“I shivered with pleasure,” Dirda reports, “scrunched further down under my thick blanket, and took another bite of my Baby Ruth candy bar, as happy as I will ever be.”
Anyone interested in Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, or adventure fiction will enjoy Dirda’s book. He reminds us that Doyle, one of the two of three most popular writers in the English-speaking world, was an extraordinary period piece. “Unaffectedness,” Doyle reported, was his own favorite virtue. “Manliness” was the virtue he most admired in other men. His favorite occupation was “work.” His ideal of happiness was “time well filled.” I don’t believe these are the sorts of answers you would get from Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, or whoever this month’s celebrity novelist is.
And how about this story, about an older Doyle traveling by train with his family through South Africa. One of his grown up sons commented on the ugliness of a woman who walked by them. “He barely had time to finish the sentence,” Dirda writes, “when he received a slap and saw, very close to his, the flush face of his old father, who said very mildly: ‘Just remember that no woman is ugly.’”
Nevertheless, excellent though Dirda is on Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, what impressed me most about the book was his opening pages devoted to Mr. Jackson and his first encounter with the The Hound of the Baskervilles. What Mr. Jackson recognized is that a successful pedagogue should appeal to a young person’s sense of adventure, not his coddled feeling of self-esteem. It’s the world outside, the world of daring and derring-do, that fructifies. This was something that another popular novelist (and also a genius) John Buchan understood. Buchan is probably best remembered today for a half dozen adventure novels featuring the exploits of Richard Hannay and other redoubtable characters. The Thirty-Nine Steps was the first and most famous, but other excellent “shockers” (as Buchan himself put it) followed swiftly. The was Mr. Standfast and Greenmantle, for example, sterling examples of the genre. The point, which Mr. Jackson intuitively understood and Dirda dramatized, is that, as Buchan wrote in his memoir Pilgrim’s Way, “The world must remain an oyster for youth to open. If not, youth will cease to be young, and that will be the end of everything.”
Mr. Jackson didn’t need the Department of Education National Educational Association to understand that, and neither, come to think of it, do we.
A few years ago The New Criterion published a review of the work of G.H. Henty, a prolific late Victorian author of juvenile literature. The review disclosed that Arthur Schlesinger, Roy Jenkins and A.J.P. Taylor all benefited from reading him. So did I. Carefully researched history, extensive vocabulary and a dose of geography were all served up in dozens of volumes which draw catch and hold the young readers’ interest.
These volumes are being reprinted for the use by home schoolers. Totally unacceptable for public schools. They are politically incorrect and might actually interest the students.
I googled G.H. Henty, to learn more about this author I had never heard of, and ended up on a website called Dumb and Dumber Down. Some good reading there. You should give it a try.
Henty is a core piece of our homeschool curriculum. And it is no burden on the kids to read his works.
I have long advocated that the current method of setting exit standards for various grades is the wrong approach. Instead, employ entrance standards: let 4th grade teachers establish the achievement levels to enter their grade, let 5th grade teachers set their entry standards, etc. Make part of the teacher pay dependent upon achieving a reasonable success level for reaching the next grade. Too few kids able to meet the entry level? Reduce the number of classes … and lay off a teacher or two. Too low a standard to get lots of kids in and increase teaching positions? Fine, but they better be able to raise them to the level needed to enter the next grade or they miss their success bonus.
It would be much harder for the teachers to complain that they were stuck trying to turn sows’ ears into silk purses.
And yes, assuredly the goal for ANY valid pedagogy must be to inspire the student to become self-educating because long life times and increasingly rapid technological and social change will demand constant learning, as all us old farts on the internet can attest.
That variety of fiction is anathema to “literary” writers and the critics who admire them…which is the reason “literary” fiction is becoming ever more insular and irrelevant to the reading public.
B. R. Myers would be pleased. As it happens, so am I.
We live in a day when Robert E. Howard is NSFS.
That puts the burden on the parents.
I’ve long had a quarrel with the way reading is taught these days! should be, in my view, a combination of READING exciting/fun stuff to kids ASAP after birth (to make being able to read as exciting to a child as–much later on–wanting to emulate what grown ups do).
And then seems to me the way reading is taught today does not encourage what I call sheer FLUENCY. And that means heavy on phonics phonics phonics–so kids can reasonably sound out and SAY what they see before they necessariloy understand what they’re reading. Instead emphasis seems to be on SLOW reading, COMPREHENSION. That isn’t the way you learn to talk or acquire language at all!! We all have comical stories to tell of what kids THOUGHT things their parents said became something quite different from what kids heard. It all becomes CLEAR over time.
You need FLUENCY to become a voracious reader more than you need fine-tuned comprehension. Frankly I see comparisons with the pedestrian approach to teaching reading and the way so many people get turned off on playing Bridge by the way it’s TAUGHT. [That’s a cause of mine at http://bridgetable.net
Bridge, back when I learned to play (the 50s) became huge fad because we all just picked it up from friends–bad habits notwithstanding. Some of us, true, got hooked on its serious aspects and went on to learning all kinds of esoteric conventions and analysis of hands. But MOST just became voracious players for the sheer endless variety of hands one is dealt.Get playing badly ASAP is the way to create a multitude of bridge players–get ‘em hooked on the game FIRST.
That’s the way reading should be approached — FLUENCY FIRST,JOY in being able to READ!!! Mistakes notwithstanding. Later fine tune (once they’re hooked)their comprehension skills, analyzing sentences, et cetera.
I always think of Harry Potter author as modern-day proof that a good story is the best recipe for producing readers.
I agree with you almost 100%. My disagreement is with the part about phonics.
Phonics has been the pet project of educators sine the Sixties- notice that today, you can barely turn on a TV without getting hit in the face with a bubbly “Hooked On Phonics!” ad. It is a standard part of K through 5 English education.
And it really doesn’t work all that well.
First of all, most words in English are not spelled “phonetically”- that is, their spellings are not consistent with their pronunciations. English is replete with homonyms (words which sound alike but are spelled differently) and antiphones (words with the same spelling but different pronunciations). This is typical of any “hybrid” language (which English is, being a pidgin of Saxon, the Romance group, and the Germanic tongues), due to the presence of “loan-words” from the parent tongues plus lingual-genetic drift.
The word “read” itself is a case in point. Present tense pronunciation- “reed”, past tense “red”. Both of which pronunciations it shares with words that are spelled phonetically, sound like it, and have entirely different meanings.
