Smith, and many other writers who were either dead or on their way to being deceased. I enjoyed a lot of what I was assigned though and eventually discovered I loved Victorian literature (gothic romance and novels of manners), which is what I focused on in college.
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April 21st, 2010 at 1:19 pm
In HS, I think the reason I enjoyed theater and reading plays so much more than my English classes and reading novels was that in theater, you’re encouraged to interpret the material for yourself. A teacher or director of course has a vision and and their own interpretation, but a good teacher or director wants feedback on other interpretations, especially about characterizations.
In college, I was a Biology and education major. So in all of my Lit classes, I didn’t analyze my reading assignments from a lit perspective. Instead I read them trying to find how I could correlate that to a science class and analyzed it that way. i.e. Cry the Beloved Country- One plot line covered how an individual doesn’t always reveal everything about themselves and I correlated that to DNA and dominant and recessive genes.
So for me, it would be ‘a’. But I think it could equally be ‘c’. I don’t know that ‘b’ is very valid. I think a person determines a ‘bad title’ based on their reading tastes. I think DaVinci Code is a horrible book, mainly because I DO predict outcomes well in novels and Brown’s writing seemed so condescending in its pretense to be suspenseful. But billions of people LOVE that book and would argue with me calling it a ‘bad title’.
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April 21st, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Most of the puritan literature we read was nonfiction or poetry. Almost entirely essays and poetry about god or religious practices. We read it leading up to The Scarlet Letter. Definitely not my cup of tea and probably not helped by the truly awful teacher I had.
I think my biggest resistance to any of the required reading was that I didn’t like being told what I was supposed to take from it. When the teacher asked what we thought of it, what we saw in it, I tended to like what I was reading much more than when I had teachers who told us what it meant without room for argument/difference of opinion.
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April 21st, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Thanks for all the info on what counts as “puritan lit.” I either never read that or I blocked it from my memory.
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April 21st, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Diana, you are lucky to have blocked Puritan lit from your memory, if you have. If only I could! *reaches for brain scrubber*
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April 21st, 2010 at 4:52 pm
*Feels very lucky I never had to read puritan lit*
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April 21st, 2010 at 5:58 pm
i adored my english teacher throughout middle school and high school. i was so lucky and blessed. i especially adored the fact that we read a lot of modernist lit (joyce, woolf, faulkner, etc) and we were encouraged to find our own meanings and references. so things like “portrait of the artist” and “the sound and the fury” became genius works where everyone found different things. and that was okay – if we could back up our interpretations, we were set.
my least favorite thing i read was “bleak house” (it might have been the timing – second semester senior year) and some short stories. oh! and huck finn! i did not like huck finn at all.
i think teachers and preference has a lot to do with it. a great teacher can get you to enjoy a book, but even the greatest teacher can’t get you to love something you just don’t.
(and “a separate peace” might be one of my favorite school books ever. i named my cat after phinneas in that book. i also wrote my AP english lit essay about it – which was impressive, given we read it our freshman year.)
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April 21st, 2010 at 6:00 pm
It is definitely C for me.
I’m not the type of person who ‘enjoys’ a book simply because I feel I have to in order to fit in with a group. Or whatever.
Reading should be fun.
When the book is drab and the characters are stupid or uninteresting, or if you do not agree with whatever the book is trying to say – then it is most definitely not fun.
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April 21st, 2010 at 10:19 pm
alaska: Can I just say that I read Bleak House in eighth grade by choice and I loved it?
Diana – a little bit of everything, I think, but especially A and C. A horrible teacher can make any book bad, and a lot depends on what people like…but I’ve always enjoyed reading, so being “forced” to read stuff never bothered me. It only bothered me when I clearly could not stand what I read (usually of my own accord), and had to read it anyway.
I also hated the “x symbolizes y” thing, but loved learning how to interpret different ideas in English classes.
In terms of the Brontes, I really liked Jane Eyre, but I liked it WAY better after I read Wide Sargasso Sea. If you’re going to read Jane Eyre, you should definitely check out Wide Sargasso Sea afterwards.
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April 21st, 2010 at 10:28 pm
I have read Wide Sargasso Sea. In college, in my class on post-colonial lit.
