This ties in with the “control” piece of last week.  Conservative parents truly believe that the only reason their offspring might fail to become Good Christian Soldiers is pernicious influence from the outside.  This is by no means a conservative-only phenomenon; anyone who has grown up in an immigrant community can attest that the same dynamic is often at play in those communities.  And there are, of course, the progressive parents who imagine that if they don’t expose their kids to the fact that guns exist, they won’t engage in play that involves guns (either pretend guns in childhood or real ones as adults). 

If people whose main concern is making kids stupid and compliant get upset at kids’ exposure to music videos and video games, it’s because they see those things, like books, as potentially horizon-broadening.

That’s where things do get a bit tricky.  Because “anti-Christian” isn’t always a good thing.  The latest MK game, for instance, allows various forms of disembowelment and torture that make grown men shudder.  Suggesting that maybe you shouldn’t show 12-year-olds women getting impaled on lances or men with arms ripped off and gushing blood at the shoulders isn’t unreasonable.

So you show some images of MK5, then you start and crusade against “Slaughterhouse Five”, and people who aren’t paying serious attention are happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Which is dumb.  But I’m not entirely sure how to get people to recognize the bait-and-switch outside simply exposing them all to the banned literature in a structured, educational environment.  Like, for instance, in high school as part of an English curriculum.  :-p

Is there a way to find out about these complaint?  I’m not sure how to push back unless I know something’s afoot in the first place.

Last month ThinkProgress reported that a Missouri high school had banned Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five because religious residents complained that it taught principles contrary to the Bible.

“So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.”

—Joshua 10:40

What’s the problem?

Oh, wait—Vonnegut’s novel was partly about the *horror* of mass killing.  My bad.

Hmm, if the Teabaggers don’t want to pay any taxes, then who will enforce all these book bans?  Wouldn’t it be the scary Big Government to hire people just to make sure that kids don’t get their hands on these books?

I’m sure somebody’s done a comparison of the percentages of people that self-identify with the Moral Majority in 1980 and those that self-identify as a Tea Partier in 2010. The only question is whether a generation passing has made them crazier (obviously, Reagan was not a Falwellite, but he was a winner, so they got on board; whereas the Tea Party on anything larger than a gerrymandered district has become enamored of losers).

Hmm, if the Teabaggers don’t want to pay any taxes, then who will enforce all these book bans?

I think you have it a bit backwards.  The Teabaggers don’t want public libraries to exist in the first place.  Functionally, they’d prefer that all books were banned, along with all book repositories.  If you want a book, you should buy it for yourself or rent it from a for-profit book rental facility.  None of this socialist namby-pamby free books for readin’ nonsense.

@bananacat - it would be the same “community” that would spontaneously and voluntarily take care of the elderly using the boatloads of money that everyone will have if we just enact conservative economic policies.  Probably with pitchforks and torches.

My mom used to be a middle-school librarian (in NE US), and she’d have to respond to would-be book banners once every couple of years. She found it to be a tedious exercise, because the complaints were always the same, and her responses were always the same. School administration would never just cut the complainers off; they’d make Mom do the whole dog’n'pony show of form filling out and dissertation on the ‘objectionable’ material.  What was funny, however, was that which was deemed objectionable. Never Twain or Vonnegut. More like Stephen King (he uses profanity!) and Sweet Valley High (something about a slutty girl who doesn’t get punished properly, maybe). Mom would always sigh heavily and say “You really don’t know kids at all, do you? Whatever’s in these books is downright tame compared to what middle-schoolers actually say and get up to. Get over yourselves.”

But you gotta push back every single time. Even if it’s to support Sweet freaking Valley High.

But attacking books shows that this isn’t about the religious right being concerned that kids’ minds are being numbed.  It shows that they’re worried kids’ minds aren’t being numbed enough!

Well said. Conservatives are right to be worried, of course. I’m a godless liberal as a direct result of reading books as a child.

Re: astroturfing, I’ve been wondering a lot lately how we liberals are going to counter that particular Teabagger advantage. Liberals really need to get better at grassroots effort, but we don’t get paychecks from the Koch Brothers to do so, so what do we do? Liberal grassroots efforts like MoveOn seem to fracture pretty quickly.

Well, if Sweet Valley High is protected, the good stuff is obviously safe.

That school that banned Vonnegut was Republic, MO - the same place that’s now being sued for forcing a student to apologize to her rapist, expelling her for a year, and then taking no steps to protect her from being raped again.

They also banned Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.  Shocker.

The Putnam and Campbell piece points out the obvious in a way that the media actually had to take notice of. Not that it has substantially changed their narrative, but at least they could not ignore the evidence anymore. Tea baggers used to be (in reverse chronological order): the religious right, the moral majority, segregationists/dixiecrats, the klan, confederates, and before the Civil War they had the only 100% accurate name they’ve ever had—Know Nothings.

The endgame here is raising a bunch of kids who are well versed in the bible but not anything else. The documentary “Sons of Perdition” follows boys who were kicked out of a Mormon cult and shows the complete lack of real education they’ve had in frightening detail. When one is asked who Bill Clinton is, he says, “He’s that guy who forced Jews onto trains and into gas chambers.” He honestly thought Bill freaking Clinton was Hitler. That’s how ignorant you can keep a child when you have total control over them and that’s what the religious freaks want for all of our kids.

@serious bette: They don’t even want the kids well versed in the bible. They want the kids to memorize the passages they picked out for them, but never to actually sit down and read the book. I’m not sure why they teach them to read at all.

Republic High School. Where rapists can grow in a safe a deVonneguted environment.

Yeah, the last thing a theocrat should want is for people to read and pay attention to the whole Bible.

I’ve just had an evil thought. We all know that lists of books that have been banned make pretty good sources of reading material - what about printing leaflets saying “Your parents|teachers|school board have decided that you are too immature to read the following books: ${booklist}. Do you know you can borrow them from ${local libraries} ?” and handing them out at schools with a long list of banned books ?

Seems to me that school children may well hunt out those banned books if they know what is banned ... even children that normally wouldn’t be interested in reading.

“That’s how ignorant you can keep a child when you have total control over them and that’s what the religious freaks want for all of our kids.”

...all the better to make them into soldiers for Jesus, protecting the American Fatherland from Islamofascism and liberals.  They need people who unquestioningly obey authority, who are not intellectually curious or self-reflective, who live carefully constructed lives where most decisions are made for them.  There are rules for all human behavior that must be followed, or punishment will result.  They use god and Jesus as the attractive packaging for good old-fashioned Fascism.

Even their favorite book is not something they want their people traipsing through unguided.  After all, un(brain)washed believers might seize on ideas such as condemning the rich, emphasizing our responsibility for one another, especially the poor and disabled, and all that other Socialist rot that lurks in the New Testament.  Much better to steer them toward the Old Testament and Mosaic Law, where small infractions often result in capital punishment, and the chain of command, and your place in it, is crystal clear for all, from the very top to the very bottom…

Seems to me that school children may well hunt out those banned books if they know what is banned ... even children that normally wouldn’t be interested in reading.

I’m on board with that, but I would give the leaflets a less encouraging tone. The fun of reading banned books when you’re a kid is that no one wants you to read them and they are very, very bad for you.

The Teabaggers don’t want public libraries to exist in the first place.

Except, of course, when they need a meeting room.

“I’m not sure why they teach them to read at all.”

Fahrenheit 451 should be inspirational in any AmTaliban/Teabagger efforts to control their flock, along with 1984 and many others.  Too bad they banned all of those books before they had a chance to read them…

It was ever thus.

Back in the early ‘60s, I saw the school janitor wheeling a large canvas container of some sort. I peeked in, and saw that it was full of red cover copies of “Catcher in the Rye” set for the incinerator.

Hadn’t yet heard of the book, at that point, but I reached in and snagged a copy of it for my own reading pleasure.

And then worked my way through the rest of Salinger from the Public Library.

Also as a child was very interested in the films banned by the Catholic League of Decency, and eventually got around to all of ‘em when they hit TV.

I’m confused how the local school board could even do that. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Island Tree School District v. Pico that a local school board could not ban or remove library books because of a given books political, national, religious, or social perspective as the court believed this violated a child’s First Amendment rights. This case in question specifically mentioned Slaughterhouse Five as well. I have no idea why the school board thought banning the book was legal.

