from 7th grade to the end of high school i really didn't enjoy reading because we had to analyze the hell out of every book we read. huck finn, great gatsby, scarlet letter, night...usually i didn't really get the deeper meaning and used cliff's notes a lot to do my papers. i don't like to analyze books. i don't really care what the deeper meaning is, or the metaphors. i enjoy a good story. i also enjoy learning about random things and reading cookbooks. ever since college ended i've been a library fanatic. i'll spend hours in there browsing the bookshelves and looking for interesting things to read. right now i've got a dozen books on building green and/or small houses. i'm really interested in housing design, especially environmentally friendly houses. i tend to not read those all the way through though, they are more a reference than anything. i just haven't had time to read a novel with school in the way.
so i decided since i'm not in school i want to read. my goal is 50 books this year. of course i will have one class next term and one during summer. then i start up full time again. but i think i can do it. i spent quite a bit of time looking up popular and classic books to read and came up with a list of 50. it is not all-inclusive at all and will probably change as the year goes on but i think it's a good list. i later found a nice list at the library of 100 fiction classics, 21 were on my list and i read 9 others. the thing about reading is you can read constantly and never read everything out there.
3 comments:
wow i remember where the red fern grows! i must've read that book for every book-it all throughout elementary school, it was super sad, i liked how they said "coons" for racoons. i dunno, plus i liked dogs and i never had a dog so i had to live vicariously...
ditto on the over-analyzing books, i still hate reading, probably all due to isherwood, i remember the very first assignment we had was like to "the crucible" or something and we had to answer a fricken' buttload of questions, i remember specifically because the summer before that we got our very first computer and it was in my parents' room so i stayed up 'till like 3 am for several nights in a row typing on that ancient computer. yup, honors english really ruined reading altogether for me.. then that was just reinforced by tanaka, remember those 5 million questions for huck finn? what is the irony between the raft house being afloat and jimbo's left nut? what the crap was all that? i feel absolutely NO remorse for cheating on that assignment, it was the right thing to do, i believe that!
but i do see merit in out of school reading, i've tried, there's this carl sagan book that i've been trying to read for about two years now, but i just can't seem to find the motivation to read (even though i think it's really interesting). right now the discovery channel is much more interesting...
Yeah, I love reading. Those stupid classes never hurt my love for reading but they certainly didn't enhance them. I think I would've actually enjoyed more of those assigned books if our teachers weren't so bloody crazy. By the way, I like how 5-6 of those books were actually assigned by those crazy people. There's a bunch of books in there that I wanted to read, too. I don't think I can do 50 this year, though. Too much knitting to do. :)
books i was assigned to read:
5. wuthering heights
8. in cold blood
13. invisible man
17. lord of the flies
20. for whom the bell tolls
21. the sun also rises
29. to kill a mockingbird
30. the call of the wild
39. the jungle
41. of mice and men
43. adventures of huckleberry finn
44. the color purple
47. charlotte's web
49. a room of one's own
50. native son
books i actually read:
30. the call of the wild
haha! well, actually read all the way through at least... the rest of them were either cliff notes or pick and choose which chapter the test questions come from...
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