Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

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In 8th grade I had a great teacher in a class called "Literary French". This was in a French-oriented high school in a boring Nordic city. Usually the teachers there were a motley crew of random francophones with no credentials whatsoever... Except for this one incredibly smart guy, who was actually a published author from Paris. (The general assumption was that he had ended up as a teacher in that nowhere place because of a woman.)

This being a literature-oriented full-year class, there was naturally a list of books to be read. Somebody asked: "Do we have to actually read these?" His answer was: "No. In school, you can almost always manage if you read 30 pages from the start, 30 pages from the end, and the author's bio. The important thing is not to read every page but that we talk about the books."

No other teacher at that school would have said that. For an 8th grader, it was like turning a key to unlock something that felt fundamental: books are not checkmarks on an assignment list; school is not a collection of tightly defined rote tasks to be performed for their own sake; what you get out of books and school depends entirely on what you bring to the table yourself.

Initially I thought you were advocating only reading the start and end of books. I was going to make a comment about only running the start and end of a marathon - you might get the best bits of the atmosphere, and afterwards be able to discuss it as if you'd run it all - but you'd have missed the core of the experience.

But, on reflection, maybe you are actually saying that the teacher meant you could get away with only reading the start and end; but the point was that you got out what you put in, and so the focus shouldn't be on what you have to do, but on what you choose to do?

I'm not sure which you're saying :)

I'm over forty now and I am only starting to read the books we were assigned to read at school, e.g. Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and the likes. In fact I guess I read these books as a kid but got nothing out of them, except grades. These are actually very good books, but being forced into reading them is the very way to make them unpalatable for life. If I didn't gave them a second try, I would still consider that as "literature" in the pejorative sense. In fact they are life, just more concentrate and immersive.

We 'did' Animal Farm at school. Pointless for me as I knew none of the history, the whole Allegorical facet was missing. I quite enjoyed it though.

When you're 11-15 you just don't have the context for many of the "great works". Would be interesting to sit in on the curriculum meetings of that age and hear what the rationale for those choices was.

On the other hand, a lot of the books I had to read for assignments weren't good reading, but did convey good messages.

1984: A HORRID read, but a very telling archetype of distopia.

The Great Gatsby: It really took 8 chapters to cover the thin vain outer shell before cracking in to the empty but interesting destruction of it all? Maybe a good metaphor for market crashes and corrections, but not a good read.

The discussion part; I don't recall having a single meaningful actual /discussion/ of the books in class. That might have actually helped make the mindless drudgery of reading them have more meaning and allowed for deeper reflection about the meaning of the content we head read.

Gatsby is not about being a metaphor for anything in particular; it's a snapshot of a particular time and place, an account of what a certain society was like. It's just an intriguing (and quite beautiful) story that captures the spirit of a certain era.

By analogy, what you wrote is like saying:

> The Mona Lisa? Roughly 75% of it is just kind of blurry. I can see her face in the middle, which I guess captures her likeness, but a photograph would've probably been better.

It's easy to miss the point or merit of these books in class: often they're forced reading, you read them too early, etc. I would strongly encourage you to pick up 1984 or The Great Gatsby again, and read it one of these days. You'll probably get much more out of it.

These books are considered among the greatest ever for good reason, and I'm sure you'll pick up on that if you give them another try. I think that Gatsby is so good that I re-read it once a year.

Gatsby is really superficial, uncompelling, flat. I picked it up because it's referenced so much in USA media as being the book kids read at high-school.

Personally I don't think anyone would be missing out by not reading it. It's just a weirdly written snapshot of life that's presented in such a tedious and uninspiring way ... what do you like about it?

One of the worst books I've read.

My issue with Gatsby, after maybe 5 or 6 attempts at reading it, was that I could never bring myself to give a damn about ANY of the characters. It found it impossible to relate to any single one of them, and thus couldn't bring myself to care about what happened to them either.

I felt the same way about the Bell Jar. About halfway through I tossed my hands some up exclaiming "just walk into traffic and get it over with already". I couldn't possibly care about that character either. Never went back to finish it.

1984 had some disturbing beauty, and I did find myself concerned and caring. Pretty sure I read it twice by the time I was in my mid twenties.

> The Great Gatsby: [...] Maybe a good metaphor for market crashes and corrections, but not a good read.

I'm interested in more detail on this perspective of the story.

My reading of the comment is that it was very much the latter.

You've just described how most JavaScript programmers write code.

I gradually hot reload my way to perfection. And I'm dam proud of that.

That's really cool. Especially - how literary it is that a published French author ends up ... banishing himself to a snowbound land because of a woman.

My kids both had a high school teacher who taught high school to support ( I think less financially than as experience ) his real job - writing textbooks. Huge influence for both.

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