Re: no such thing as bad publicity?

On Oct 31, 7:16 am, Sea Wasp <seawaspObvi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
James Gassaway wrote:
Sea Wasp wrote:

Andrew Plotkin wrote:

Here, Gary Thompson <quux...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Would the same hold true for books? I'd think so. Some people
enjoy trash. Nobody enjoys tedium.

Were I isolated from the Net, I would have predicted that nobody
enjoyed _Quicksilver_, because it was boring as dirt.

The fact that people read "Moby ***" continues to confound me.

Don't some high schools still require it? Or does that just confound you
even more? :P

Indeed.

If they must require old books, I'd much have preferred "The Count of
Monte-Cristo".

I think the problem is not so much that they require old books, as
that they tend to favor old books of a verbose, heavy-on-description
sort that is contrary to modern tastes. I find Melville or Dickens
largely unreadable, but Jane Austen zips right along. I'm not sure
that Austen is the best for a high school class, as the boys might not
go for it, but there are other possibilities.

As it is, high school English classes often seem to be designed to
kill off the interest even of the readers in the group. I remember my
American lit class, where we were looking forward to getting to Poe,
since we knew that we actually enjoyed his writing. When we got up to
him in the textbook, the teacher skipped over that section, because in
her experience high school students were willing to read him on their
own. I wanted to scream (which would have been appropriate for
Poe...).

Richard R. Hershberger

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