Comment by Modified3019 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Modified3019 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Another thing is the mandated reading comes with punishment attached. One goes into it knowing that they’ll have to puke out some key points, contort bullshit into an intro-body-conclusion format, or worse, overanalyze it for “meaning”.

Early in high school among other things I had to read was “The Veldt”. Of course I hated dealing with it like everything else. I couldn’t have even told you who the author was a few weeks after the assignment.

In late high school, I discovered Ray Bradbury as I began exploring my local library, branching out from comics (Calvin and Hobbes, pogo, bloom county) and nonfiction books into fiction. He quickly became one of my favorite authors due to the sheer volume of short stories he had. Many were good, some were bad, and some were great. It was a bit of a pleasant surprise to encounter “The Veldt” again without a teachers whip at my back. It was sad to finally work my way through the last of what he wrote knowing there would be no more.

You've almost certainly come across them by now, but his novels are fantastic. I started with The Martian Chronicles and then The Illustrated Man, but ended up loving Something Wicked This Way Comes and even Dandelion Wine.

There's something about good fiction and youth that just went together so well -- maybe people who did a lot of, say, swimming in their formative years feel that way about "good swimming" and youth, but I have to believe that good fiction would still trump most everything else for the time period.

For me, fiction was a way to explore my thoughts and dreams indirectly as a kid. I’ve never been one much for introspection, but reading tickles something in that part of my brain to reflect on my life and sometimes relate what happens to a character to what I’m feeling/have felt. In a story, the author has to tell you how the character feels explicitly (usually) in addition to the normal story beats. Occasionally I would notice a mismatch between my own gut reactions and that of the character which would make me stop for a second and try to dissect what the differences were between my interpretation and that of the author.

Not to even mention that reading is a way to escape and explore without leaving the comfort of your own home.

The only downside I find currently is that reading new things is quite expensive and I haven’t found a great digital solution yet. My phone is too small but carrying a book or a reader tablet is not practical every day.

8+ years ago I accepted an offer to join some family on an impromptu weekend trip. Plenty of pool time was expected so I brought the novel I was 3/4ths the way through, its sequel, and an unrelated book on the off-chance I wanted something different. Combined these books took up half my carry-on satchel (I enjoy long epic fantasy), turning it from a simple carry to a painful shoulder-biter and hip-digger.

I purchased a Kindle after that trip. I read a lot more than I used to because between my phone and the physical Kindle I always have my current book ready to go. Physical book purchases can now be hardcover-only because I'm buying for a permanent collection, not endless consumption.

Yea, I'm also a fan of epic fantasy! I largely find myself moving to audiobooks to get around carrying books everywhere.

Do you have experience with devices that aren't kindle? Not super thrilled about the Amazon ecosystem, though I know it's not terribly difficult to jailbreak them.

I loved the approach my “high school” (in The Netherlands) took around 2002: you had to pick a few books from a list of books the teacher read. Then read those books and have a 30 minute “free format” discussion with the teacher about them. She’d ask for shared themes between the books, or differences in the way the stories were told, what it showed about the approach or background of the authors etc. Basically a teacher-student one-time book club.

>>overanalyze it for “meaning”.<< I doubt overanalyzing actually happens. But pupils, including younger me, just don't understand how much more work and thought have gone into the legends they are reading. Yes, it's a 500 page tome. No, neither the blooming flower nor its color on page 356, line 38 are "random" and them symbolizing the meaning of life isn't "bullshit." Yes, a work like this happens only once a decade on one continent. That's exactly why it's one of the maybe 20 books that you read in full during your schooling.

> No, neither the blooming flower nor its color on page 356, line 38 are "random" and them symbolizing the meaning of life isn't "bullshit."

I firmly believe that most of this stuff in schools is massive over-analysis and that most authors, whose works are analysed in this way, have not planned all of this ridiculous nonsense we had to invent on the spot during a test. And that's exactly what we did - assign meaning to any meaningless detail and somehow connect it to the character or plot. The curtain is blue? It must signify the protagonists deep longing for love.