I went through K-through-5 during the early heyday of phonics in the Kennedy/LBJ era. And not only did I personally get very tired of the second grade teacher constantly exhorting us to “Sound It Out! Sound It Out!!” at the top of her (not inconsiderable) lungs, I frequently got in trouble for pronouncing words “wrong”- because I was pronouncing them the way the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary I had at home said they were to be pronounced, which was often at odds with what the teacher’s “phonics” book said was correct.
(I might add that I learned to read at age one and a half, and in Kindergarten was reading at a fifth-grade level, according to tests. Since I was already reading E.E. “Doc” Smith, Robert Heinlein, etc., at that point, my actual reading level may have been a bit higher.)
One thing I did notice was that other children, who came in liking reading, and eager to do so, were “turned off” by the constant exhortations and “drill-and-kill” of the phonics regimen. Many of them stopped reading for pleasure, and most of them went on to score poorly in English at the higher levels. Phonics had turned something they did for fun into a dreary chore in which they were constantly being told that they were doing it wrong- no matter what the dictionary said. I can think of no faster way to make a child hate reading than treating them in that way.
“Phonics” may be a useful tool in dealing with some children who have reading comprehension problems; I used it in junior high school as a teaching aid to help grade 5 and 6 students with learning disabilities as a volunteer teacher’s aid. (Actually, I was “volunteered” for it by my English teacher- you know how that works, I’m sure.) In using it, I became even more aware of the systems limitations than I had been in 2nd grade. I got very used to hearing a child say, “that didn’t sound right- that’s not the way it sounds when I say it talking”, or words to that effect, after pronouncing a word “correctly” according to the phonics method. My response was to ask, “How does it sound when you say it talking to somebody?” Nine times out of ten, the “learning disabled” child knew the correct pronunciation from hearing the word said by everybody around them every day. I told them to say it the way they heard it from their parents, teachers, friends, and such, no matter what the “phonics” book said.
And on the rare occasion that I said “sound it out”, I always said it softly.
As stated above, phonics may be a useful tool in certain circumstances. But it is by no means a panacea, and its overall effectiveness has been both overblown, and oversold.
cheers
eon
I agree completely. I was also an early reader and phonics had nothing to offer me. To achieve reading fluency and speed, you must learn to be a “sight” reader, that is to see the entire word or sometimes groups of words and translate it into a concept in your mind. The same is true when reading music, you see the “note” and translate it into a fingering on the instrument. You can’t think, that is a “b” let me see which “b” it is and then find the fingering on the violin etc.
Phonics is nothing more than a very primitive teaching tool for reading at the most basic level with simple words. It will never get you to fluency and will bore the snot out of an intelligent child who has already learned to read by recognizing “whole” words.
You need to extend your study of reading education further back in time. What you’re talking about is clearly part of the counter-revolution against the dropping of phonics in previous decades; at the very latest this started with 1955′s Why Johnny Can’t Read and since then it’s been a war without end, continuing to this day.
Were and are there excesses on the phonics side? I’m sure, but it’s been well proven that a large fraction of children (1/3 or more as I recall) will never learn to read well unless they learn phonics first.
Lina & Gringo [below]- couldn’t agree more. I was taught “phonetic pronunciation” in 1951-52; my sister was taught the “word memorization” method in 1956-57. The most noticeable and significant difference was our approach to unknown words especially when dictionary pronunciation guides weren’t “that user friendly”.
I would eventually stumble my way through a ragged semblance of correctness and go on to the next challenge while she would quit due to frustration if someone didn’t give her the verbal equivalent.
I have always loved reading and my sister – not so much. The difference could be explained perhaps in many ways but I tend to agree that early experiences determine later behavior.
I’ve also come to believe reading skills influence self-reliance and self-determination.
I don’t know when I learned to read but it was without the use of phonics……which I occasionally use now in my old age to help me spell a word.
I had a running e-mail argument with some uber conservative who thinks phonics is all good….there is no other way to read. I taught reading for many years without benefit of phonics and found, in the 60s that there was so much emphasis on sounding out words that no one knew anyathing about what they were reading. Phonetic rules were so involved that I couldn’t check papers without referring to the answwer sheet.
In response to Mr. Starr….books for kids have become so sanitized to rid them of any possible bias or non PC ideas that they are nothing but glop. I wish more parents would make their feelings known to the major publishers of children’s reading materials. Without being squeaky wheels, phonics will go on and on.
I am an uberconservative, but agree with you. I don’t see the connection – political beliefs and education, though. Guess I didn’t have you for critical thinking skills class.
BULLSH*T, eon! UTTER B.S.!
My husband went through the educational system in Chicago when they were ‘experimenting’ going off phonics and he was practically ILLITERATE.
When I was teaching our daughter Phonics, he started to gradually learn to spell.
Phonics isn’t “perfect” because the English language is a HOT MESS, but, Phonics WORKS. My daughter is an incredibly gifted writer and I taught her language by Phonics.
You need to rethink your stance.
Have a nice Thanksgiving.
hugs,
Delia
The phonics method you are talking about has no real relation to the “Hooked on Phonics” program that parents can purchase for their pre-school children. HOP is a wonderful program that teaches children about phonics, sight-words and slowly builds up their reading confidence by guiding them through books of increasing difficulty. Both of my sons used the program and were reading at the 4th grade level by the time they started elementary school.
To teach reading, you need both good stories AND phonics. Phonics enable the reader to decode the printed word. From my experience, first graders enjoy the repetition of phonics exercises. But once students learn phonics in first grade, I would not see the need for phonics drills in subsequent grades.
Fifth graders who have already learned how to decode the printed word do not need phonics drills. For a fifth grader who doesn’t know yet how to decode the printed word- which would lead me to suspect that the student had been exposed the “Whole Language” approach but not to phonics- phonics should help.
Fluency is, of course, the key. In the late 90s and early 00s a company that I formed developed at great expense a program for teaching reading through modeling a fluent reader. Like the books for the blind, I added a spoken version of text so that the student could access both the visual and auditory version of the material at the same instant. The student’s goal was to be able to imitate the reader when tested by the teacher. Control of the learning process was given to the student so that he could repeat the audio version as many times as necessary in order to attain mastery. In addition, the material was broken down into phrases, so words always appeared in a meaning-filled context. That, of course, is the only way anyone learns to read. Take, as an example, the following sentence: “The nurse wound the bandage around the wound.” We only know the meaning of “wound” from its context. The material that our company used was all off copyright. It included tongue twisters, Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights.