@Ted H—Teabaggers are never concerned with legality.

Oh, they’re not banning it. It’s not like they’ll smack it out of a kid’s hands if they’re reading it on a bench or something. They’re just taking it off the library shelves and not offering it. They’re doing the same thing with Abortion… they might not be able to outright outlaw it, but they can certainly make it close to impossible for a woman to get one. They’ll wait until people adjust to unavailability before they make it illegal.

To be fair, I think libraries have every right to stock the books the community wants and that the kids will read. And parents have every right to object to a book’s content being taught in class (for example: what if your kid’s high school lit teacher decided to teach collected works of Piers Anthony or Ayn Rand). But the problem is of course that we don’t seem to have a lot of balance, and I suspect the Missouri school system isn’t so homogenous as all that, and of course when the entire grounds of the argument is “that it’s counter to the Bible,” it’s a little hard to make the case that a publicly-funded institution needs to adhere to that particular litmus test.

Also, Jon Stewart is starting to call the teabaggers out on their “who we say we are and who we actually are, those be two different things” mentality. He pointed out that Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann are just “Moral Majority in tricorn hats.”

I did a report recently about a specific attempt to ban a book at a school library, “Sandpiper” by Ellen Wittlinger.  It’s a teen coming-of-agish story where a young girl deals with family problems, new friends, and a stalker.  The girl had received a “bad girl” reputation because in her earlier teen years, she gave blow jobs to a number of guys.  She says that at the time, she liked the attention and power the act gave her, but she no longer is into that.  The author says that one of her goals with the book was to depict oral sex as sex.

So the book was challenged for its descriptions of oral sex (interestingly, the teen girl who challenged the book checked it out and refused to return it… so that no one else would read the dirty, dirty parts, I presume).  The school officials decided not to ban it, because they thought that it might leave them open for lawsuits, but decided to change its library policies so that this sort of book wouldn’t end up on their shelves in the future.

My favorite bit was how the officials liked that the book showed negative consequences of sexual activity, but wished it didn’t describe that sexual activity.

I’ve never read Slaughterhouse five, but when they ban it, they make me think I’m missing something. And I haven’t been a teenager in almost twenty years!

(interestingly, the teen girl who challenged the book checked it out and refused to return it… so that no one else would read the dirty, dirty parts, I presume).

Either that or she was afraid that the heavy crease at that section might be noticed by the next people who checked it out.

@25

Teaching the collected works of Ayn Rand would, at worst, be a massive waste of time because they have no literary merit. I’m not so concerned with the ideological purity of what my kids are exposed to that I would worry about them becoming Objectivists as a result of reading it. It’s not like I uncritically agreed with every trumped-up 30-page speech I ever read in a book, even as a child.

But at any rate, “community standards” are a poor measure by which to decide such things. Ask anyone who’s grown up in a conservative community what it’s like to deal with the caprice and repression of community standards. Libraries don’t exist to reinforce the community’s ingrained social norms, and while schools do, they shouldn’t.

Not 30 pages.  200 pages.

  Attn Triplanetary at 10: I think one of the structural strengths of rightists and one of the worst structual weakneses of leftists is that rights are less prone to factionalism than liberals. Sure, different groups of rightists exists and each has a different emphasis but they focus on one issue at a time and all work together. When it comes to opposing same-sex marriage, every rightist group gets involved in the effort. I remember seeing a paper on how same-sex marriage is bad because it would lead to tax increases. The logic is bizarred but even the anti-tax right was getting involved in the effort to persecute the LGBT community and deny them their right to marry whom they please.

  Leftist groups are different and tend to focus on exclusively on their particular issue regardless of whathever the fight of the moment is about. Leftist groups also tend to to focus on one issue. There are specialized rightist groups but the right always had a general rightist group to unite them in an umbrealla organization. The Tea Party is an example of this. JBS used to be an example of this. Move On was an attempt at a general liberal group but it failed.

People overanalyze the factionalism on the Left.  We have maybe 1/100th the money they have, so it’s hard to organize.  That’s a sufficient condition.

Strangely, the religious right sees things the way I do in this way—-they don’t see a significant difference between fiction in a book, on a stage, or on a screen.

I am convinced you are both wrong. Reading is an active process that affirmatively engages the imagination and critical faculties. Watching/listening is a passive process that bypasses the imagination and critical faculties.

@Comment #33: Punditus Maximus on 08/22 at 01:34 PM

People overanalyze the factionalism on the Left.  We have maybe 1/100th the money they have, so it’s hard to organize.  That’s a sufficient condition.

Yeah. It pretty much comes down to that. I’d be organizing with the Maoists for enough $$$

  PhysioProf, I think the existence of fanfiction and fanart actively disproves this. There is plenty of fanfiction based on movies and television shows and this is evidence that watching something can at least stimulate the fannish mind.

TedH@12:45:
At the link, it says the reason the gave for banning “Slaughterhouse Five” was the language.

Zifnab:

That’s where things do get a bit tricky.  Because “anti-Christian” isn’t always a good thing.  The latest MK game, for instance, allows various forms of disembowelment and torture that make grown men shudder.  Suggesting that maybe you shouldn’t show 12-year-olds women getting impaled on lances or men with arms ripped off and gushing blood at the shoulders isn’t unreasonable.

My folks were pretty blaise about such things and let me read “Lonesome Dove” when I was fifth grade, which portrays stuff on the level of the MK game, and watch various R-rated 80s action movies around that time. I don’t think I was scared for life by such things.

Triplanetary—Believe me, putting Rand and Anthony in the same vein was intentional both as ideological crap but also for their literary merits. But frankly, I remember more than one book that I was required to read in high school having “less than great” literary merits but was indicated because the teacher wanted it in the curriculum. But the point is that people should be allowed to object to what literature is being taught to their kids. Personally, I don’t think Catcher in the Rye is the greatest book ever written,  but it seems popular, and I’m not entirely sure I see the harm except for maybe Salinger’s creepy fixation with teenage boys. But if I found out my kid was going to be reading Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead? Well, I would object because it’s crappy literature bumping up against shitty ideology. That would be my “community standard” speaking.

Reading is an active process that affirmatively engages the imagination and critical faculties. Watching/listening is a passive process that bypasses the imagination and critical faculties.

PhysioProf, are you seriously arguing that “Kidnapped by the Desert King” and “The Billionaire’s Secret Baby” (both Mills and Boon) “affirmatively [engage] the imagination and critical faculties” to a greater degree than the Iliad, Hamlet, Voltaire, Le nozze di Figaro, Ordet, The Third Man, The Sopranos, Life on Earth, Mahler’s 5th symphony, just to take a few Western canon examples.

Anyone remember the crappy anti-drug “Go Ask Alice” book from the late 1970s?  The parents in my school were all up-in-arms over it - drug use! sex! - and while it wasn’t in the library, there were lots of discussions of how bad it was (and they didn’t mean “bad” in the “shitty writing and worse story” way).  Naturally, my friends and I passed around a dog-eared copy to read and talk about, and we took it a lot more seriously than we would have if our parents had been “meh” about it.  I’ll bet half the kids who got into “Harry Potter” did so because their fundie parents were against it (witches! magic!).

Or - because I realise it is unfortunate I’ve chosen women vs men, though I think we can blame umpteen thousand years of patriarchy for that - do you really think that “The Da Vinci Code” is better than the above? Not to mention better than every single work by Artemisia Gentileschi, Kiri Te Kanawa, Judith Weir, Verity Lambert…?

Reading is an active process that affirmatively engages the imagination and critical faculties. Watching/listening is a passive process that bypasses the imagination and critical faculties.

Any evidence for that statement?  Or just pearl-clutching?

In any case, I’m sure the many people over human history who have participated in oral folklore culture over the years in almost all cultures of which I am aware are deeply saddened to know that their experiences of communal storytelling, which engages teller and listener, are inherently inferior to my sneakily reading Flowers in the Attic when I was in third grade.

