Comments on: Kids these days

By: Kevin A. Lewis

Kevin A. Lewis — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:37:46 +0000

You’re right about ephemeral stream-of-consciousness expressive syles which evaporate before your very eyes even while they’re being proclaimed as edgy and hip, (Exhibit A: James Joyce-how on earth does he still cut the mustard?!)but it’s also a fact that as time passes, we grow farther away from things like Elizabethan English, which really makes it more important to try to hold onto them. (For instance, try to find a Catholic diocese where somebody still understands the art of Latin liturgical incantation) And although Beowulf should still be on any decent reading list, it should be explained that it wasn’t originally meant to be read, but chanted or sung around a blazing meadhall fire, probably where most of the listeners were drunk out of their minds. Come to think of it, that brings us right back to James Joyce, doesn’t it?

By: Steve Means

Steve Means — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:42:29 +0000

Kevin, I also think a general degradation of classic education standards and creeping irony contribute to a “who cares” what you think, especially as young people in particular are reacting rather than thinking before they send texts and the like. This stream of consciousness-style thinking tears at the roots of a large well-thought out story with a slow but huge impact for those with the patience to invest a little time off-line.

By: Steve Means

Steve Means — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:29:08 +0000

Gosh, I hated Silas Marner, too. Practically unreadable. Now I’m going to drop a bomb: I could not get through Don Quixote; I found its endless repetition and quaint restatements of the exact same thing to be incredibly boring. On the other hand, Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes is an amazing tome (1150 pages) that feels like a Cervantes novel but infinitely more interesting and exciting! Oh, and Ayn Rand and that unreadable monster, Atlas Shrugged.

By: Kevin A. Lewis

Kevin A. Lewis — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:00:28 +0000

Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan English, which is more or less equivalent to Quranic Arabic or high-church Latin; I’ll admit the language is overly poetic and expressive, but 400 years ago language skills were more important, for reasons we don’t have time to go into here. (I still prefer the King James Bible, which most people haven’t got the attention span for) I still (Silas Marner notwithstanding)think Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the least readable of the so-called classics inflicted on high school students these days, though.

By: Siri Kirpal Kaur Khalsa

Siri Kirpal Kaur Khalsa — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:43:12 +0000

I think the books are getting less complex. I don’t think Shakespeare would have an easy time getting plays read or performed if he were writing those same plays today. “Too much purple!” would be the attitude.

On a different note, I’ve read about half of the books in the 1964 and 2012 lists, but on my own time. In Junior High (modern Middle School), we read Great Expectations, Evangeline and Johnny Tremaine, plus a bunch of short stories and poems. In High School, we read Hamlet, The Scarlet Letter, Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and Othello. I was Dick and Jane era for Grade School, more’s the pity. But I read lots of early Dr. Seuss and lots of fairytales.