Needless to say, marketing was difficult. “Mastery” was completely out of favor, the Just So Stories were politically incorrect, and the primary documents of the United States were outrageously ethnocentric. I still look back with pride at our work, but we could hardly have done worse in choosing our material.
How DID we survive without the Department of Education? But, who knows, with this “plugged-in” generation, kids today are probably reading more than ever before. At least if they sit in front of a computer on the Internet, they’re reading. The problem is, they aren’t necessarily reading anything good.
If there was a way to encourage kids to read better things on the Internet, that would be a start. Perhaps giving kids a school-approved list of web sites and telling kids to “check them out.” Of course, the kids would be quizzed on the web sites they read (nothing helps like a bit of motivation), but at least they would be reading something good and at no cost to them (since almost all these web sites are free). I hate to say it, but e-books and web sites may be taking over the world, simply because they are cheaper and faster to manufacture than conventional books. So sitting under those blankets with a good book may be replaced by sitting in front of a PC, a Kindle, a Nook, or an IPad. The only thing that really matters is what the kids are reading. And that’s where teachers and parents come in, not the Department of Education.
Most of these really good books are already available online for free, either to read online or to download to an e-reader (or to print out if you prefer). Anyone can access great books!
Give me “It was a dark and stormy night” any time (yes, some nights are darker than others!) Stories, tales — not self-absorption and prose for prose’s sake. I was forced to read the old-English Beowulf in 6th grade. Is there any wonder I hated reading then?
Doyle is often overlooked today, not just because of Holmes (whom, as Mr. Kimball points out, “serious literary critics” turn up their noses at) but because he was also one of the godfathers of modern science fiction.
Beside the Sherlock Holmes stories, and his more basic historical novel “The White Company”, Doyle also wrote such stories as “The Maracot Deep” (c.1926), about Atlanteans and a rather nasty entity living in the ocean, and “The Horror of the Heights” (1913), concerning an extremely nasty critter living in the stratosphere- with an appetite for aviators. H.P. Lovecraft owes more to Doyle than most fans of the Cthulhu Mythos realize.
And of course there is “The Lost World” (1912), which gave us Professor George Edward Challenger and that plateau full of dinosaurs in South America. Doyle wrote other stories about the redoubtable Professor, in many ways presaging such pulp heroes as Lester Dent’s Doc Savage (which Dent wrote under the Street & Smith “house name” Kenneth Robeson), and such later TV and movie protagonists as Nigel Kneale’s Professor Bernard Quatermass. Like Professor Q, Professor C always left the impression that anything or anybody who got in his way would end up with a Professor-sized-and-shaped hole right through them.
But Doyle’s ambitions for his writing were much less grand. In fact, he explained them quite simply, in his own preface to “The Lost World” (1919 U.S. edition):
“I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy,
To the boy who’s half a man
Or the man who’s half a boy.”
cheers
eon
One of the scariest things I’ve ever read is the description of a man being stalked through dense forest by a stealthy T-rex in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’. This was long before Jurassic Park (if I recall correctly, Crichton steals this scene for his book). It’s one thing to imagine living dinosaurs, but imagine them with the complex behaviour of a big predator takes near-genius, and a good dose of non-literary life experience. The kind of thing you don’t get sitting around the Lit faculty lounge.
Writers like Conan Doyle—or, for that matter, Kipling, whose short stories I devoured in my youth—are all but incomprehensible to the Texting Youth of today, and their works in many cases largely unavailable.
These works are incomprehensible beause they use unusual words of more than single syllables, and punctuation—and because they describe a world which antedates not merely computers and cell phones, but (gasp!) even telephones with buttons, answering machines, television, and radio. Such a world is all but incomprehensible to the incurious and historically-challenged youth of today, over and above their unfamiliarity with its vocabulary and its use of dependent clauses.
They are also unfamiliar with that vanished world’s ideals and virtues, and, in consequence, that world’s moral map as well as its physical topography is utterly alien to them. Many of the stories of these older writers have been tacitly consigned to the dustbin because they embody language or attitudes which, when used towards other ethnicities than that of the writer, are nowadays deemed too cruel or crude or inflammatory for the tender sensibilities of today’s child, raised swaddled in cotton-wool. Indeed, the recent outlawing (on “safety” grounds, due to allegations of trace lead in the printing ink) of all children’s books printed prior to 1985 ensures that many children will reach their majority safely segregated from the lively plots and complex language which engaged the generations before them.
Writers like Conan Doyle—or, for that matter, Kipling, whose short stories I devoured in my youth—are all but incomprehensible to the Texting Youth of today, and their works in many cases largely unavailable.
Hardly, at least among those who aren’t illiterate entirely. The more self-conscious may not care for the tone of the just-so stories, but that doesn’t make them hard; most only know Sherlock from the old movies, so expect it to be boring. (Thank goodness for that new movie– it might get them to start looking into the stories and finding they’re more like the Downey Jr. version than the old, slow, mocked movies.)
Kipling’s poetry is a great “in”– it’s interesting, fun and easy to read aloud, and things actually HAPPEN. I found it on accident because an uncle has a habit of complementing “you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”
You’ll find a few that fit your stereotype, but idiots have been with us for ages– thirty years ago my mom was arguing with a high school kid who couldn’t comprehend the question “where does milk come from before the store?”
The “current generation” (Heaven knows how you’ll define that– I’ve seen it applied for everyone from “today’s middle schoolers” through “everyone under thirty”) may be ignorant, taken as a whole, but they’re not mindless. Ignorance is curable.
You are inadvertently proving my point. Kipling’s “Just-So Stories” are among his least interesting and least exciting work. They remain largely available—albeit bowdlerized so that racial language which offends the modern ear has been removed. Yet the two Jungle Books, Puck of Pook’s Hill and its sequel volume Rewards and Fairies, not to mention the Stalky stories—all of them intended for children—are not particularly easy to find, and contain language which is largely too convoluted and advanced (and “slow”) fr th txting generation. Nor is it easy to find a lot of Kipling’s many other short stories in print; the same fifteen or twenty keep coming up in rotation in volume after volume.
