Quote:
Originally Posted by Iarwain
The "proper" reader, according to Adler, makes detailed outlines, lists definitions, reconstructs arguments, and doesn't judge until he understands what's being said.
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Oh honey, I'm so sorry this book exists...
The proper reader may indeed need to do things like this at times, but the proper
writer should make it his or her goal to make these things completely unnecessary. I can only hope Adler's book didn't require note-taking to be properly understood... I would hate to need a book to teach me how to read a book that teaches me how to read! It would get so cyclic...
My bookshelves aren't quite so full as some others (give me time! and money! and more bookshelves!) but as far as it goes, I've read a substantial amount. A varied substantial amount. I've had a well-worn library card for as long as I can remember and I'm chasing after an English Lit degree that doesn't really pertain to my life goals, but hey who said bureaucracy needs logic? I have at least fifty books sitting in my dorm room right now, after having forced myself to bring only the bare essentials to school with me. Lurking on sagging bookshelves at my parents' house a few hours from here, I have a few hundred more.
I've read maybe ten pages of
The Brothers Karamazov and adored each word, each sentence, each idea. Adored. And I loathed
Crime and Punishment almost as much as I hated
The Grapes of Wrath. I think
Hamlet is nowhere near as profound as
Little Red Riding Hood and I rank Neil Gaiman next to John Donne. I think T.S. Eliot's a hack, I have no idea what the difference between Wordsworth, Emerson, and that other guy is, but I think Blake's
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell should be handed to everybody upon their fifteenth birthday. I love Poe but think he got lazy, and I won't read Dickens any more on principle. I think
Harry Potter should be taught not in Lit classes but in courses on sociology. I've participated in dirty limerick contests in bars and I've written pages upon pages of iambic pentameter discoursing on the nature of Shakespeare's villains. I'm disappointed in the
New Testament for taking four gospels to get the story across. I've never forgiven Kafka for taking so many pages to get Gregor out of bed. I'm completely in love with haiku and folklore, I believe that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is nice and all, but
One Hundred Years of Solitude was mind-numbing. Borges makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, while Ben-Jeloun and Achebe leave me ambivalent. I read parts of a trashy romance novel this summer called
Duke of Sin; it was terrible and wonderful, much like Galadriel. I like graphic novels;
Stardust is on my floor right now, and I spent a sizable portion of a bus ride reading
Batman. Moby Dick bored me to tears.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer made me want to commit seppuku with my pen.
What was my point?
Ah, yes.
The reason any book is wonderful, so say I, is because people like to read it. If people like to read books with the aid of other books, have at it. I mean, hey, some people own handcuffs, you know?
The reason I like Tolkien but hate C.S. Lewis is because I enjoy reading Tolkien's stories, whereas I feel like Lewis is shoving his down my throat, maybe twisting now and again to get them deeper. Literature is pass/fail. Classics, historically speaking, pass. That doesn't mean we should have to read them. That just means other people have either liked them or have been too afraid to admit that they suck because people with more social power have said that they don't.
I read. A lot. Published work, unpublished work, the back of my shampoo bottle...
Yes, Tolkien is wonderful. Yes, classics are wonderful. But...
Read whatever helps you get through your life in such a way as that you are as good a human being as you can possibly be. K? Thx.