Reading on paper or screen

[Nobert]

Maybe this is why I've read The Great Gatsby three times and have still never figured out its status as a classic. It's so short and easy to read that I never really feel like I've chewed on it when I'm done with it. It goes down before you realize what's really in it...the literary equivalent of a girl drink.

 

[sheeplady]

I vaguely recall reading the article but obviously not deeply enough to remember the contents.

lol

Maybe this is why I've read The Great Gatsby three times and have still never figured out its status as a classic. It's so short and easy to read that I never really feel like I've chewed on it when I'm done with it. It goes down before you realize what's really in it...the literary equivalent of a girl drink.

You just must mean that it is really good, because girls are awesome, right?

 

[Feraud]

Reading makes us smarter and nicer. Saw this today and thought of this thread.

And some of these benefits come through particularly if we read on paper.

http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/#ixzz2XjKlGqdi

This reminds me of a recent compliment my wife and I received. We had family over for a small birthday celebration. While sitting in the dining /book/dvd/computer room a family friend stated how smart she felt surrounded by all the books.
I later mentioned to my wife you will never hear that compliment from someone in a room with an ipad or e-reader. No matter how much data the device holds.
I'm a firm believer there are immeasurable benefits from having "stuff" around. Be it books, magazines, records, artwork, sculptures, and various doodads..
I grew up in a home like that and have tried to expose my son to the same variety of intellectual stimulation.

Maybe this is why I've read The Great Gatsby three times and have still never figured out its status as a classic. It's so short and easy to read that I never really feel like I've chewed on it when I'm done with it. It goes down before you realize what's really in it...the literary equivalent of a girl drink.

I could never understand the fawning and cult status of Catcher in the Rye.

 

[LizzieMaine]

This reminds me of a recent compliment my wife and I received. We had family over for a small birthday celebration. While sitting in the dining /book/dvd/computer room a family friend stated how smart she felt surrounded by all the books.
I later mentioned to my wife you will never hear that compliment from someone in a room with an ipad or e-reader. No matter how much data the device holds.
I'm a firm believer there are immeasurable benefits from having "stuff" around. Be it books, magazines, records, artwork, sculptures, and various doodads..
I grew up in a home like that and have tried to expose my son to the same variety of intellectual stimulation.

We didn't really have an environment like that when I was growing up -- my mother rarely read anything more substantial than confession magazines, and my grandparents had about thirty books in their house, all of which I'd read by the time I was seven. (A 1925 edition of Emerson Hough's "The Covered Wagon" was a favorite, even though I don't much care for westerns, as was a Seventh Day Adventist religious book, "The Desire of Ages," which my grandmother had bought from a door-to-door evangelist because she felt sorry for her being out in the snow.) Otherwise all they had was Life, Look, and "Super Service Station," a trade publication for gas station operators.

So I improvised -- I read the newspaper all the way thru every day, even the stuff I didn't understand, and when I was done with that I'd read cereal boxes, jar labels, light bills, anything I could find that had writing in it. Kids who like to read will find things to read, and if you don't fill that need with something worthwhile they'll fill it with anything they can find -- some of which may not be all that worthwhile.

I could never understand the fawning and cult status of Catcher in the Rye.

I read that in high school and wanted to punch Holden Caulfield in his whining, entitled middle-class mouth. I wouldn't have a copy in my house unless it was printed on toilet paper.

 

[Harp]

I could never understand the fawning and cult status of Catcher in the Rye.

I read that in high school and wanted to punch Holden Caulfield in his whining, entitled middle-class mouth.

Alias "Jim Steel(e)"... Grace Metalious' Peyton Place was infamous by the time I found it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Alias "Jim Steel(e)"... Grace Metalious' Peyton Place was infamous by the time I found it.

Gad yes. My mother did have a paperback copy of that, which I found hidden under the towels in the kitchen drawer. I live just a couple of towns over from where they filmed the movie, which is still viewed as a point of perverse pride.

As for Holden Caulfield, another worthy fate for him would be to air-drop him onto the "Lord Of The Flies" island. Let somebody deserving take the rock instead of Piggy.

 

[Stanley Doble]

As I get older and eyes and muscles get weaker reading from a computer screen gets more appealing. Easier than holding a heavy book and magnifying glass.

I suppose I could just give up reading. No I couldn't.

 

[Stanley Doble]

lol

What a country!

+1 for "Reaching For The Moon" reference.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Maybe this is why I've read The Great Gatsby three times and have still never figured out its status as a classic. It's so short and easy to read that I never really feel like I've chewed on it when I'm done with it. It goes down before you realize what's really in it...the literary equivalent of a girl drink.

Read it slower. It looks like Coca Cola but it has the kick of Bourbon if you don't guzzle it.

 

[Harp]

Maybe this is why I've read The Great Gatsby three times and have still never figured out its status as a classic.

High in a white palace, the king's daughter, the golden girl...
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Before you have another go at Gatsby you might give Nancy Milford's Zelda a try.

 

[Harp]

Gad yes. My mother did have a paperback copy of that, which I found hidden under the towels in the kitchen drawer. I live just a couple of towns over from where they filmed the movie, which is still viewed as a point of perverse pride.