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April 22nd, 2010 at 10:20 am
Wow, interesting topic. Thanks for making me think about this. I realized that the books I loved in high school were read in my favorite English classes. I had one teacher I loved in particular who made me look at books and interpretation in a whole new light. She gave us the right tools then let us interpret ourselves.
I LOVED The Scarlet Letter because it was the first book that was ‘opened up’ to me. We read the first chapter as a class and my teacher said, “Tell me who the father of the child is.” None of us had a clue so our assignment was to re-read the first chapter, write an essay on it and discuss. When I read the chapter again I realized right away and couldn’t believe I had missed it. The book was so much better.
I HATED A Farewell to Arms because another teacher made us analyse the book word for word and had in his head what he felt the book ‘meant’. There was no room for individual interpretation or reading enjoyment. Sad. I should probably read it again.
I guess it really matters who your teacher is. Every book I read with the Farewell to Arms teacher was AWFUL. I shudder when I hear the titles, Night, The Pearl and The Old Man and The Sea. But the good teachers gave me a love for books that I probably wouldn’t have liked otherwise: Macbeth, Wuthering Heights, The Sound and the Fury. I’m really grateful for the those teachers and feel that a lot of my ‘interpretation’ abilities have come from them.
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April 22nd, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Yeah…I taught American Literature for five years and I never once did any “Puritan literature.” Yes, I covered “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and maybe one set of poems, but only as a lead in to THE CRUCIBLE
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April 22nd, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Sorry…interrupted thought.
I know THE CRUCIBLE was not technically Puritan in time period–it was the only time I went non-chronologically. But it was way more fun and salacious than anything that the Puritans actually wrote and I loved having the girls fight over who got to read Abigail’s part and how which ever poor soul got to read John Proctor would blush profusely.
As for THE SCARLET LETTER, it’s part of the American Romantic period, which we studied along with several of Hawthorne’s short stories, including “Young Goodman Brown,” and Melville. Really, what would junior year be without learning to say, “I prefer not to,” from Bartleby the Scrivener? And of course, I spent WEEKS on Poe. We may have read everything he wrote. Or close. The kids loved him, I loved him…it was win-win.
I loved all of American Lit. My favorite book read back then was SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser. But I never taught it. My favorite book to teach was THE SCARLET LETTER. And GATSBY. I loved GATSBY. It was usually the last thing I’d teach as I always ran out of time by the end of the year because we spent nine weeks learning how to write research papers. Ugh. Necessary, but UGH.
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April 23rd, 2010 at 12:05 pm
I think my answer is D – Influence from family and friends. Reading was and is a norm in my household. From the time I recited the Golden Book “Jumping Jackie” because my parents read it to me to the series books I read as an adolescent, to novels and romances later in life.
As for school, I had some good teachers that were forced through the curriculum to read very crappy things. 9th grade could have been great except we had to read, a conneticut yankee in king arthur’s court and other not so great novels. She did pick some truly awesome short stories though that i still remember reading. 10th grade was a joke. Finally in 11th we were able to be more expressive with our views and I wrote some of the best lit papers of my life in that class. (total math major in college and the thought of a 5 page paper gave me the willies)
I took advanced speech in 12th and was rewarded with a great teacher and great plays to analyze.
all in all, I think D or even E all of the above plays a role.
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April 24th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
To me,the best English teachers were open to interpretation of literature from their students instead of forcing their own opinion on the students. I think that interpretation of literature can be subjective and there’s not always a finite answer. My AP English teacher picked a variety of books for us to read. Some of them I loved (The Color Purple,The Awakening, The Bluest Eye, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and some I loathed (Heart of Darkness and 1984). I thought it was so cool that I had to get a permission slip to read The Bluest Eye. I felt like I was getting to read a book that other high school students weren’t allowed to read. He taught me how to recognize symbols and analyze meaning. I wouldn’t have passed college English without his class.
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April 28th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Yay, I also hated Wuthering Heights. Definitely read Jane Eyre, though. She was the more talented sister in my opinion.
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November 21st, 2011 at 7:12 am
.karen-millen-dressuk
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