Three Monkeys, Ten Minutes

If I hadn't been forced to read LotF and then made to analyse everything in tedious detail I may well have liked it too - the context was very significant

If you read Nation as one of Pratchett's kids books it is perfectly acceptable. As with LotF, its all about the way you go into it.

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I had LOTF at school, too adn appreciated it. Not loved it, because there was nothing happy in it, but have read it a few times and each time saw things I needed to read. I hated Catcher in the Rye and Bless the beasts and Children, though, and would have hated them even if they hadn't been prescribed texts.

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I may well have appreciated LotF if I had read it independently of school. But this was the same teacher that caused me to totally reject poetry for many years. I still have a number of the mental scars from her teaching.

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What a bad teacher! Or a bad teacher for you, at least.

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Going to a small high school I ended up with her as a teacher for 3 years. She wasn't awful at all - certainly we didn't hate her and for most stuff she did an OK job. But she didn't understand that her pupils didn't love the same stuff that she did. She assumed we would love it too and ended up teaching it very badly. Sort of the opposite of infectious passion.

I remember late in my last year that the got a real shock when she realised that the class were not getting into Auden - her favourite poet.

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I had the Auden problem, too. I need to revisit Auden and discover if the problem is with the poet or the age at which I was introduced. I have yet to discover a high school kid who enjoys Auden, now I think of it.

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My memories of Auden are of poetry that had an awful lot of obvious imagery and "heart on the sleeve" emotions. That made it ideal for English class analysis but I have no idea if it made for good poetry.

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I too had LotF at school (I was in a different cohort to Ross)and found it relentless. I think the same year I also read Golding's essay on LotF that explained his view of his allegory. Not so curiously, that opinion wasn't held by the teachers of high school English.

Read Catcher in the Rye two years ago (after holding a copy captive for around ten years). As an adult I could see what the fuss was about. If I read it as a teenager I would have got the wrong signals: i.e. it's okay to be a self-obsessed pratt; under age drinking, especially of spirits, is very cool; anger and bewilderment are the marks of sophistication. Depression in the face of the death/suicide of an elder brother would have been lost on me.

Still have difficulty with poetry. Helps that most of it is pretentious crap. Hearing it read to drunk varsity students by touring poets took some of the baggage away - but nowhere near enough.

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It was performance poetry that helped me regain some appreciation of poetry too. The albums of John Cooper Clarke helped a lot.

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Mine was Sam Hunt and Gary McCormack doing their thing.

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The chansons de geste did it for me. (I know I'm strange :) ).

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I'm reading your Illuminations at the moment, so that seems perfectly in keeping with you actually.

Of course, we are all a bit strange around here anyway :)

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I hated Catcher in the Rye because of its narrative style. Salinger's writing voice totally bugged me then and still bugs me now (I tried re-reading last eyar, just to be fair to him).

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If it's any consolation - he is (was due to death?) still hung up on Catcher. It managed to stifle his writing career.

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I may dislike Catcher, but I would neer have wished that fate on him from it. I hate it when someone doesn't get to grow as a writer, for whatever reason.

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ratfan.livejournal.com

All right, who didn't have LotF at school? I don't remember hating it - but not liking it enough to keep a copy either. Only two books survived the English Literature lemon-in-paper-cuts analysis for me and they were England in Literature, a general grab-bag with exerpts from Beowulf to early 20th short fic and also Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I don't actually remember anything said in English class about that book which is probably the key but I kept my old text and have bought a lovely new slipcased special ed of it this year.

Sorry, this is more of a waffle than an answer. I haven't had anybody to talk to intelligently since Xmas Eve.

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I get that - its easy to get out of the social contact habit.

I don't think I came out of high school English with any set books that I admired. All the books I liked were ones I found myself - even a couple on the possible set books list not actually taught.

I did pick up an appreciation of Shakespeare though. I guess everybody did a few of his plays at school too.

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stephen-dedman.livejournal.com

I hope you meant 'since Boxing Day'.

I read Lord of the Flies voluntarily in my high school years, and was favourably impressed. The only sf my high school English classes managed to ruin temporarily was The Chrysalids, which I later rediscovered, enjoyed, and even tried to turn into a video for my film & drama class.

I also had to read Sons and Lovers in high school, and some Thomas Hardy at uni, but I'm pretty sure I would've hated those anyway.

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The only sf we got set in high school was A for Andromeda. I was just able to bring myself to watch the movie adaptations.

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ratfan.livejournal.com

Absolutely since Boxing Day, though perhaps it may be more correct to say I absorbed the vibes from intelligent persons, i.e. you and

agoodliedown than conversation, since you guys were talked out from entertaining your family hordes and we mostly watched Empire and Jedi

I feel that English lit would even have managed to wreck those, had they been studied in school.

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cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com

I felt the same way about Owls Do Cry. You know, the one Janet Frame wrote just after getting out of the insane asylum?

Work of near-insane genius, yes.

Ten-ton weight of 'what's the point of being alive, anyway? Whatever you do, life will suck' dropped on the heads of a bunch of tender teenagers? Also yes.

Still bitter about that, actually.

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At least you got a local author - they never put any of them near us. Or maybe that was a good thing given what you had to suffer.

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lobelet.livejournal.com

I suppose I was lucky -- I strongly admired my English teacher and he taught me to love Shakespeare and Browning and (to a certain extent) Dickens. But he was actually a little dubious that anything of any worth had been written since Walter Scott died; on a good day he might admit that the nineteenth century had some small literary merit, the syllabus said he had to admit that. But he wasn't happy about it. (I'm not exaggerating). And so I had to discover the moderns all by myself. LoTF was an eye opener and Catcher In The Rye left me open mouthed in admiration for a week (though I re-read it a few years ago and was less than impressed; I think you have to be a teenager to appreciate it). I started to read and appreciate poetry because of an interest in jazz and the avant garde. To this day I just love the Edith Sitwell/ William Walton collaboration on Facade and Stan Getz and his colleages helped a lot as well (Cleo Laine; oh my goodness me, Cleo Laine!). But ultimately I found it tedious (Auden was particularly tedious, though I thoroughly enjoyed a remark that someone made after looking at Auden's seamed, lined and wrinkled face: "If his face looks like that, I wonder what his scrotum looks like?").

And Pterry's "Nation" is crap.

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You were lucky. I've spent a lot of years undoing my English teacher's influence.

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