That could be an interesting online poll—juxtaposing the “which would you rather your kid do:” questions with answers like:

13 year-old:
a) Watch Up
b) Read Twilight

10-year-old:
a) Read Harry Potter
b) Watch Veggie-Tales

12 year-old:
a) Read Flowers in the Attic
b) Watch Jersey Shore

15 year-old:
a) Watch The Prestige
b) Read Vampire High

16 year-old:
a) Play Shadow Of The Colossus
b) Read The Xanth Series

etc, etc.

Ugh, I read the Xanth series obsessively from the time I was about 10 to the time I was about 15.  I cannot even imagine what the fuck was wrong with me not to have seen Anthony as the ragingly creepy narcissist that he is.  What kind of person names his imaginary country after himself?

Even though it will be pointedly ignored by mainstream media types wed to the narrative that the Tea Party is a spontaneous uprising of people who were apolitical before Obama sent them around the bend

They’re wed to that narrative because it’s financially dangerous to be otherwise.  I’d say the majority of media types know they’re just the Moral Majority all over again, and they remember getting boycotted.  They’re afraid to lose viewers/readers to Fox or worse.

I tend to see people like this as the equivalent of a builder who builds a bridge and then won’t let anyone use it lest it collapse. They work hard to instill their moral values into their kids…but just in case, they’re not allowed to know about other value systems because the bridge might break. (I know, an imperfect analogy) This kind of thinking creates a brittle mindset. I find it interesting how adamant they are about ‘blind faith’, when in my experience it is the faith that is questioned that is stronger, because you can address the weak areas. Fundies just keep adding sticks underneath and hope they’ll hold things up.

The latest MK game, for instance, allows various forms of disembowelment and torture that make grown men shudder.

A lot of the fatalities aren’t even that entertaining. They’re just gory for the sake of gore. The less gory ones are generally more interesting.

My folks were pretty blaise about such things and let me read “Lonesome Dove” when I was fifth grade, which portrays stuff on the level of the MK game, and watch various R-rated 80s action movies around that time. I don’t think I was scared for life by such things.

That hardly matters.  Many less easy-going parents take an instant dislike to the games.  Advocacy groups simply transfer that dislike from an easily recognizable visual image onto a dense and complex piece of literature and draw a bunch of false equivalences.

The actual traumatic (or lack of traumatic) effect hardly matters.

Two true stories:

a) My mother just retired from running a Catholic school library in London, Ontario. For a while the school board had her assigned half-time to two libraries, one in London, one in a small town about 20 miles outside of the city. While she was running the rural school library a group of parents tried to ban The Owl and The Pussycat because the owl and the pussycat lived together for a year before they got married.

b) My local thrift store sells bags of children’s books and toys - you know, two or three books and an old action figure - right by the cash (probably to encourage impulse buying). I saw one once that contained, along with two perfectly innocuous children’s books and a plastic dinosaur, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. The likeliest explanation is that the staff mistook it for a kid’s book because of the title, but I really hope it was a prank. Either way some kid is going to have the time of their life!

Ugh, I read the Xanth series obsessively from the time I was about 10 to the time I was about 15.  I cannot even imagine what the fuck was wrong with me not to have seen Anthony as the ragingly creepy narcissist that he is.  What kind of person names his imaginary country after himself?
Comment #44: EG01 on 08/22 at 03:11 PM

If you ever have any doubts about it, his autobiography really lets loose.  I remember reading openmouthed about how upset he was that “girls” were editing his books.

If you ever have any doubts about it, his autobiography really lets loose.  I remember reading openmouthed about how upset he was that “girls” were editing his books.

For me it was Anthonology, with the fucked up stories about the torture aliens and the alternate universe of cattle people (there were no animals, so the people used humans as cattle). I liked the space dentist but never read anything else of his again.

@Comment #44: EG01 on 08/22 at 12:11 PM

Ugh, I read the Xanth series obsessively from the time I was about 10 to the time I was about 15.  I cannot even imagine what the fuck was wrong with me not to have seen Anthony as the ragingly creepy narcissist that he is.  What kind of person names his imaginary country after himself?

You probably enjoyed the imaginative storytelling, and were too young to notice the narcissism. If you’re actually worried about it.

Some years back (more than 10), at the publishing company my best friend worked at, they had an article hung up on the wall about woe! woe! it so hard for new authors to break into the publishing industry! woe!  The best part, the part someone had gone over with a highlighter, was a quotation from Piers Anthony bemoaning this tragedy.  He said (and it’s been a while, so I’m sure I’m not getting the words exactly right) “It is too hard for new authors.  I’m sure that if my name weren’t ‘Piers Anthony,” I wouldn’t be able to get my books published today!”

Next to it, one of my best friend’s colleagues had written “Very true.”

@Comment #50: ScottK on 08/22 at 02:39 PM

For me it was Anthonology, with the fucked up stories about the torture aliens and the alternate universe of cattle people (there were no animals, so the people used humans as cattle). I liked the space dentist but never read anything else of his again.

For me, probably the Chthon/Phthor series. The sexuality was just too creepy.

Thanks for the words of support, atheist.  I’m OK.  I like to use it as a reality check whenever I start wringing my hands about What It Says About Today’s Youth and Their Values and Ideas About Gender That They’re All Reading Twilight.  I read Piers Anthony, I remind myself, at about the same age, and I turned out a good lefty feminist, so all is not lost.  Then I also remember that I had a strong lefty feminist family to help me keep my head on straight, and I start worrying again…

What was funny, however, was that which was deemed objectionable. Never Twain or Vonnegut. More like Stephen King (he uses profanity!) and Sweet Valley High (something about a slutty girl who doesn’t get punished properly, maybe).

I wonder how many got challenged for violence?  It has been noted that, in comparison to European tastes, it’s more acceptable in the US to show a man sticking a knife into a woman and less to show him sticking in a penis - despite the fact that the latter is more common and usually a happy event.

Republic High School. Where rapists can grow in a safe a deVonneguted environment.

Well, of coures - the penis is more powerful than the knife, obviously.

To be fair, I think libraries have every right to stock the books the community wants and that the kids will read.

Well, to be more serious, the problem here is that the library is a community asset, and yet our clients are individuals.  “Every reader their book” is a fundamental principle - we have to deal with teh actual human needs of real people rather than community wishes.

It might be nice if no-one ever spoke about those icky queer feelings or girls giving blow jobs or alcoholic fathers beating their families.  But those things are actually real, and giving children/young adults access to stories dealing with them is empowering.

Ugh, I read the Xanth series obsessively from the time I was about 10 to the time I was about 15.  I cannot even imagine what the fuck was wrong with me not to have seen Anthony as the ragingly creepy narcissist that he is.  What kind of person names his imaginary country after himself?

Well, the early Xanth stuff and a lot of the Cluster space series wasn’t bad.  I noticed stuff getting weird when I was young and read “Omniscope” - in between liking the ideas, I started wondering if man/woman/man relations really would be like that.  I started formulating PiaToR’s First Theory of the Opposite Sex - “They can’t think that wierdly, surely?”

Orson Scott Card is another example.  Go and read the novelisation for “The Abyss” - it’s a very humane book, going out of its way to make the movie villian understandable and even sympathetic, as well as explaining the main couple’s marriage and divorce.  I’d happily pass that to any kid, despite disliking the author.

I noticed stuff getting weird when I was young and read “Omniscope”

*sigh* “Macroscope”.  My brain isn’t working well this morning.

I don’t know about the early Xanth stuff not being that bad, PiaToR.  My memory is that in the first Xanth book, A Spell for Chameleon, the main female character has the magic “power” of cycling through different identities/appearances.  A third of the time, she is beautiful and sexually amenable, but dumb as a bowl of hair.  A third of the time, she’s average-looking, of average intelligence, and has an average “personality” (“personality,” in this book, seems to refer to how nice she is to/willing to fuck the protagonist”).  And a third of the time, she’s extraordinarily smart, but also extraordinarily bad-tempered and ugly.

I cannot even begin to deal with the fucked-uppedness of the mind of a man who thinks that’s cool.

Well, yeah, but that totally zoomed past my 10 or 11 year old head.  Hor-what?

Holeeee shit. You know that dude that used to post the disjointed troll posts, consisting of links and caps, none of which made sense? “Take that, atheists!” or something similar?

He’s been identified and arrested for making death threats against atheist bloggers, as well as stalking people in real life—-and making threats. 