Children are not taught to glory in the texture of language nowadays. They are not taught to read or to memorize poetry, with the result that even the relatively accessible language of Kipling’s verse is largely closed to them. The prose might as well be in Chinese given the complexity of the vocabulary and sentences, the unfamiliarity of the society and the mores the stories portray, and the level of what passes for “reading comprehension” nowadays.
Oh, I was taught poetry in school.
And I hated it.
And I still hate it.
One of the big problems with the way reading is taught, is that they don’t separate teaching *reading* from teaching *English literature*.
I was always more drawn to technical and mathematical subjects–I ended up becoming an engineer.
One of the very first things I read–when I was in first grade–was a book on how internal-combustion engines work. But I read that on my own.
There’s nothing wrong with teaching reading by getting kids to read a technical manual or a user’s guide for their computer–or a book or paper on some scientific subject.
But that’s not the way reading is taught. Reading literature, rather than reading scientific or technical subjects, is what is taught in most schools under the label “reading”.
Oh, I was taught poetry in school.
And I hated it.
And I still hate it.
How terribly, terribly sad.
One reason why so many kids (and then adults) dislike poetry today is because of the way they were exposed to it in school. The vast majority of children adore rhythm and rhyme, but our “experts” foist free verse on them. Children love stories, but our “enlightened” educators pass up narrative poems (too long! too hard!) for lyrical description.
Very sad, indeed.
So your point in claiming that the “texting generation” can’t understand Kipling and Doyle was that it’s hard to find? The lack of availability may be why they don’t tend to read it, not evidence that they’re incapable.
From your response to sinz54, I think you’re not understanding the situation quite right. The experts demand technically praiseworthy things– such as the gosh-awful ‘poetry’ my English teachers foisted on us– rather than, say, Kipling’s poems. This kills off the interest of those who don’t already know about good poetry which means there’s no demand which means the books aren’t offered, and it cycles.
If you actually offer the quality stuff to ‘kids,’ the same percent as ever will enjoy it– it’s just not offered, and another generation grows up hating poetry and reading because the only examples of either they’ve been offered are horrible. (What would you think of short stories if you’d only been offered “Hills like White Elephants”? How many people think all Japanese food is raw fish and thus would never touch it?)
No, my points are multiple:
1) The “good stuff” in terms of unbowdlerized editions of the works of great writers—Kipling, Marryat, Berna, J. Meade Faulkner, C. Day Lewis, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Arthur Ransome, John Verney, to name a few who come to mind—is, indeed, hard to find.
2) The “good stuff” is intentionally hard to find, in part because there is in place a law which mandates the destruction/non-sale of children’s books printed prior to 1985, on the grounds of “safety” (i.e., alleged trace elements of lead in the printing ink)—which means not only that a great many superb books not in print are being destroyed, but that a great many superb illustrations to those books are also being destroyed. Illustrations are expensive to print, and are often left out of modern editions of earlier classics. The outlawing of pre-1985 books on “safety” grounds is one of the most brilliant acts of cultural vandalism perpetrated in the last decade.
3) Even if the books were obtainable, the children are by and large unequipped to read them. I have copies of short-story “readers” designed for the elementary schools of mid-20th century New York; I strongly doubt that today’s NYC high school students could read the tales with comprehension, and answer the suggested questions which follow each story. This is partly because the children of today are barely literate in the “see Spot run” mode; partly because their vocabularies are minimal; partly because they have no ability to imagine a world other than their own; partly because they have an attention span which is a fraction of the attention spans their forebears had.
4) There is no teaching of verse by recitation and memorization any more. Recitation and memorization teach children elements of the music of language whether or not they want to learn or realize they are doing so, and improves the storage capacity of their brains.
I did not know there was a sequel to Puck of Pook’s Hill! I will have to look for that one. My dd has loved Just So Stories and Puck of Pook’s Hill. Our homeschool curriculum (which is freely available here: http://www.amblesideonline.org) uses many of the books you all have mentioned. I cannot tell you how pleased I am with the results of using these excellent works with my children. Oh, how those public school students are missing out. After reading these books, the modern works by and large seem dull and insipid.
Thank you for that link! I just got “Just So Stories” for my little girls after a LOT of searching, and hope to home school them– every little bit of extra information helps.
I actually found the Jeremy Brett Holmes to be closer to the books than Downey.
I haven’t seen the series, since in ’94 (the last year on IMDB) I was barely in double digits; luckily, it’s on Netflix, and if it’s as good as you believe the kids who see the new movies will check it out and get hooked… Heck, the kids that are old enough to drink this year would have barely been in school when that ended!
Forgive me if I’m wrong. I think you can GIVE away the books, just not sell them 2nd hand. The books are not illegal, they aren’t marketable. I’m talking like the government, aren’t I?
When that bit of news came down the pike, my wife and I smelled something stinky in Helsinki. We’ve come across quite a bit of abridged childrens’ literature and it occured to us that the progressives had another arrow in the quiver, child safety. No, not safety from lead, safety from authentic literature. The day will come when the original Kipling or Twain will be found, not on a KINDLE, but only as a mouldering relic on a shelf.
Books, my friend. BOOKS
I believe you are correct that pre-1985 children’s books can be given away without penalty, but not sold.
So what? There are hundreds, nay, thousands, of titles that are thus slated for destruction—and hundreds of thousands of copies. Not only books, but illustrations; illustrations by the great Arthur Szyk, by Rockwell Kent and Lynd Ward, by Howard Pyle, by the many brilliant line artists whose work adorned the children’s books of earlier ages. All—all—slated for the dust heap or the compactor, because while you may legally give away a contraband book without penalty (such gratitude for such a non-favor!), without a financial incentive to trade in such books there is no reason for them to survive. In short, unless one can buy and sell these books, the vast majority of them will be destroyed. I know of charitable resale institutions which, rather than risk running afoul of the law, have simply refused to deal in such merchandise, and consigned what they had to the ash heap.
Complete cultural destruction—in the interests of an utterly bogus concern for “child safety.”
“One might even argue that the trade name “Kindle” is le mot juste for a device that is, in the end, dedicated to “burning” the traditional book.”
Just what I SAID.
“…while you may legally give away a contraband book without penalty (such gratitude for such a non-favor!
Didn’t I say this? “I’m talking like the government, aren’t I?”
Again, the GOVERNMENT’s position would be that they are deserving of gratitude!
I’m on your side !
