Words, Words, Words: Thing 16

Odd what one discovers that maybe they weren't supposed to when searching and playing on the library thing site. What I realized was that the majority of books / authors here are either the basic pulp fiction / trendy books (Harry Potter, Dan Brown) or the books that sellers push to the public, i.e. the "book club" books (Kite Runner, Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight). The classics were hard to find, though Agatha Christie was well represented, as she should be.

I'm not judging librarything by any means. I think, actually, it is a pretty cool site and a neat idea. I'm even considering joining, though I'm not sure when I would have the time to go through my library and type in the info--though that is probably easier than I am thinking. I guess what I am noticing is a trend in our reading habits. Our culture seems to read what we are told to read even after we leave high school English. A friend of mine sent me an article on this last year, and sadly, not being as hip with a reader or tagging option on my bookmark bar, I cannot relocate this article, but it discussed that today's college students are not branching out and reading the "rebellious" literature that college students of years' past did. No one is picking up Jack Kerouac or J.D. Salinger. Instead, they are choosing to reread the Harry Potter series or dig into Twilight (or back into Twilight) instead of finding the literature "forbidden" to them on the high school level.

I remember how cool the college bookstore was at Oklahoma State, and how much I enjoyed buying my books and a few extras if I could afford them. I was constantly looking for new authors or new titles to keep me interested, and through this hunt, I discovered how interesting historical fiction could be, but even better, in the right hands, or compelling history was in itself. And finally, I was picking my own books instead of having them assigned (although my lit teachers were doing plenty of assigning as I recall). It was here that, rereading The Scarlet Letter, I discovered I actually liked it and understood it. I think my years in college challenged my reading level instead of stagnating it by only reading what I remembered I liked in years previous.

Anyway, that was off topic. I liked the 50 book challenge and think it would translate to a high school classroom quite easily. The public library has these kinds of challenges for the kids during the summer (I think), and anything that fosters reading is okay by me. But at some point, a person has to take charge of this skill and begin reading out of his or her comfort zone--not that a person has to read something not liked; I've stopped plenty of books because they just grated on my nerves (Dan Brown, Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence series--these two cannot rival Miss Marple or the persnickety Hercule Poirot). I suppose this leads back the argument about kids reading books where the characters have nothing in common with the student, so why read it? I hate this argument. If I only read books that had characters like me, I'd be pretty dang bored after a while. The beauty of reading, to me, is actually finding people not like me, people with worse troubles, better lives, more exciting careers, etc, things I may never experience and getting to see what that might be like.