It amuses me that people are trying to protect kids from ‘bad language’. Yeah. Like kids don’t use worse language than old farts like me all the time.

It’s not so much the narcissism with Anthony (read Letters To Jenny if you want a truly barfworthy parade of narcissism though) as it is the increasingly-not-even-cloaked pedophilia and pedophilia apologetics. Firefly, the Mode series, and some of the books in the Immortals series, although thank Lard I’ve finally managed to forget which, would be the best examples of it but I would never recommend anyone actually be so foolish as to read them to find out. It’s pretty disgusting.

Well, the early Xanth stuff and a lot of the Cluster space series wasn’t bad.

The very first Xanth book features a dumb-nymphomaniac-beauty character who gets a bunch of men accused of rape because she’s too stupid to realize she shouldn’t take off her clothes every time a man talks to her nicely.

@#56:  The novelization of “The Abyss”???  You mean where the daughters the mother raise are neurotic messes, but the daughter the father raises is the successful engineer?

Yeah, that’s a great message all right.

@Eric_RoM at 4:14:
I havent’ read it, but a subtle suggestion like that seems pretty benign compared to the clownshows of rightwing wish fullfillment Card has published this century. Or to anyone who’s read one of his political columns.

  Nineveh, I suppose you could argue that even really bad pulp novels are more imaginatively stimulative than say the Sopranos because when reading really pulpy fiction people often image themselves in the protagonist position and having the same adventures and experiences that the protagonist has. This phenomena also occurs with visual/audio media but its rarer. Its also different. Usually with visual/audio media people wish that they were Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Bond rather than imaginging themselves in that position.

  Re Anthony and Rand, I think there is a difference between the two. Rand is simply a bad author regardless of her ideology. She can’t write and her imagination is lack luster. Anthony is frustrating for different reasons. He is wasted potential. He clearly possesses a very strong and clear imagination and his technical skills as a writer aren’t bad, not great mind you but he can write better than many other mass market fantasy/scienice fiction authors but his misogyny/disturbing beliefs about sex keep getting in the way. Whats really annoying is that is other political beliefs seem to at least lean progressive/liberal, so many of his beliefs are good but the ones regarding gender are really evil.

  Nineveh, I suppose you could argue that even really bad pulp novels are more imaginatively stimulative than say the Sopranos because when reading really pulpy fiction people often image themselves in the protagonist position and having the same adventures and experiences that the protagonist has. This phenomena also occurs with visual/audio media but its rarer. Its also different. Usually with visual/audio media people wish that they were Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Bond rather than imaginging themselves in that position.

  Re Anthony and Rand, I think there is a difference between the two. Rand is simply a bad author regardless of her ideology. She can’t write and her imagination is lack luster. Anthony is frustrating for different reasons. He is wasted potential. He clearly possesses a very strong and clear imagination and his technical skills as a writer aren’t bad, not great mind you but he can write better than many other mass market fantasy/scienice fiction authors but his misogyny/disturbing beliefs about sex keep getting in the way. Whats really annoying is that is other political beliefs seem to at least lean progressive/liberal, so many of his beliefs are good but the ones regarding gender are really evil.

uh, no, Anthony isn’t that great a writer. I remember reading his Immortals series in high school, and even though I was scarfing it down like popcorn, I was pretty aware “this is shit.”

I remember trying to get the library system to reclassify some books they had in their system - when I tried to look up information on psychiatry, all their books were from them 70s, including several which had seriously been debunked.  I said it was inappropriate to be listed uncritically if the study it was based on turned out to be a scam (in the case of the books I pointed out, they were).

They said they wouldn’t pull any books from the shelves or change their notation in the catalog, but that in the intervening time that my request was on their docket, the books had been ‘lost’.

EG01:  It was supposed to be inconvenient and ‘be careful of what you wish for’.  The magical panties is what you should probably remember from the books…

judybrowni, back in the mid-70s, I had told my grandmother that I was interested in reading the prophecies of Nostradamus, and when we got home after shopping at Macys’, she asked Grandpa if they were on the Index.

The avowed aim of the list was to protect the faith and morals of the faithful by preventing the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors. Books thought to contain such errors included some scientific works by leading astronomers such as Johannes Kepler’s Epitome astronomiae Copernicianae, which was on the Index from 1621 to 1835. The various editions of the Index also contained the rules of the Church relating to the reading, selling and pre-emptive censorship of books, including translations of the Bible into the “common tongues”.[4]

Strangely enough, I started with “The Source of Magic” and got through to “Crewel Lye” or so before giving up.  Dunno if I ever read the very first book.

uh, no, Anthony isn’t that great a writer. [...], and even though I was scarfing it down like popcorn,

[Raises an eyebrow]

At that point, scarfing things down like popcorn was precisely what I wanted.

I recently completed a course in children’s literature, where I plumped down firmly on the “Get them reading whatever they want, then sneak in the good stuff” side.  Although I didn’t admit it in any coursework, this had a lot to do with my voracious reading habit being fostered by Enid Blyton back when I was 6 or 7.  I made some rather nasty comments about the Stormbreaker series, and then pointed out that the saving grace was that the young teens I’d talked to - male and female - loved the goddamned things.

I *want* children to turn into lovers of books and reading, even if that means they read a lot of crap.  In a year or two, I’ll probably be trying for a public library position, so it’s not just an academic subject.

I get that, Crissa, but the thing is…who wishes to be stupid or ugly?  Nobody, or at least so small a fraction of the readership that it’s not worth publishing a book teaching them that “lesson.”  The idea is that wishing to be beautiful would of course mean you get stupid along with it, and that wishing to be smart of course means that you get ugly along with it, because you know what’s not hot?  Smart lady people.

I recently completed a course in children’s literature, where I plumped down firmly on the “Get them reading whatever they want, then sneak in the good stuff” side.

PiaToR, I don’t mean to be a smartass here, but…why?  I love reading and I always have, but not everybody does.  And loving it and being good at it means that of course I’m going to be able to get a lot out of it.  But kids who don’t love it, and aren’t good at it—provided they’ve had ample opportunities to try it (and too few children do)—why would they get the benefits I did?  What makes reading so special that just doing it, no matter what you’re reading, is worthwhile?  It’s like…you never hear anybody saying “Well, even if little Timmy is watching Jackass 2, at least he’s watching movies, and maybe down the road we can get him into <i>Citizen Kane<i>.”  What makes reading so special?

PiaToR, it’s possible to eat a thing of popcorn and realize that it’s bad for you. That’s how I felt about Anthony. He wasn’t giving me anything but literary empty calories. I wasn’t being challenged to think in new ways, like, at all. It was just dumb entertainment that I read to pass the time. It’s not like it was the first time I’d picked up a book—I’d been a voracious reader all my life. Books like the Earthsea trilogy, the The Chronicles of Prydain, the original Oz series, classics like The Secret Garden, young adult stuff like The Language of Goldfish and The Outsiders, some trashier stuff, I recall reading The Dollhouse Murders and Wait Till Helen Comes, hell, even the Dragonlance series was a better read than Anthony. The Immortals series was when I realized that there was a rock-bottom.

Oh, God, the immortals series!  That has the one where the super-beautiful woman marries the young guy for some reason that I can’t recall, and they can’t bring themselves to consummate the marriage because they don’t really have feelings for each other, and then she goes to visit him at his…college? (I forget)...and one of the other students assaults her while he’s somewhere else, pouring a bottle of beer or wine over her head, knocking her down, and clearly preparing to rape her, when the young husband arrives in time to save her and beat up the wanna-be rapist, and she is so turned on then that they have to go have sex immediately (as I recall, she tells him to “claim his prize”), because nothing turns the ladies on like being attacked and almost raped, right?

The very first Xanth book features a dumb-nymphomaniac-beauty character who gets a bunch of men accused of rape because she’s too stupid to realize she shouldn’t take off her clothes every time a man talks to her nicely.