See comment by Jerry above
Sooo true. I remember with the deepest pleasure learning to read. I was in second grade, and the local library had a long row of the Hardy Boys series. My mother read me a few pages of the first book we checked out, to get me started, but she had things to do, and wouldn’t read to me non-stop all day long. Since I HAD to find out what happened next, there was no solution other than to slog through the books myself. From there, it was a life-long habit of reading for pleasure before i fall asleep. My THANKS, forever, to those who understood children and published and distributed those wonderful stories.
The crux—”What Mr. Jackson recognized is that a successful pedagogue should appeal to a young person’s sense of adventure, not his coddled feeling of self-esteem.”
My parents were readers. I grew up with a mother and father that read every night. Since I was born soon after World War II, it may have helped that we did not have a TV until I was a few years older. During those crucial formative years before starting kindergarten, I saw my parents reading daily.
I also spent a lot of time outside playing under the sun and the sky exercising my imagination. That helped too—something many of today’s children do not do. Instead, the parents allow them to spend hours inside watching TV, playing video games or social networking on sites such as Facebook. Not playing outside is an epidemic in America that is so bad, most children do not get enough of an essential nutrient that comes from the sun—vitamin D.
Parents are the key. If children reach elementary school without the parent as a role model for reading, then the child is already behind and most teachers are not Conan Doyle, Ryder Haggard, James Hilton, Geoffrey Household, Rafael Sabatini or even R. L. Stevenson. If they were, they probably wouldn’t be teaching for a living considering how US public school teachers are treated and blamed for just about everything.
When I was a child, I doubt that my parents knew much about the so-called importance of instilling a false sense of self-esteem in their young son, which was fortunate for me. Instead, in my 60′s, I still read books and my latest method of reading is using an Amazon Kindle. Does it matter if we read off paper or a screen as long as we are reading? Reading exercises the imagination and develops that area of the brain where we solve problems and do critical thinking. It doesn’t matter much what we read as long as we read—science fiction, romance, westerns, mysteries, fantasy, horror, literature, etc.
In fact, I consider it child abuse when a parent does not raise a child during the formative years up to six years of age to develop a love of reading books. If most or all children entered kindergarten with a love of reading, there would be few if any problems in our public schools.
That’s what parents do in Finland where it is customary to teach a child to read starting about age 3. Then, by the time the child is seven (when they start school in Finland), the child already reads at a basic level, which explains why Finland’s students place among the top three to five countries annually on the International PISA test and Finland’s unionized public school (more than 90% of Finland’s teachers belong to a strong teacher’s union) are considered the best in Europe and the world.
Funny for this article to come up this morning because last night at B&N I got the sudden yearning for some stories by Kipling. Interesting characters, exotic locations, plots that reinforced an ethic of a great era; can anymore be expected?
My home always had lots of books and I can remember taking them off the bookshelf and literally aching to interact with them somehow. So I took a pencil and scribbled on a few pages. I kept one such book for decades and foolishly loaned it to a idiot who lost it and barely had the civilized courtesy to apologize.
Kindle? No thank you. I have always haunted (or would that be “stalking” in today’s latest and greatest) used book stores. I have found many an old friend there whom I thanked for their faithful service by giving an honored place on my bookshelves. I found a book with a hand written poem tucked inside, given and received by people unknown but to my imagination. I have found many books with loving sentiments inside the cover. I understand because the greatest gift I can give anyone is a good book.
I was born in the early eighties, and the school diagnosed me as “learning disabled.”
Thankfully, the middle-of-nowhere place I lived had a special ed teacher who ended up there because he wasn’t very good at milking advantages from stuff… the first thing he did when I walked in was take me to a large wall of books and ask me to pick one. I didn’t notice it at the time, but I suppose he was rather shocked when I chose one of the harder ones… and read it with relative ease. The school’s program required that you read Dick and Jane (yes, seriously) before you’d be allowed to try the next level up, and so on. You were limited to the shelves in the Library that you’d already proven you could read. I was a brat, but I wasn’t “reading disabled” or something. (Thank goodness for Hank the Cowdog, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and such…as well as teachers that didn’t complain if you decided to stop reading a book you chose because you didn’t like it. If I’d been forced to finish Dracula I’d probably have been put off trying random books entirely.)
A lot of teachers don’t seem to understand the notion of “reading for pleasure.”
Might want to keep in mind that just because the educators
Hm, not sure how I managed to delete the last half-thought.
Might want to keep in mind that just because the educators’ think there’s a defect doesn’t mean there is one– sometimes they just assume.
Speaking of brats… next time you hear that X.YZ% of school kids didn’t know water is wet or something, remember how these things are generally done: you’re given a big multiple choice test to fill out, and your answers don’t count. Half the guys in my class thought it was the funniest thing ever to choose a really dumb answer, and most of us resented being given a bunch of work for no good reason.
If I’d been forced to finish Dracula…
Dracula unabridged is not a children’s book, understanding it requires an understanding of the period, its culture, and its religious background that a child of this age can’t generally come by.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming release of the Ignatius Press Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s work.
It’s also really gross to an eight year old! I didn’t have problems with the historical and society aspects– at least as far as I got– but the part about him laying there like a bloated leach? Eeew!
School today has too many other goals: union needs for happy members, government workers jobs, replace parents, babysitting the reluctant……… Making things, even reading, more interesting won’t work since the competition is computer games and laziness-both allowed and encouraged.
Back to readin, writin, and rithmatic and out if students don’t keep up-give the parents a babysitting problem if they don’t make their kids meet some standards for academics and behavior.
There are incredibly negative cultural/economic issues disrupting learning. When school worked, math was a 12 year progressive program which built on previous learning. With text books changing and being selected without the overall growth context, math basics start over or change with each text book cycle. Fourth graders might be able to learn algebra, but not without multiplication tables memorized.
Like #1 commented, G.H. Henty, is a very popular author among homeschoolers. My children loved reading these books, as well as Doyle, Twain, Dickens, Poe and even the simple Little House series.
I think reforming our schools is possible but may not happen because solutions today rely on money.
As the mom of 4 homeschool graduates-one studying to be a nurse, one a fireman, one a soldier, and one taking university courses while deciding on a direction, I can say that perhaps the system may need a complete overhaul as my children are ages 16-22 and our schooling was very different than public schools.
This has always been a bone of contention with me since I grew up reading Burroughs, Lovecraft and comics, watching cartoons.
