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Comment by a_wild_dandan | Hacker News Reader

Nothing sterilizes a book's emotional or intellectual impact quite like being forced to read it. It's like cultivating a person's appreciation of sushi by physically shoving it down her throat.

What's worse is that I can only unhelpfully lament the current state of literature in education -- I have no idea how we may improve the system...

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> Nothing sterilizes a book's emotional or intellectual impact quite like being forced to read it.

at the rate of one fucking chapter a week

I always remember Flowers for Algernon, a book which we read as part of English class. I devoured it in about 2-3 days and it was definitely the first book to ever make me cry. Like, that book is fucking incredible. I told the teacher next day - who (wisely) said I shouldn't share this with fellow students lest I get mocked.

4 weeks later we're being asked questions about the motivations of characters. Or what do we think the author meant by this paragraph. All in chapter 4.

I couldn't remember, I didn't care. The book had a profound interest on me and nobody else was actually reading it. Just micro-analysing all possible joy out of it. Ugh.

That depends probably on whether you were a lit major or not. I can understand how someone forced into a lit class under general studies would be irritated by texts that seem uninteresting or irrelevant but if you're a literature student that's exactly what you're there for.

Half the use of the classes was getting a syllabus someone had gone to great lengths to organize around an expert knowledge of some area or string of thought.

I usually found a good deal of value, even when the author or work was not to my specific taste.

My classical literature class had a cycle exclusively on Antigone. I was and am not as enamored by that play as was my instructor and the critic George Steiner who we were asked to read. But to loathe the requirement and not focus on deriving the best possible value from that assignment would've been a waste of money.

Years after college, I still really enjoy walking through a university bookstore and looking at the books in the curriculum for each major. Pretty much everything that's not a textbook is regarded as a really important book by the experts in the field, and a lot of them are quite readable for nonfiction which I assume is a result of professors wanting to keep students interested.

I personally enjoyed (and was certainly impacted by) many of the books that I was forced to read during high school. The most memorable ones for me all fell into the "modern classics" category - To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, The Diary of Anne Frank, and so on.

Don't sugarcoat 1984 quite so much. It is an important read, but it's also good to tell a reader that "the interesting bits" happen (very roughly) 2/3rds of the way in to the book.

At least it's not The Great Gatsby (blegh) 8 chapters of annoyance and one lonely chapter of actual non-world building.

> Nothing sterilizes a book's emotional or intellectual impact quite like being forced to read it.

That depends on many factors, including the particular book, the "coolness" of the teacher, the age of the pupil, etc. Poetry finally clicked for me in my final year of high school when we were assigned one single poet I had never read before (and definitely wouldn’t have never read if he hadn’t been assigned in school). I was so fascinated by this mandatory reading that I bought the poet’s collected works, then began reading verse by his contemporaries, and so on and so forth.

Who was it?

I found I had the exact same experience with poetry. I used to had poetry, because it was something that I was forced to read in school.

Now, years after leaving high school, I actually find myself reading poetry for enjoyment. It's possible to read it and not sit there and analyse every word of every line. Sometimes it's nice to just read a poem and leave it at that, in the same way you'd listen to a song without delving into the lyrics.

Yeah, as a kid I always hated analyzing poetry. It felt similar to dissecting jokes[0]. A good poem stands on its own. I'd understand if we were in poem-writing class, there spending hours analyzing structure of a poem would make sense. But in a general class, it basically killed my interest.

(A lot of my experiences in school can be summed up by a question that was never answered: "why are we talking about this?".)

[0] - "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process."

I've always thought that before forcing us to read a classic they should get us to attempt writing one (or, more realistically just a few pages). Get us to create a relatable character, come up with an engaging and original plot, describe a place, a situation or a character in a clear, concise, amusing, manner. Get us to realize first hand how difficult it is to do so. Then you have my attention. Now I want to know how the best do it.

This is a good idea. Although don't make me describe a real place or let me pick a place to describe.

One thing that might make it _slightly_ better, is that when I had read something for one of my language courses, they'd give us a list with a selection of books we could choose from.

So at least, you kind of can read a bit about each book and then see which one you'd like best. Still, the selection had to fit in the school curriculum so it wasn't exactly free choice. And a few of them were mandatory for everyone.

I'd say the experience still wasn't great, but perhaps was better than being forced to read book X.

Intrinsic motivation to read does make the experience a whole lot more satisfying, and as others have noted before me, reading some of those books again now makes me appreciate them more. Just recently started reading some of Tolstoy's work and I can imagine that a decade ago (in high school) I wouldn't have been able to find motivation to read anything he wrote.

"Many of the plights of the protagonists just didn't stir me at all when I was in school, either because I didn't understand the historical context well enough, or because I didn't yet have enough empathy to feel their pain and loss (it's always pain and loss in the classics...)"

This suggest that the difference had more to do with life experiences and generally amount of knowledge then with having it assigned.

While this is possibly true, I think we should not discount the fact that a lot of prescribed reading (in schools) is not age appropriate literature. If I had read 1984 or 'Lord of the Flies' during my schooldays I would not have been able to appreciate it. I read a lot in that period and I loved to read (and still do) but I seldom liked reading what was prescribed as part of the curriculum - with the sole exception of 'Robin Hood'. It was an 'abridged' version and I read it so many times because I was thoroughly entertained by the story.

I liked 1984 at high school. I loved it, my favorite book at the time.

I agree that Robin Hood and adventure should be assigned soon. The biggest risk with Robin Hood and similar books is that you get it assigned too late, when you cant appreciate story as genuinly as young people.

Not necessarily. Depends on circumstances. Putting a book on a school or college curriculum is a form of enforced reading dictated however by people whose opinions you presumably respect.

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