Piers Anthony: Proto-MRA

PiaToR, I don’t mean to be a smartass here, but…why?

i, You’re assuming that “loving it and being good at it” is an innate rather than a learned characteristic.  The situation is more nuanced - teachers and exposure to books can and do make a difference.  ESPECIALLY books in the household according to the literature.

ii, Getting kids into the habit of reading for pleasure will affect them for their entire lives.  To give an analogy, think of it like liking exercise.

iii, A person who reads fluently is freer, has greater options, and is more capable of understanding and exploring their world than someone who doesn’t.  The ability of the masses to read has altered our world and our very ideas of self in ways we don’t even notice.  Where the library is, is civilization - the idea of a humane and tolerant community sharing ideas.

iv, On a personal level, have you ever seen a kid or an adult turned on and excited because of a book?  They babble a bit as they try to process it, and it leaves permanent changes in the way they think.  I’ve seen that with stuff I’ve lent out or recommended; I’d like to see that more in my professional life.  It’s a really great feeling - you can’t predict or control what they take from it (nor should you), but the fact that you’re making a real impact to them just tickles the hell out of me.  Foster a love of reading and they’ll keep doing that themselves for their entire lives.

Ultimately, I think homo sapiens libris is a different species from the unlettered, in a very real sense, and that this difference allows them to be greater than they would be otherwise, both individually and as communities.

“What makes reading so special that just doing it, no matter what you’re reading, is worthwhile?”

Among other things, one of the best ways to become a good writer is to read a lot.  You absorb the rules of grammar and basic style and improve your vocabulary.  And a book can be kind of a wash as literature but perfectly well-written and edited, and therefore useful in helping someone become a better writer. 

Plus, reading is something that you actually do get better at with practice.  Many kids stop reading because its frustrating, because they’re slow, but if they kept reading, they would improve.  I’ve seen kids who hated reading, but then they got into dinosaurs or whatever, and read books about dinosaurs, and suddenly reading was not only enjoyable, but easier, and so they went on to read other things, or their homework was easier, etc.

Among other things, one of the best ways to become a good writer is to read a lot.  You absorb the rules of grammar and basic style and improve your vocabulary.  And a book can be kind of a wash as literature but perfectly well-written and edited, and therefore useful in helping someone become a better writer.

This. Being able to express yourself clearly in writing seems likely to become more important because of the web, not less. And ready a lot makes you more likely to be able to express yourself in something better than a tweet with half the words misspelled.

Reading a lot, not ready a lot. I asked for that one, didn’t I?

#60 So happy Linky McTroll Post is behind bars.

I accidentally clicked on one of his links, and for the first time in my computer use, ever, my computer was infected with a virus. It took hours upon hours (no, days) on the phone with tech support for my anti-virus software to get rid of it.

If he spends as much time in jail, as I did alternately banging my head on the desk and shouting at tech support, that may be some justice.

I just recently read my very first Xanth novel.  I saw it at the library and it caught my eye because it was in the “New Fantasy” section.  Well I’m glad it was free because it was a complete disappointment.  It’s like the author is attempting to mimic Terry Pratchett and failing miserably by not having any coherent plot and relying way too much on puns.  Puns are fine, but that was really the only attempt at humor in the whole book.  The whole thing was so freaking cliched predictable that I was nearly bored to tears.  All of the little side adventures seemed pretty much random and unconnected to the main plot, and the whole thing wrapped up too nicely in the end.  I’ll stick to Pratchett from now on; his humor is insightful and the plots actually exist.  I feel like it’s an insult to Pratchett that I ever though Anthony could be anything like him.

Anyway, I’m glad to find out that I’m not the only who thought that book was a waste of time.

  #80—-He’s been stalking a LOT of people and making a lot of serious threats. He showed up at a conference where a bunch of his usual victims were. The guy literally lives in his mother’s basement. Eventually the cops got so many complaints they couldn’t ignore them.  He appears to have some form of illness, but he did take steps to avoid detection, so…..

  #79—-It is a truth universally acknowledged that when typing a complaint of that sort this is always what one does. Everybody does it, has done it, or will do it. I cannot tell you how close I came to typing ‘has does it’, thereby demonstrating it in action.

As for reading,  it’s amazing what you can pick up from even shitty romantic novels. Some romance novelists pride themselves on their arcane research (Cassie Edwards not withstanding), and the better ones are way more fun than history books that leave a lot out.

Something else, too: you have to read horrible crap to really appreciate the good stuff—-and how fine a line there can be between good and bad.

Anthony isn’t that great a writer. I remember reading his Immortals series in high school, and even though I was scarfing it down like popcorn, I was pretty aware “this is shit.”

His writing is pretty much painfully clunky in all but his earliest books. I remember reading him explain that he decides on the plot of a book and its outline in advance, then writes it, keeping to a strict working schedule and making sure he doesn’t spend time idle. While all of this sounds good the result seems to be that he wrote a LOT of books where he thought “This would be an awesome plot!” and then never fleshed out the details or characterization in any way at all, just churned out something resembling a novel and cashed his checks.

There is no way a lot of his dialog should ever have gotten past an editor into a published book. Plus, the further into his writing career you look the more the writing is basically character-voiced screeds (about how it’s totes okay to sleep with underage girls because they want it, they REALLY REALLY DO), interspersed with cameos by special fans or buddies appearing as characters, with no ties to plot context. Sometimes I wondered if he was auctioning off the cameo appearances for extra fundage. Maybe to pay for sex tours in Thailand?

So creative, yeah, for sure. Great at thinking up interesting premises. A good writer? As far as writing and actually turning out a completed novel, pretty much a complete hack.

I read a ton of dumb regressive (or just plain fucked up) stuff as a kid—Orson Scott Card’s non-Ender’s-Game books, Robert Heinlein, Piers Anthony, L. Ron Hubbard—but it’s not like you have to unquestioningly accept everything you read. If that were true I’d be, I dunno, terrible at science and spending all day fucking tentacle monsters or Great Danes.* If for every Heinlein there’s an Andre Norton, for every Anthony there’s a Terry Pratchett, you can grow up figuring out the good from the bad yourself to some extent.

*goddamn you Card and Hubbard, respectively.

Wow, this has been enlightening. I haven’t thought about Piers Anthony since I was about 12 and I read a couple of his books, and then my mother, thinking “science fiction is making him not set things on fire!” got me Robert Heinlein’s “The Number of the Beast”, which is hideously, problematically sexist but a hundred times more interesting. And that was it for old Piers. I vaguely remember his books as just being a bunch of dumb puns thrown together—though I’ve always remembered the conceit that thrown fruit will explode. And now I’ve read through all these comments and learned rather a lot.

How did we get into a discussion of terrible ideologues writing genre fiction without bringing up Terry Goodkind?

The only thing that I would say is different about today’s Tea Party compared to, for example, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority of the 1980s is that the current crop of wingnuts make their ideological predecessors seem like flaming liberals, relatively speaking.

Jon Huntsman committed campaign suicide and ended his own presidential aspirations (not that he ever really had a chance) this weekend when he expressed his belief in those supposedly radically liberal claims that Charles Darwin was right and the earth is getting hotter.

The teaklanners have taken the far right fringe so far off the map that every single Republican president in American history would be considered a liberal RINO in today’s GOP, even George W. Bush. When your position has moved so far to the right that you actually think Dubya’s biggest shortcoming was that he was too much of a liberal, you’ve lost all grasp on reality.

  I haven’t read Anthony in over fifteen years, so I might be misremembering his writing style a bit. But from what I remembered it was good workmanship like prose. It wasn’t great poetry or really moving but not that bad either, especially compared to many other fantasy novelists. Anthony isn’t Pratchet or LeGuin or even Mercedes Lackey, whom I think he paired up with once but he isn’t Rand either.

Terry f’n Goodkind.  My ex had a raging boner for the Sword of Truth series and made all of his friends read it.  His friends included me and a bunch of people who actually love fantasy and by the fourth book we all agreed that my ex needed to STFU.  And whomever was paying Goodkind by the preachy, sanctimonious word needed to stop before the poor man masturbated himself to death.

Terry Goodkind LOLOLOLOLOLOL. Ayup.

How did we get into a discussion of terrible ideologues writing genre fiction without bringing up Terry Goodkind?

Oh my god yes. When I ran out of Robert Jordan’s stuff I read the first Seeker book and was entertained, skimmed the next 2-ish out of morbid curiosity (basically wanted to see how fucked up the sex and torture stuff would get. Spoiler: very) and then was suffering too much eyestrain from all the eye-rolling at his poorly-disguised ranting to continue.