Although I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that if I liked a thing it must be good, I still recognized that there was a difference between “sober” and “serious.” Jane Austen may be sober and Lovecraft may not be, but they were both “serious” about what they did and therein lies the rub as they don’t say.
I learned that good stuff is where you find it and not where you expect it to be. I learned to think for myself and I found that perhaps an unknown writer in mainstream terms, Jack Vance, may be as good an American prose stylist as we had in the 20th century.
Is wine really more sophisticated than soda pop or is it a cultural conceit?
The same type of panel edit mimicking movement will be ignored if Joe Kubert did it in a Sgt. Rock comic book but applauded if done as a triptych by a conceptual fine art photographer.
No one has a monopoly on quality, just the perception of such and those on the wrong side of this issue are missing out on an awful lot of fun.
How many of us go back and re-read these old novels? I do. Think of ‘em! James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, John Buchan (the trio about Dickson McCunn and the Gorbals Diehards), Laurens van der post (Flamingo Feather), Kipling, Dumas, Verne, the Chinese “Journey to the West” and “All Men Are Brothers”, Talbot Mundy, Burroughs (the Mars and Pellucidar novels), and on and on. How about history? Parkman and Prescott, Winston Churchill, and others. Short stories? Poe, O Henry, ‘The Arabian Nights’. Maybe we should go back and read some of them again. Enjoy!
Just to clarify one point: That would be Winston Churchill the American writer (Richard Carvel and other best-selling historical novels), not Sir Winston Churchill the British politician (who wrote history and war reporting, and one novel).
Many libraries still have the American Churchill’s novels on the shelf.
Many thanks for the kind words about my little book about Conan Doyle. As Roger Kimball suggests, it is as much about the pleasure of reading as it is about the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, the book is meant, in part, to be read as an invitation to explore the many works of CD overshadowed by his great sleuth of Baker Street. Not that the Holmes stories, or the activities of the Baker Street Irregulars, are neglected. The subtitle, by the way, derives from Holmes’s long projected masterwork, “The Whole Art of Detection.” It struck me that Conan Doyle was in fact a master of every sort of fiction, from detective stories to weird tales to historical fiction to novels about contemporary life. Hence the subtitle. The editor of The Strand once called him “the greatest natural-born storyteller of the age.”
If I may be so bold to mention it, my memoir of 10 or 12 years ago, “An Open Book,” is the more extended story of how I discovered books as a young boy in an Ohio steel town and how reading changed my life. Its style and tone is very much the same as that in On Conan Doyle and my various books of essays. md
Roger Kimball is right about the plenitude of titles that offer young readers gripping involvement, and the wisdom of reading them in our schools. The sideswipe on Marin Amis and David Wallace is unjustified. Both have produced great fiction. Nobody suggests that their work is suitable for primary schools, nor is that the test for literary merit.
btw, I’m reading Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, immersed in the pervasive banality of the IRS. It’s not for junior readers, but I find it intermittently brilliant, which is all you can hope for from an unfinished work.
This really gets to the main issue of why so many youths hate reading–the material they are given in school is either simply terrible, or completely uninteresting to the student.
When I was in 9th grade, we had to read “The House On Mango Street,” which is a collection of unrelated “scenes” (no plot, forward action, nothing) about disadvantaged, lower class Hispanic children. I’ve always wondered how many of my other classmates were completely put off of reading after having been forced to read that garbage…
Many high schools make the mistake of forcing boys to read works like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet, and others that appeal only mostly to girls…this drives many boys away from reading. Unfortunately, the schools will probably never assign “masculine” works like The Conquest of Gaul or Henry V, because, well, you don’t want to discriminate against the girls’ choices!!!
Parents are the key to literacy, not the schools; what they do at home will influence the child’s reading habits far more than the miserable reading assignments given at school. The most important thing you can do is to turn off the TV. My parents limited TV watching when I was young, but kept me well-supplied with Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams novels, and kids’ books on ancient history. Paperbacks cost a whole lot less than your cable subscription, and can be checked out for free from the library.
Matt, are you from Chicago? That experience sounds awfully familiar. We had to read “The House on Mango Street” virtually every year from sixth grade onward, and I loathed it. No plot, no characterization, nothing happening . . . I love books, and I had to struggle to finish a chapter.
And I agree: literacy and imagination start with the parents. Mine decided that “Treasure Island” was appropriate bedtime fare for a three-year-old and I never looked back.
there are sooo many problems with today’s public schools, where to start? we have gone from one bad idea to the next over the past 40 or so years trying to make every special interest group happy, except the children. somewhere we lost them. we have abandoned the elegance and simple honesty of the ancients for the canned, freeze dried and microwaved nonsense of today’s undereducated overblown “academics”. if our children cannot comprehend what they are supposed to be learning, how can they be expected to compete in a world already full of constant change? if they do not absorb it in school, is there a place later in life where it will all become clear? no wonder socialism sounds so good to so many dumbed down never to succeed functional illiterates. somebody else’s stuff sounds pretty good when one can see he/she will probably never be able to compete well enough reach up and grab their own share of the pie.
the real answer is always the same. it involves good long term planning. it takes hard work. it takes a desire in the hearts of students to reach for more, more, more in their studies, not in the mall. i watched a program the other day on chinese students and what they must accomplsh to go further than their parents. they compete constantly with other students, for everything. only the best go on to university, not the whatever from this group or the richest or the (fill in the blank) from whatever group. they are coming up in the world, and we are in a very steep decline. i am not here to brag about communism. we have seen in my lifetime how it eventually destroys the will to work. but what i saw coming from those children had nothing to do with that. what i saw was an intense fever to be the best in all areas of their education, from sports to academics.
we still see that desire in our youth in sports. they see their friends, brothers and sisters on t.v. getting theirs. sports is a place where they think maybe they can compete, not in the classroom. sell drugs, be a player, or play ball. those are their choices, as they see it. parents, teachers and administrators, whose fault is that?
In my youth in the late 40′s/early 50′s I had the same experience as Dirda, except with the writer, Zane Grey. I’m 72 now and the stories ‘Betty Zane” et.al
are as fresh as then.
To help youngest son thru k-12, I made a point of reading his assigned books myself. Arrgh. Every one of them was terrible. Wimpy protagonists who get sand kicked in their faces for 350 pages. Total boring plots, like the middle aged lady who liked to ride city buses in Reading PA. Distopias so violent as to make 1984 seem like boy scout camp. Age inappropriate stories about sexual relations (and more) assigned to children before they reach the age of puberty. Minor works in place of the writer’s best work.
