[SmokeAndMirrors]

I agree that, of course, taste in books is personal. Also that some things might be better at certain points in your life, with certain understandings, than at other points. I read Catcher in the Rye on my own when I was 15 or so. I loved it, but I refuse to read it again. To me, it felt like I was reading it at the perfect point in my life for that book, and I think it would spoil it for me to read it now.

And I did like some of the books I read for school at various points- Of Mice and Men, Dharma Bums (yes, really), The Outsiders...

And some of them I think I would have liked better had we read something different from that author. For example, I wouldn't say I "hated" Romeo and Juliet, but it certainly didn't resonate with me very well at 17 - and I wasn't the only one. A few months later, I wound up reading some of Shakespeare's comedies, and enjoyed them greatly.

I don't think I'll ever like Watership Down - the subject matter itself doesn't appeal to me in any way. But being forced to read it for class made me hate it infinitely more than I probably would otherwise.

There's an argument to be made that I was an especially ornery child, but I don't think I'm alone in some of the lit that I was forced to read in school turning me off from reading. There is definitely a large gap in my life where I did very little reading on my own - incidentally, it coincides nicely with the heaviest years of forced reading in school. And it was never heavier than how I read now, so I doubt it has anything to do with the amount of reading.

School reading assignments turn a lot of kids off from reading. I think some of this has to do with the content itself, much of which hasn't held up well with modern changes in storytelling and writing. Something being more than 70 years old does not automatically make it better than something that came out 5 years ago, and in some cases can make it less accessible to young readers.

I'm not saying let's assign Twilight (although I certainly think you could derive an interesting discussion about the fundamentalist movement in America from it... but that's only if you can stand to read it). But I am saying that we should give more thought to how these novels hold up. 100 years ago, trains were pretty amazing too. But now we have airplanes.

Also, I do think more thought needs to be given to how they teach them. Taking Twilight again, I can only read as far as 100 pages into the first book if I look at it from the perspective I mentioned above - one of evaluating its timeliness and popularity against current trends in American society. If I pay too much attention to the story itself I just go insane.

Psychologically speaking, this is something that teens and adults are capable of, but usually not younger people (or at least not to the same degree). It's a meta skill you gain as your brain develops. And you only *really* develop it by using it. It's one of those processes that you have to work at.

Looking back on it, I think the majority of the books I was assigned in the later half of school were intended to teach us about something unrelated to the book itself, in the same way Twilight doesn't actually talk about the fundamentalist movement. But there was very little, or no, direction towards thinking that way about it, and without that context, some of these books are completely insufferable. It is only the cultural and social context that makes them readable.

Teachers need, as the Salon article mentions, to be giving clearer instruction to minds that are only beginning to have this ability, as to how to read it for its context. Some of these books come alive if you look at them from that direction. Others are merely more tolerable. But lacking that context, they are just painful and often feel pointless. And I don't remember ever getting a ton of direction when I was in school.

I take that back. I had one teacher who was great at that. I'm fairly sure that's why I liked every book he ever assigned.