Anthony isn’t Pratchet or LeGuin or even Mercedes Lackey, whom I think he paired up with once but he isn’t Rand either.

I wouldn’t call Lackey the best writer ever either, but she at least can imagine more than one (straight, cis, 50’s-era) sexuality, unlike Anthony. And her female characters were much better than his, though Tamora Pierce might win that fight. I liked Lackey’s solo stuff (Valdemar etc.) but her team-ups always seemed weird to me somehow, even when she coauthored with Andre Norton—which resulted in less fangasming from myself than I’d hoped, personally. Maybe that was me just being a snob about liking her older stuff best, I dunno.

Since we’re on the topic of crappy fantasy/sci-fi, maybe someone can tell me the name of a book I read a long time ago.  I read it right around the same time that I read a Terry Goodkind novel, and I had the two mixed up in my head for years.  (I went through my brother’s donate pile, and ended up reading a bunch of crap because that’s why he was getting rid of them.)  This was a story about some alien overlords sending a group of prisoners of all types of aliens species (including humans) to colonize a barren planet.  They used prisoners so no one would notice if they died.  I remember a cliched “sex” scene between the female human colonizer and one of the overlord soldiers, where it was rape but they didn’t call it that and of course she ended up loving it once he made her do it.  Does this sound familiar to anyone?

  Bagelsan: I believe that Lackey is at least a generation younger than Anthony, which might explain the differences in approaching sex and sexuality. I haven’t read much Lackey except the Free Bard series, where I got pissed off at the first novel because the young woman protagonist was romantically paired with an older man. The young woman with a much older man is my least favorite pairing in fiction. Can’t really explain why but it always pissed me off. Suppose it reeks too much of hierarchy.

  Its been ages since I read much fantasy or science fiction in over two years, my reading tastes kind of shifted away from fantasy and more towards literary fiction.

I think the real reason a lot of people have their shorts in a bunch over “Slaughterhouse Five” is that it is very antiheroic in its depiction of American World War II soldiers.

That’s silly, for two reasons:

—From the moment the last shot was fired in World War II, the men who fought in it have received oceans of love, respect, admiration, gratitude, etc. I’m not saying they don’t deserve it, but if one guy wants to piss in that ocean, well, it’s a mighty big ocean.
—Vonnegut was himself a World War II vet, so as far as I’m concerned, he could write what he wanted.

#94- I think you’re right. Compare to the reviews of the “The Pacific” HBO series on Amazon. There’s an amazing amount of hate because the Marines are portrayed realistically instead of as ten-foot-tall Arthurian paladins of virtue. I’ve read the books by Leckie and Sledge and the show got it pretty much right. But no, to the wingnuts anything short of bootlicking hagiography must be the work of America-hating liberal traitors.

Lee @ 93: That’s a huge pet peeve of mine too, and I never liked her Bard stuff or any of her sort of later urban fantasy—her Herald books and Mage books were just straight-up fantasy with royalty and magic and psychic horses and stuff, which I liked a lot better. And they were written first too, so maybe she was just better at writing for a young female audience at that point (more coming of age stories and teenage protagonists.)

Bagelsan, Tamora Pierce wins ALL the fights.

How did we get into a discussion of terrible ideologues writing genre fiction without bringing up Terry Goodkind?

Because Terry Goodkind doesn’t write fantasy novels, he writes philoso-I can’t even finish typing that but it’s a thing he actually said about his writing.

He also had a tv series made but got pissed and refused to cooperate with the project when they wouldn’t put in his crazy objectivist rantings.  The TV series was like, half decent, though I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want to laugh at Terry Goodkind’s pain (which is to say I would absolutely recommend it).

@bananacat: Anne McCaffrey’s Freedom’s Landing series?

Oh, Orson Scott Card, what happened to you? You wrote two pretty good books - namely, Ender’s Game and its first sequel - and when I read them as a kid I had no clue how fucked up a person you were.

Well, with one exception - I got my first hint of what a blowhard Card is when, having read EG, I went back and read the forward by Card. He made some offhand comment about how, after reading Beatie’s Army of the Potomac, he couldn’t play chess anymore. Because it’s not a realistic depiction of war or something. Since when did anyone think that chess is supposed to be a realistic depiction of war? A comment like that is only a drop in the bucket of everything that’s awful about Card, of course, but it was the first time I read a sentence he wrote and paused, looked askance at the page, and said, “Huh. You’re kind of a tool.” It was the first of many, many times that happened.

But what’s most blatantly stupid about Card is that, in the midst of multiple heavily conservative states, most prominently Texas, threatening to secede from the US again, Card is convinced that liberals will be the ones to start the next US Civil War.

Triplanetary @100: Well, didn’t the Yanks start it the last time? </southernconservaloon>

Since when did anyone think that chess is supposed to be a realistic depiction of war?

Are you trying to tell me that most warfare does not feature murderous queens rampaging around a large square area and maybe facing off against each other in a battle to the death? Because then frankly I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

I try not to read anything by or about authors that isn’t their actual fiction, but sometimes getting that creepy feeling is unavoidable… I was willing to forgive Card the tentacle rape stuff but the book that featured pedophilia all over the place decided me that I would appreciate Ender’s Game (Ender’s Shadow was decent too) and forget he’s written anything else. :p

But kids who don’t love it, and aren’t good at it—provided they’ve had ample opportunities to try it (and too few children do)—why would they get the benefits I did?  What makes reading so special that just doing it, no matter what you’re reading, is worthwhile?  It’s like…you never hear anybody saying “Well, even if little Timmy is watching Jackass 2, at least he’s watching movies, and maybe down the road we can get him into <i>Citizen Kane<i>.”  What makes reading so special?
Comment #72: EG01 on 08/22 at 05:14 PM

Because if you know how to read, you can read contracts, and news articles, and terms of service, and credit card agreements, and instruction manuals, and voting materials, and a thousand thousand other things that make your life easier or yourself more powerful if you actually understand them.

Are you trying to tell me that most warfare does not feature murderous queens rampaging around a large square area and maybe facing off against each other in a battle to the death?

Not since Alexander slaughtered the Sacred band…

Not since Alexander slaughtered the Sacred band…

I lol’d. XD

i, You’re assuming that “loving it and being good at it” is an innate rather than a learned characteristic.  The situation is more nuanced - teachers and exposure to books can and do make a difference.  ESPECIALLY books in the household according to the literature.

Yeah, I’ve read that too, and as I recall, the most interesting part of it was that it was the literal presence of books in the household that mattered.  Not how much the parents read.  Not how much the kids read.  Not how much the parents read to or with the kids.  But the physical presence of the books in the household.  What’s that about?  Are books magical talismans of some kind?  Is the Kindle going to undo the good effects of the physical objects?  I have no idea.

And yes, I do think that, to a certain extent, loving and being good at something is innate rather than learned.  Practice can make a person better than she/he was at something—lifting weights three times a week for some years made me stronger than I had been—but I’m not convinced that it can make you good at something you’re actually bad at—i.e., it never made me strong.  As for loving something…yes, again, I do think that a lot of that is down to personality.  My sister was raised in the same household as me, with the same book-loving parents and a ton of books.  I don’t think she’s picked up a book for pleasure since…high school (since we’re not at all close, I could well be wrong, but she’s certainly not reading up a storm the way my mother and I do).  I have never loved physical activity.  I never will love physical activity.  It’s not a question of finding the right physical activity for me; it’s not an issue of encouraging me or showing me the benefits or having someone who’s good at it help me.  It’s about things I like to do and things I don’t like to do.  I might be unusual, but I don’t find they’ve changed much over the years.  I like reading, and always have.  The other people I know who love reading have always loved reading, too.

As I said, I’m setting aside the issue of kids who have not been given the opportunities to discover that they love reading.  That is indeed an important reason to have libraries and outreach programs about reading and the like.

ii, Getting kids into the habit of reading for pleasure will affect them for their entire lives.  To give an analogy, think of it like liking exercise.