In short, 99% of it is indeed overanalysed bullshit.

I was always astonished at how much my literature teachers could seemingly hallucinate at-will on a piece of text and come with some hidden meaning for every word, comma, or rime.

I did not seem to be blessed with the accepted form of creativity for literature analysis, and, with every rebuttal, the pleasure of exploring those texts became less and less..

After many, many, many years, I'm slowly coming back to some of them to read on my own terms, and most books have been a pleasure to re-discover.

Literature Language Models

I remember Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed and clearly saying that he did not have any hidden meanings in his writings. Yet, I remember how my English teacher would go on about x passage as a metaphor for y. I think we were discussing a short story of his. We would spend hours finding the hidden meanings in authors' writings. I'm sure that's the case for many of the books we read in school. I'm sure many authors are more philosophical than others but definitely not all of them. True, overanalyzing authors' writings is a thing. It's a shame because reading becomes a chore rather than a joy.

Indeed. To me, a lot of stuff like this (the kind and color of a blooming flower) is basically a way for the author to create or maintain an atmosphere/background to the book. Mentioning flowers a lot makes it clear this is not an action packed plot driven thriller. Mentioning military ranks and insider jargon and abbreviations paints a military atmosphere.

Basically a lot of words are “set pieces”. Very important for the general atmosphere but not overflowing with meaning and significance per se.

Is it so hard to accept the fact that an author might not be completely 100% conscious of all the things influencing them when creating a work of art? That some choices they made because they just felt right in the moment come from somewhere else? And that someone else can see this happening from an external perspective and propose that way of reading the text that the author didn't think about?

At the same time, is it monstrous to put forward the option that you, as an audience member, are not a passive brainless drone, but you are collaborating in creating the meaning of what you experience? That your inner life and meaning and interpretation stemming from being exposed to art are actually interesting and worth talking about?

Why do we have to live in a world where we assume words written on a page or colors dripped on a canvas have a single truly objective interpretation? Why do we have to beat with a stick on the head of someone telling them "no, you're enjoying this work in the wrong way because the author said so"?

If such things influence works of fiction, they must surely influence works of nonfiction just as much, if not more so — yet I never had a schoolteacher ask me to analyze nonfiction writings anywhere close to the depth I had to analyze novels.

It wasn't until the tertiary level that I first analyzed science writings and related philosophy writings to a similar depth (albeit for a different purpose), and discovered to my delight how many of them are written with a beauty and a kind of humanity that verges on poetry. It moved me in ways that fiction never has, I think in part because of the purity and honesty of my discovery — so unlike the trudging hours I spent miming proundness in school until I could no longer recognize it.

I am truly glad that nonfiction analysis was neglected in school, because it otherwise would have been robbed of all its spirit and magic, too.

Why do we force students to analyze text in this manner at the cost of killing their love for recreational reading? So many children, who once loved story time best of all, grow up to hate books and poetry. Yet they still love the search for meaning in cinema and music which, as yet, still remain mostly beyond the killing touch of involuntary study.

Is it any wonder literary analysis feels fake to so many people?

Can you share any example of non-fiction literature with beauty and humanity? Thanks!

Try Oliver Sacks.

If you look at it, I'm sure you'll find equally plenty of people rolling their eyes at film critics for "making that up".

But I broadly share the sentiment of your message, and I personally blame some sort of variation of Goodhart's law. School curricula take an unquestionably good thing ("the critical search of meaning is an important skill to have") and have to pigeonhole it into something standardized and quantifiable (otherwise, how can you stitch a grade number to it? The horror!). The result is this desolate widespread contempt for everything that is not a literal interpretation.

> most authors, whose works are analysed in this way, have not planned all of this ridiculous nonsense we had to invent on the spot during a test.

you're absolutely right and they even doubled down on that https://www.oxfordhomeschooling.co.uk/blog/the-death-of-the-....

There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is s*t.

- Ernest Hemingway

Reply on news.ycombinator.com