No B just zzzz

[threemonkeys]

I hated Lord of the Flies. I hated it in the way that you can only hate a book you are forced to read and deconstruct in high school english class. Up until that time I'd rather liked the old castaway tales. I knew that the noble attempts to survive on desert islands were totally unrealistic but I loved them anyway. I loved their SF equivalents too. Golding and my English teachers took that away from me.

Move forward to today and Terry Pratchett's Nation. It reads like those old Victorian era castaway books I read as a kid. To be more clear - it reads like a kids book. Aimed I'd guess as the 10-12 year old bracket. Except it doesn't say that anywhere on the book. Read the cover notes and you would be thinking that you are going to read some sort of satire - a Lord of the Flies type allegory in fact. Oh sure there is an allegorical element to it, but it is pretty obvious stuff. Most allegories have extra deeper layers - this book has extra surface layers.

I can't help thinking that some marketing person at Doubleday (an English lit major probably) has looked at this book and groaned about receiving another kids book instead of an adult diskworld novel which would be easier to sell. So armed with the knowledge that most Pratchett kids books sell to adults anyway has left out the critical age specific information and tried to sell it as something smarter than it is. A pity really because as a kids book it works fairly well - I can see it as working when read aloud to a 10 year old. It even as a few old style Pratchett jokes to keep the adult reader amused - just not many.

So if you have this book, read it to your children. And never ever force them to study Lord of the Flies.


EDIT - That's SIR Terry Pratchett - seriously!

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

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.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

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.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

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

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

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.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

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.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

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.

[littenz.livejournal.com]

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.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

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

[littenz.livejournal.com]

Mine was Sam Hunt and Gary McCormack doing their thing.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

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

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

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 :)

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

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).

[littenz.livejournal.com]

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

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

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.