Right.  I understand that’s the idea.  But in my experience, people who hate exercise…hate exercise.  I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of a physical activity I’ve ever enjoyed, and the best I can come up with is skating.  I liked ice skating and I liked roller skating as a kid.  I don’t get the chance to do those much, if at all, any more.  It never, ever, ever translated into enjoying anything else that could even be vaguely construed as exercise.  I dutifully lifted weights for a few years, until I developed some knee issues, but I never once liked it, or thought of it as something I did for pleasure.  People like me, who don’t like exercise, don’t do it for pleasure because it’s not pleasurable for us, not because it’s not a habit.  Why would reading be different?

OK, walking, I do like walking.  But really, I only like it as a means of transportation.  I wouldn’t just…walk on a treadmill or something.  It’s not precisely the activity I enjoy.  It’s the experience of walking through a city or some beautiful countryside, which I guess encompasses the activity, but is more like enjoying reading about…sharks, because you find sharks interesting.  OK, but if you’re reading about sharks only because you like sharks, then it’s not the activity that matters, it’s the sharkiness of it, and presumably you’d like watching National Geographic shark specials just as much (at least, I do).  Whereas I’d rather read a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire than watch a documentary about it, because I like reading itself, and I prefer that mode of conveying information.

i, You’re assuming that “loving it and being good at it” is an innate rather than a learned characteristic.  The situation is more nuanced - teachers and exposure to books can and do make a difference.  ESPECIALLY books in the household according to the literature.

Yeah, I’ve read that study too, and as I recall, the most interesting part of it was that it was the literal presence of books in the household that mattered.  Not how much the parents read.  Not how much the kids read.  Not how much the parents read to or with the kids.  But the physical presence of the books in the household.  What’s that about?  Are books magical talismans of some kind?  Is the Kindle going to undo the good effects of the physical objects?  I have no idea.

And yes, I do think that, to a certain extent, loving and being good at something is innate rather than learned.  Practice can make a person better than she/he was at something—lifting weights three times a week for some years made me stronger than I had been—but I’m not convinced that it can make you good at something you’re actually bad at—i.e., it never made me strong.  As for loving something…yes, again, I do think that a lot of that is down to personality.  My sister was raised in the same household as me, with the same book-loving parents and a ton of books.  I don’t think she’s picked up a book for pleasure since…high school (since we’re not at all close, I could well be wrong, but she’s certainly not reading up a storm the way my mother and I do).  I have never loved physical activity.  I never will love physical activity.  It’s not a question of finding the right physical activity for me; it’s not an issue of encouraging me or showing me the benefits or having someone who’s good at it help me.  It’s about things I like to do and things I don’t like to do.  I might be unusual, but I don’t find they’ve changed much over the years.  I like reading, and always have.  The other people I know who love reading have always loved reading, too.

As I said, I’m setting aside the issue of kids who have not been given the opportunities to discover that they love reading.  That is indeed an important reason to have libraries and outreach programs about reading and the like.

ii, Getting kids into the habit of reading for pleasure will affect them for their entire lives.  To give an analogy, think of it like liking exercise.

Right.  I understand that’s the idea.  But in my experience, people who hate exercise…hate exercise.  I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of a physical activity I’ve ever enjoyed, and the best I can come up with is skating.  I liked ice skating and I liked roller skating as a kid.  I don’t get the chance to do those much, if at all, any more.  It never, ever, ever translated into enjoying anything else that could even be vaguely construed as exercise.  I dutifully lifted weights for a few years, until I developed some knee issues, but I never once liked it, or thought of it as something I did for pleasure.  People like me, who don’t like exercise, don’t do it for pleasure because it’s not pleasurable for us, not because it’s not a habit.  Why would reading be different?

OK, walking, I do like walking.  But really, I only like it as a means of transportation.  I wouldn’t just…walk on a treadmill or something.  It’s not precisely the activity I enjoy.  It’s the experience of walking through a city or some beautiful countryside, which I guess encompasses the activity, but is more like enjoying reading about…sharks, because you find sharks interesting.  OK, but if you’re reading about sharks only because you like sharks, then it’s not the activity that matters, it’s the sharkiness of it, and presumably you’d like watching National Geographic shark specials just as much (at least, I do).  Whereas I’d rather read a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire than watch a documentary about it, because I like reading itself, and I prefer that mode of conveying information.

Damn it, double post, because while I am good at reading, I apparently cannot click on the proper buttons to save my life.

#69 Wasn’t aware of the Index: my, that would have plumped my reading list.

However, my Catholic mother was very big with the Public Library, not a book burner, and I’d been reading adult novels since about 8 or 9.

But I believe I’d read a Legion of Decency pamphlet from a table in the foyer of the Church, plus banned movies were a subject I’d overhear the adults talking about in the same foyer.

I had a public school education, and I’d effectively left the Church by 12, so, fortunately or unfortunately, I’d never come across the Index—until now.

iii, A person who reads fluently is freer, has greater options, and is more capable of understanding and exploring their world than someone who doesn’t.  The ability of the masses to read has altered our world and our very ideas of self in ways we don’t even notice.  Where the library is, is civilization - the idea of a humane and tolerant community sharing ideas.

You think?  I mean, I agree about the library being a signpost of civilization, but the first two sentences there.  I just am not sure I see a lot of evidence for them.  Some people absorb, understand, and create best through written language.  Many people are far more visual thinkers, and use images.  Still other people are kinesthetic thinkers.  And I’m sure there are even more kinds.  What makes my preferred mode of thinking and understanding inherently superior to those of visual or kinesthetic thinkers?  The druids of Gaul, according to Caesar, scorned the idea of literacy and the written word—they felt it destroyed the capacity of the reader/writer to remember and truly internalize words and ideas (of course, we know what Caesar thought about them, and not what they thought about Caesar, precisely because Caesar wrote shit down and they didn’t, but I’m not sure that “think of posterity” is a really worthwhile argument for reading for pleasure—perhaps “invest in better arms and armor and military discipline, and also try to produce a military genius of your own” would be the more pressing concern).

Ideas can be shared and understanding broadened and passed on in many ways—pictorially, through oral folklore and storytelling, through dance, musically.  What makes reading specifically such a better vehicle for exploring and understanding for everybody, not only the people who are particularly given to it?

iv, On a personal level, have you ever seen a kid or an adult turned on and excited because of a book?  They babble a bit as they try to process it, and it leaves permanent changes in the way they think.  I’ve seen that with stuff I’ve lent out or recommended; I’d like to see that more in my professional life.  It’s a really great feeling - you can’t predict or control what they take from it (nor should you), but the fact that you’re making a real impact to them just tickles the hell out of me.  Foster a love of reading and they’ll keep doing that themselves for their entire lives.

Sure, I’ve seen it, I’ve induced it, and I’ve experienced it (as the kid/adult in question).  But isn’t what you say true of all art forms and/or forms of communication?  And not only those—scientists can wax lyrical about the elegance of a particular chemical reaction or equation or biological process.  I have, on occasion, found myself deeply moved by the grace with which Derek Jeter used to throw to second (I appreciate baseball, but only as a spectator).  Why is reading better than any of those?

Ultimately, I think homo sapiens libris is a different species from the unlettered, in a very real sense, and that this difference allows them to be greater than they would be otherwise, both individually and as communities.

Ok, I think this is our basic difference.  I wish reading for pleasure made someone—or a community—greater than they would be otherwise.  But I have not noticed that being better-read is at all correlated with being a greater or better person in any way—it just seems like the better-read are, as Katha Pollitt once said, “the general run of humanity, but with better vocabularies.”  Some people who like to read are boring, or stupid, or petty, or self-centered.  Plenty of communities have achieved great and amazing things without having even had the opportunity to become hyperliterate.  Prior to our century, the ruling classes of Europe and the US were literate and the working classes were not, and it does not seem to me that it made the ruling classes, on the whole, much greater than the people they ruled in any moral or meaningful sense of the term.

I do think being a fluent reader and writer has, historically, given the person in question a certain amount of power, which is why it was forbidden to teach slaves to read in the US.  But I’m not sure that holds true today.  The written word is no longer, I think, the most important mode of communication, and the skilled cinematographer or animator has the power to communicate his/her ideas on a far broader basis than the skilled writer.  It’s not the great readers and writers who wind up in positions of power in today’s world—if it were, English professors, who are almost invariably insatiable readers-for-pleasure since childhood, would make far more money.