As for Holden Caulfield, another worthy fate for him would be to air-drop him onto the "Lord Of The Flies" island. Let somebody deserving take the rock instead of Piggy.

I discovered Peyton Place wedged behind a row of peach cans inside the kitchen pantry.
-------

John Knowles' A Separate Peace is a darker examination of adolescence, and while neither Salinger's Holden Caulfield
nor Knowles' narrator are particularly admirable, ASP made an impression due to its theme of a death-spiked conscience.

 

[LizzieMaine]

John Knowles' A Separate Peace is a darker examination of adolescence, and while neither Salinger's Holden Caulfield
nor Knowles' narrator are particularly admirable, ASP made an impression due to its theme of a death-spiked conscience.

We had that one, too. I can't see cordovan shoes without flashbacks.

What annoyed me most about all these books were that they were about adolescent *boys*, and if girls appeared at all they were as accessories. Don't high school English teachers know any good books about the problems of female adolescence?

 

[Harp]

What annoyed me most about all these books were that they were about adolescent *boys*, and if girls appeared at all they were as accessories. Don't high school English teachers know any good books about the problems of female adolescence?

...I went to an all male prep school , so the literary curriculum was perhaps narrow.
However, Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Jane Austen's Emma; Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter;
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; and her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights all come to mind as suitable.
I would also add Samuel Richardson's classic Clarissa, The History of a Young Lady; also, George Elliot's Middlemarch.

 

[LizzieMaine]

...I went to an all male prep school , so the literary curriculum was perhaps narrow.
However, Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Jane Austen's Emma; Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter;
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; and her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights all come to mind as suitable.
I would also add Samuel Richardson's classic Clarissa, The History of a Young Lady; also, George Elliot's Middlemarch.

Oh yes, we had Bovary and The Scarlet Letter in high school, but it would have been nice to get something 20th Century in there somewhere. Other than "The Bell Jar," which I didn't much like at all.

I was all ready to recommend "Marjorie Morningstar" to my high school English teacher until I got to the last chapter. What a sellout.

 

[Harp]

Oh yes, we had Bovary and The Scarlet Letter in high school, but it would have been nice to get something 20th Century in there somewhere. Other than "The Bell Jar," which I didn't much like at all.

I was all ready to recommend "Marjorie Morningstar" to my high school English teacher until I got to the last chapter. What a sellout.

Sylvia Plath isn't easy and her Ariel collection amounts to a cry for help. Her poetry and prose might best be avoided except by the hardiest of souls. Herman Wouk was a yarn-spinner with a predictable ending. I did not read Marjorie as a kid, but a Dominican nun whom had an Oxford PhD in Lit recommended Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex over Wouk's masculine attempt at "portraying the Shiksa".

 

[Nobert]

I keep half meaning to read The Bell Jar because some of the characters are relatives of mine. But based on the little skimming I did through Plath's collected journals and her overall reputation, that whole emotional extreme of being so caught up in your own perceptions that you document every little reaction to the most common events just seems so draining. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the little bit I've received.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If she'd been born sixty years later, she'd be a Twitter/Facebook celebrity.

I think a lot of what she wrote about was very specific to her social class -- there were certain expectations of well-bred middle-class girls in that particular time and place that no doubt felt very oppresssive for those experiencing them. But I was neither well-bred nor middle-class, and had no such expectations to live up to -- so what she saw as a life of frustration, I saw as a life of unearned privilege, and couldn't understand what she was so worked up about. I found her especially irritating and whiny because my mother had herself had a breakdown in the late sixties and had gone thru ECT. Compared to her real-life experiences, which I vividly remembered as I was reading the book, I thought Miss Greenwood was a narcissistic complainer of Caulfieldesque proportions.

What high school literature needs is the story of an angry post-adolescent girl working in a textile factory. Now that's angst.

 

[Nobert]

I think a lot of what she wrote about was very specific to her social class -- there were certain expectations of well-bred middle-class girls in that particular time and place that no doubt felt very oppresssive for those experiencing them. But I was neither well-bred nor middle-class, and had no such expectations to live up to -- so what she saw as a life of frustration, I saw as a life of unearned privilege, and couldn't understand what she was so worked up about.

Well, I don't entirely relate to that mindset either and, as I alluded to, this is a branch of my own family tree we're talking about.

 

[Harp]

I keep half meaning to read The Bell Jar because some of the characters are relatives of mine. But based on the little skimming I did through Plath's collected journals and her overall reputation, that whole emotional extreme of being so caught up in your own perceptions that you document every little reaction to the most common events just seems so draining. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the little bit I've received.

Well, I don't entirely relate to that mindset either and, as I alluded to, this is a branch of my own family tree we're talking about.

"...her art's immortality is life's disintegration...there is a peculiar, haunting challenge.."
Robert Lowell, Foreward to Ariel

Well, you will never know unless you try.

 

[Derek Cavin]

Paper and always paper. I love the feel and look of a book. I love to see someone else reading a book and see what the cover is. (Plus I have a degree in Printing Technology/Management and work for the world's largest printing company.)