cutelyaware t1_ix0ziov wrote on November 19, 2022 at 10:19 PM

Reply to comment by DukeofVermont in [OC] Inspired by movie barcodes, I made some emotional barcodes for books by Campbell_MG

Speaking of tomes, that's quite the comment! I think it's fair to boil it down to easy vs hard books. That's sort of what I understood the rule to mean. IE it will turn people off to the book if they're not mature enough to make the effort needed. Personally I simply skipped all the expository sections on whaling as I found them both dry and disturbing, and not contributing much if anything to the story.

I also agree with your comparison to LOTR where I learned to simply skip over the songs. I thought they were terrible and didn't add to the story.

I think we're on the same page, which ironically supports the idea of not pushing heavy works onto young people who may reject them and then never discover those gems later.

DukeofVermont t1_ix2fo58 wrote on November 20, 2022 at 5:41 AM

I think not pushing is key and properly introducing things. It's the same for literally everything, you start small and learn, but for some reason a lot of people just are thrown in the deep end of literature and hate it because they got pushed.

I think my love of classic lit is because I had an amazing 75 year old high school teacher who taught British Lit. He was super chill, it was all he taught, he was a great teacher and you knew he loved it. He did a great job explaining and introducing things so Shakespeare wasn't just reading it to read it.

It's a world of difference being introduced to something by someone who can explain, is excited and can answer questions vs my junior year English teacher who just assigned books and spent 50% of class talking about his old high school sports achievements (no joke, I hated him) and no one cared at all about anything we read.

I also taught ESL in NYC and I had my class read a simplified version of Frankenstein and they loved it. I was really surprised how well they took to it. They though the simplified Dr. J and Mr. Hyde was just okay in comparison.