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]

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.