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Old 03-24-2013, 12:56 PM   #397
Andrew H.
Grand Master of Flowers
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I'm a fan of audiobooks and listen to them on my commute or as I do tedious chores or when I go for a walk. I don't see *much* difference between reading a book and having the same book read to me, although there is a slight difference...enough so that occasionally I will stop listening to an audiobook and read it instead. But I think this may be more related to the fact that I am typically listening to audiobooks in distracting environments where I can't devote my full attention to the book they way I would when reading.

Re: snobbery - as stated upthread, snobbery that involves someone negatively commenting on something that they see you reading is likely based on a certain amount of insecurity...there's really no other reason for someone to go out of their way to denigrate what you are reading.

Although the same can be said of the "reverse snobbery" of some posters in this thread: some people do, in fact, enjoy lit fic better than genre fiction. They aren't "pretending" to do so to make you feel bad. Which doesn't mean that there aren't *some* people who are doing that. See insecurity, above.

Really, though, we're mostly just talking about entertainment, and I just don't see a lot of room for actual snobbery based on how people decide to spend their free time. Reading "Perelandra" instead of a Star Wars novelization won't make you a better person; nor does it make you a pretentious twit. It just happens to be the type of entertainment you prefer. By the same token, watching House of Cards on Netflix is an equally valid choice.

On a not quite tangential note, I want to point out that a lot of books that people read in literature classes aren't being read because they are the best 20 (or whatever) books ever written, but because they are (presumably) important historically, which is how most lit classes are structured.

So if you start off by reading Alexander Pope, you will probably find him stilted and somewhat mechanical. But for the 70 years of so of the Enlightenment period, that was what people read...they didn't have the same tastes as we do and were more interested in a kind of mechanical precision and a certain type of cleverness than in, say, interesting characters. (They also had a pretty deep knowledge of Classical literature, which can make a lot of references unclear to people who don't have the same level of knowledge...trying to watch Buffy the Vampire slayer in 200 years will probably be about the same).

But after having dealt with the enlightenment, you get to the romantics, maybe with a side trip through Sturm und Drang. When you read "The Sorrows of Young Werther" or poetry by Wordsworth or maybe a novel by Scott and probably something by a Bronte, you get to a new period with a lot more emotion, because writers are explicitly rejecting enlightenment works as soulless and mechanical and are trying to write something that is basically the opposite. Again, "Werther" is in this list not because it's better than everything else (although it was a European-wide sensation and caused fashion-conscious men to dress like Werther), but because it was so important for the new literary movement of the next 80 years. But then people get tired of romanticism and replace it with realism/naturalism, which goes on for 60 years and which is why you get to read Thomas Hardy.

Then people got tired of the darwinistically based determinism of realism/naturalism and you get to read Joyce (probably an excerpt from Ulysses in a survey course). Ulysses was hugely important for modernism and influenced pretty much everyone. It's hard to overstate his importance for showing a meaningful way of writing that wasn't just more naturalism. (Although it's pretty well accepted that most of the people influenced by Ulysses didn't read the whole thing - but that's not really the point, as Ulysses was important because it introduced a new way of writing, not of making plots).

TL;DR: lit classes aren't great books classes; they are more like history classes.
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