The only reason my child learned to read at all was to enjoy classic science fiction and fantasy. Heinlein, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Burroughs, J.K. Rowling and the like saved my son from illiteracy.
The corruption of education by Marxist and other leftist ideologies is well known, and this is a very serious problem to be sure. But it is not the only serious problem that needs to be addressed.
Another problem, one that I believe exacerbates the first, is the unexamined belief that all children are capable of learning. Intelligence and other aptitudes necessary for academic success are not possessed by all students in equal measure. Simply put, some kids are smart, some are stupid, and some are in between. It is not possible to teach dumb kids to be smart ones. They are who they are, and the best that educators can do is prepare them for the lives that they will lead as adults, lives that won’t be spent working with their minds.
Intelligence is a complex topic. Being “smart” or “dumb” actually changes over a single person’s lifetime. I recall a study in which prisoners were given the opportunity for early release if they could pass the tests necessary to become licensed exterminators. “Intelligence” and the presence of well-documented learning disabilities were, within limits, found not to be factors in success on the examination.
Actually, short of traumatic injury or disease, a person’s intelligence is remarkably fixed and stable throughout their lifetime.
Most of the social problems our society deals with are the result of stupid people acting stupidly. This is why these problems never go away, but merely change form.
The only things that have a proven track record for reducing these problems are religion and peer pressure, especially when used together. If you can convince someone prone to dysfunctional behavior that God is going to kick his ass for it and that his neighbors are going to shun him for it, then he’ll be less likely to do it.
People used to sit down after dinner with a “good book”, and read – and read to their kids.
They would have their stack of books, and the weekly/monthly magazines, to attack each day along with the evening paper.
Now, those magazines have turned to “pulp”, the evening paper might as well be a Dodo Bird; then came radio, followed by TV, and now staying current on “social media”.
It is sad, really.
One might even argue that the trade name “Kindle” is le mot juste for a device that is, in the end, dedicated to “burning” the traditional book.
“Kindle” might just as well be taken as implying that it will re-ignite an interest in reading.
Reading this article made me tear up, just a little. I think I need to pick up this book.
I’m twenty-three, but I remember very similar experiences to Mr. Dirda. Books formed a huge part of my childhood: history, fairy tales, adventure (I swear I can still recite the first chapters of Treasure Island from memory), and even comics like Asterix and Tintin, which Mom would translate for us out of her French editions. Dad loved Sherlock Holmes, but he was equally big on Kipling and C.S. Lewis. I knew what Einstein’s famous equation meant by the time I was in fourth grade, because one of the characters in Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” said it.
It never stops amazing me that an arrangement of ink symbols on plain paper can fire the imagination like they do, and it frustrates and scares me that I can find so few people who feel the same way.
Not too many years ago I was substitute teaching part-time in a couple of perfectly decent Detroit suburbs. One day at a middle school I was talking with the librarian and she said she didn’t know how to get boys to read. Young people that age, she assured me, were interested in feelings and relationships, but she didn’t know how to get the boys interested. As she spoke, literally over her shoulder I saw a complete set of the Heinlein juveniles. A quick check of the shelves later also showed, among others, Sherlock Holmes and John R. Tunis.
This leads to a somewhat off-topic topic, namely that schools these days seem to be set up to encourage girls and discourage boys. But that’s another thread.
Alex: I have a similar experience. About six times a year I work for a company that adminsiters the liscensing test for Texas teachers. These tests take up to five hours to complete, and there are two sessions, so its usually a ten to twelve hour day in one classroom.
Once I spent one of these Saturdays in an 8th grade Language Arts classroom. With all that time to kill I got to check out the books involved in the lessons and the classroom library. I was aghast. Didn’t find a single tome that would be in any way interesting to a middle school aged male. Nothing about heroism, action, leadership, individual accomplishment, bravery etc. etc. The tomes were all touchy-feely, group think, female plot drivers (read the synopsis of the utterly ludicrous “Charlotte Doyle” soemtime), incredibly anachronistic feminist ideas (also see Charlotte Doyle),multi-cultural clap trap etc.
I even brought that to the attention of our English department chair at my school, and she pretty much agreed with me.
Books were as necessary to me as air when I was a child. They still are. I have no idea how I learned to read – I just could and long before I got to school. I was tested at a high school reading level in the third grade. Happily, my parents and teachers never told me that a book was “too hard” for me to read. I just plowed on and skipped over the parts I didn’t understand. I got the gist of the story just fine even though a few words were obscure. Today, I have books in every room and my Kindle never leaves my purse. Sadly, most of the students I teach (college juniors) are not readers and give me blank looks when I mention characters like Ebenezer Scrooge, David Copperfield and even Sherlock Holmes.
If you attended any library book sales in the last 15 or 20 years you would have noticed that the sale children’s books are what we used to call literature and that the shelves are filled with new books fictionalizing various social problems. They are very dull reading and the vocabulary is usually very basic. The same trend exists in the assigned and recommended reading in elementary and middle schools. And for slightly older children, there is the abomination called “young adult literature.” What a misnomer. At least in the 80s and 90s when my kids were in school, private schools still offered high grade reading material, but I’m afraid now that if parents aren’t providing it, kids are not finding it. It’s no wonder they have to be forced to read.
Oh – and now we’ve moved on to “electronic textbooks” in upper income high schools. An even more disturbing trend.
reform primary education?
Simple. Send all the teachers and their union commissars to replace the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Then put the returning troops into the classrooms as teachers.
And don’t bring their replacements home ever.
Re comment above: “You can cure ignorance”.
BS! Cognition functions poorly and entirely differently after puberty than it does before puberty. We’ve now got MRIs to prove that is a fact.
Learned early, the practice of ignorance is forever.
As I read Roger Kimball’s piece and the comments, I conclude that he and his readers were able to read fluently before entering primary school. That was my case as well. Roger’s article suggests that supplying the child with good stories, well told, is the key to reforming primary education.
I agree that we must replace the rubbish being used for reading : the queer princes, talking automobiles, and dreary multi-culty narratives.
Yet that change will not address the fact that most pre-school children cannot read, many do not yet know their alphabet, and large numbers speak English only as a second language. But primary school teachers are no better prepared.
