I have about an hour to go in this (listening to the audio book) but I have really enjoyed it so far. I do wish the copy I have had the racism story included.
Some of the stories have been very good, some just entertaining, and a couple disturbing.
I was horrified about the music playing boys. I know many atrocities were done when Europeans discovered the "new world" and who knows how many people died because of the diseases that were brought over (95% is the guess). I know this is supposed to be a parallel to the expansion in the America's and I know there were some real monsters involved, but the lack of empathy from the boys is still very disturbing.
Usher II, discussing censorship, is one of my favorites though. Maybe one of these days I will have to read his other more famous work on censorship.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AnotherCat
I remember one English class where the teacher made the point that we should not be over zealous in reading messages into the literature we read as it may be that all that was intended by the material was that it made a good story or provided a frame for a good story. That stuck in my memory and while the literati seem to be free with interpretations of author's works without much challenge we do see the writers of song lyrics quite frequently correcting the pontificators (perhaps the best known being Lennon's repudiation, backed by McCartney, of the claims that the title Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was an LSD based pun).
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That is one of my biggest complaints about literature in school and I wish one of my teachers had made a similar statement. I wonder how many millions of people have been turned off reading as a whole because of well-intentioned teachers trying to find more meaning in something than the author intended? Sometimes books are just good stories.