Our local college awards BA and MA degrees in primary education. For the BA, two courses are offered to prepare for reading instruction. Only one of those courses touches on phonics, and deals with the subject descriptively, giving no details as to how the topic is taught. None of this is accidental. A rather complete explanation of the real agenda for government schooling (aka public education) may be found on the web site http://www.johntaylorgatto.com.
Re: Comment #31
I should clarify: public education has resisted reform for almost 100 years, and under the teacher unions, will continue to do so. The status quo was threatened by No Child Left Behind, but President Obama has exempted substandard schools for the time being.
John Taylor Gatto proposed a novel way to initiate reform of primary education, which he calls the Bartleby Project. He asks parents to join an “open conspiracy,” withholding their children from public school (ranking by IQ, standardized tests, and so on), while they are developing most rapidly. The idea calls for courage on the part of parents and their children. Homeschooling will be required, but only for a few short years. By the time a child is eight or nine years old, he or she will be able enter school without risking the loss of curiosity or integrity. If a sufficient number of parents participate in this Project, it will result in a great (mutual) shock. The children will learn for themselves that this system is immoral and fraudulent. Unless the teachers can adapt to the change, they may have to leave their profession. Read it yourselves: http://bartlebyproject.com/gatto.html .
For many of those who were taught to read unsuccessfully using “phonics” after the mid 1960′s, be advised that you may have been taught with strategies some call “phony phonics.” These instructional strategies uses some phonics, some sight-word memorization, and some whole language guessing, subsitutiton, and skipping of unfamiliar words, just to get the “gist” of what is being read.
However, successful reading compehension is somewhat like a three-legged stool, the “legs” being accurate reading (decoding of the letter symbols to sounds), understanding of the words being used in the text or passage,
and sufficient background knowledge, including understanding of the grammatical concepts used.
Sadly, most of today’s colleges of education are the root cause of failed education. Caring, dedicated students and teachers don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t know that they don’t know it. In my work, I teach teachers to become skeptic scholar-educators, to use effective, scientifically research-proven strategies that lay the foundation for successful reading.
Many tell me that they never learned to read using phonics when they were chldren and in most of their college reading-education classes, phonics is taught as an after-thought or worse.
That being noted, I agree with the fact that fluency absolutely is essential. However, when students are taught — or when they develop their own strategies out of sheer survival — many error-causing strategies are the end result.
Students who may be using the error-causing strategies very well — even if they have been taught to use them — may be considered to be learning disabled or struggling readers. By comparison, if the school provided three-legged stools for the students in the classroom but one of the legs was not as long or as strong as the other legs, would we consider the students to be “struggling sitters” or “sitting disabled”?
The history of reading instruction and education of teachers since the mid-1960′s reveals the use of a plethora of what I call CAPs, namely, commonly-accepted practices without validating research. For example, the so-called sight-sight words were initially developed by Rev. Dr. Gallaudet to teach deaf students how to read, at least by getting the gist.
Those sight-words strategies for the deaf were “looped” into the Dick-and-Jane/Look-Say which were sold to schools as “new and improved,” but were unproven theories. They were failures, as we now know, as scientific research has proven they were not as effective as systematic, direct instruction of explicit phonics. Now, when we teach hearing children to learn in the same manner that deaf children were taught to read, are we surprised that we have an increase of students with disabilities?
Nonetheless, other educationists looped and promoted their unproven theories into published curriculum and currently, most so-called reading programs are a “looping” of “educationally-correct” but experimental theories of explict phonics + implicit (phony) phonics + sight-words (anti-phonics) + guessing (non-phonics)+ “parrot reading”.
Yes, the English language is a complex language. With explicit, systematic, direct instruction of phonics concepts that teach the sound-symbol Code of the English language, followed by practice in reading(decoding) and spelling (encoding) of the phonics concept to be learned, students in the 4th gradeand up will be able to read (decode) upwards of the 1,000,000 words in the English language with relative fluency. The dictionary and the reading of words in context will help them learn the meanings of the vocabulary.
The teacher’s instruction and the students’ reading of a wide variety of books, materials, and Internet sites will expand the background knowledge. Of course, the old-fashioned teaching of sentence diagramming and the conventions of the English language will “steady the stool” so that students will be confident, fluent readers and able to attack more advanced literature.
The bottom line: We must all be skeptic scholars and educators even more so must be skeptic scholar/educators. It is important that we not assume that teachers have been properly taught, that colleges and universities are providing the best training for our teaches, that the name-brand publishers of curriculum are presenting the most-effective instruction, that the most expensive means it is the best.
If you are a teacher, if you know a teacher, if you have students being taught by a teacher, then it is up to you to become the expert. Assume nothing. Accept no excuses that permit failure. If the student isn’t learning, the teacher isn’t teaching — but it may not be through any fault of their own. We must read all sides of the reading-instruction discussions.
In conclusion, if we hear that someone had phonics instruction and phonics “didn’t work for them,” they may have been mis-taught by unsuspecting, under-educated teachers who thought they were teaching phonics.
However, what we have been doing since the mid-1960′s clearly isn’t working. Prior to the 1960′s when explicit, systematic, direct instruction of phonics concepts was the common practice,America’s reading scores were very high. We can do better. I have done so and so have my teaching students when they use research-proven strategies and skip the experimental theories. Read all sides. The truth will sift itself out.
“I like the kind of fiction in which things happen, and then keep on happening.”
Do people really wonder why Harry Potter is so popular?
Thanks for the great suggestions. Ya’ll sound so lit up with joy.
It makes me near worship my kids first grade teacher even more. She works all her kids through open court (phonics) and she assigns regular books after that. The boys have all gone for Treasure Island and Gulliver’s Travels, in Great Illustrated Classic form. And- the Iliad- several different readings, as they progress.
May I praise the Great Illustrated Classics, which seem to have disappeared? They were sold in craft stores, or on grocery store discount shelves- one to three dollars for a redacted hardbound, with line drawings- 273 pages- everything you’d wish you could read- including biographies of George Washington and Davy Crockett. Treasure Island, Moby Dick, King Solomon’s Mines, Conan Doyle’ stories…The men looked heroic and manly, the women looked healthy and beautiful, and the children looked innocent, in the illustrations. I miss them.
And, ohmygoodness, I had to take House on Mango Street in college!!!!It was awful!!! It fit in with my Rick Bragg complaint- can’t poor people afford verbs??? It seems like they can’t afford plot-lines, either!!!!