Among other things, one of the best ways to become a good writer is to read a lot….And a book can be kind of a wash as literature but perfectly well-written and edited, and therefore useful in helping someone become a better writer.

I agree.  But just as I will never be a great painter no matter how many museums I go to in my leisure time, because I do not have the visual skills or talents or predispositions necessary, I do not think that getting someone with a visual bent to read a lot when he/she would rather be observing the play of light on water will necessarily make him/her a good writer. I could become a passable painter, I suppose, judging from the results of quite strenuous efforts made when I was a teenager…but would that really have been the best use of my time if I hadn’t enjoyed it and had rather been reading books and thus honing my skills at what I was really good at?  Wouldn’t it be the same thing for the visual artist who is reading a lot and not particularly enjoying it?  (I did enjoy the artistic efforts I made and what I learned from them, which is why I made them; I assume that a visual artist might enjoy, at some point, trying her hand at writing.  I’m not in favor of preventing people from trying new things or things they’re not good at.  I hope that would go without saying.)

And honestly, lots of crappy books are crappily written, and often, unfortunately, due to the ongoing destruction of the publishing industry, sloppily edited.  V.C. Andrews, to whom I keep returning because she was the crappy author of choice for pre-teen girls of my generation, was a terrible writer.  Mercedes Lackey, in one of her books, referred to a character’s heart “literally” being in her mouth (I am glad to say that it was not).  I’ve never read the Twilight series, but reliable friends who have tell me that they cannot get through ten pages at a time without cracking up hysterically at the wretchedness of the prose.

Because if you know how to read, you can read contracts, and news articles, and terms of service, and credit card agreements, and instruction manuals, and voting materials, and a thousand thousand other things that make your life easier or yourself more powerful if you actually understand them.

Right.  But the issue isn’t whether learning to read at all is a worthwhile thing to do.  Literacy is indeed an essential skill in the first world.  The issue is why reading for pleasure is considered so much more worth encouraging than any other leisure-time activity.  And I’ve got to tell you, I have been reading voraciously, as they say, for well over three decades now, and I can categorically say that all that experience has been absolutely no help whatsoever when it comes to reading contracts, terms of service, and credit card agreements.  When it comes to all three of those things, my eyes glaze over after about three paragraphs, if that many, and all the pleasure reading I have ever done, of everything from Piers Anthony to The Odyssey to histories of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to Jaws (now there’s a crappy book—the movie is so much better) is of no avail.

I want to emphasize that I don’t think that reading for pleasure is a worthless activity.  I think it’s extraordinarily worthwhile for those of us who enjoy it and want to do it, just as playing baseball is for athletic kids, and watching films is for visually oriented kids, and listening to music is for musically oriented kids.  I just don’t understand why we conceive of the activity of reading as having inherent value for those who, having been given ample opportunity to try it, would rather be doing something else.  And I don’t understand why the response to something like Captain Underpants is “At least they’re reading” when we don’t have that response to kids watching lousy television, or lousy movies, or playing lousy video games, or doing anything else of poor quality.  I like reading crap as much as the next person, but it’s not a particularly ennobling activity.

Ok, I think this is our basic difference.  I wish reading for pleasure made someone—or a community—greater than they would be otherwise.  But I have not noticed that being better-read is at all correlated with being a greater or better person in any way—it just seems like the better-read are, as Katha Pollitt once said, “the general run of humanity, but with better vocabularies.”

Well, I said “allows them to be great”.

a, Who exactly would you call great?  Can you name, say, six people you’d admire for their achievements?
b, How many of those people are illiterate or non-readers?

Individuals?  No, I can’t name many non-pleasure-reading individuals who I’d consider to be great off the top of my head (Harriet Tubman, who I believe was illiterate, being the one exception; and I could be mistaken about her illiteracy, as it’s been many, many years since I’ve read a biography of her.  My flawed and unreliable memory also suggests to me that Fannie Lou Hamer never had the opportunity to become a reader-for-pleasure, but again, I’m more than willing to be corrected by someone with a more recent acquaintance with the facts.).

But I can cite participants—not just participants, but the active, powering force—in movements or events whose bravery and activity would qualify them for greatness.  For instance, the workers in the major labor battles of the nineteenth century—I’m thinking of the 1888 matchworkers’ strike in London and the dockworkers’ strike of the following year, which kicked off the era of New Unionism in the UK.  Given the hours they’d been putting in working and the lack of educational opportunities, I’m not convinced that more than a small proportion of those men and women would have been big readers for pleasure, and I’d certainly say that their actions qualified them for greatness in my book. 

And, as always, correlation is not causation—certainly having received a good education in an era (pre-, say, mid-20th-century) when reading was the major way of transmitting knowledge, the kind of education that was available mostly to those who also had other material advantages of the kind that would position them to achieve greatness, would cause being a reader and being great to coincide in individuals more often than not…but that’s not due to reading’s inherent worthiness.

I also am now wondering if Sojourner Truth was literate or not, because the Wikipedia article on her refers to her “dictating” her memoirs.

Further update: Sojourner Truth was illiterate, as this quotation from the website of the Sojourner Truth Library attached to SUNY-New Paltz tells us:

“It may seem ironic that a library is named for a woman who could not read or write….She often said ‘I can’t read books, but I can read the people.’”

Another four illiterate “greats”: Homer. Genghis Khan. The Beowulf poet. Charlemagne (he learnt to read later in life).

But otherwise with EG01 - correlation is not causation. In a society in which literacy is tied up with power, people will be literate because they already have advantages. In a non-literate society, from which my four examples above come, the same does not apply.

Not sure I have anything to add, but thank all of y’all for a wonderful, fun-to-read comment thread. It’s been the most fun I’ve had this week. 

Okay, I have one thing to add—this page is full of the kind of stuff that’ll have you laughing at Terry Goodkind all day long.

#94- I think you’re right. Compare to the reviews of the “The Pacific” HBO series on Amazon. There’s an amazing amount of hate because the Marines are portrayed realistically instead of as ten-foot-tall Arthurian paladins of virtue. I’ve read the books by Leckie and Sledge and the show got it pretty much right. But no, to the wingnuts anything short of bootlicking hagiography must be the work of America-hating liberal traitors.

With “Slaughterhouse Five” it isn’t just that kind of stuff. It’s portraying the Good War as a so monstrous it’s absurd industrial slaughter. Which is pretty close to the truth, but World War II in memory is supposed to be this hard, but redemptive struggle of the world against evil. “Saving Private Ryan” and its “earn this, Matt Damon, durrr” etc. You don’t really get that from the Vonnegut’s eye view of World War II, you as a reader have to add all that context about how the Nazis started the war and were out slaughter and conquer until they were stopped.

Speaking as an artist with literary pretensions—-can’t say I’m good at writing, though I’ve dabbled in fiction, as the member of a sf&f apa, for not quite two decades, and feel like I’m finally starting to get the hang of it—-I would say that the big advantage of being able to read well is the, um, low startup costs.  This is even more true for writing, and I do agree one of the best ways to become a good writer is to read—-lots. 

Frankly, it’s just plain hella faster to convey one’s ideas in words.  Quicker, too, I’d say, in essays (who-hoo, blogs) than fiction:  it was Isaac Asimov who claimed it was much easier to write nonfiction than fiction, and, again, having done both, I’d agree with that assessment as well.  It’s not that paintings or dance or comics, let alone film, are not great ways to get your point across.  I mean, I know a woman who does political protests against racism with bead work (Joyce Scott) but on the hole (heh) it’s not an efficient medium for conveying complex political arguments.

Visual art, even music, takes far more resources.  I can write novels faster than I can make the equivalent art.  Writing takes only pencil and paper, or a cheap laptop.  Art on the other hand, even if it’s drawing with pencil and paper (consider the fabulous Duncan the Wonder Dog, as an example) still needs a scanner/camera, image editing software, not to mention far more bandwidth, to share.  Text?  You can write your novels on your phone (and people in Japan have done just that.) This would explain the popularity of protest songs—-because while music notation was harder to reproduce than plain text, still, much easier than photos, let alone 4-color.

Otoh, to draw on the computer, I need (realistically) a much more powerful computer, more storage, a graphics tablet, not to mention mastery of graphics programs, on top what I already know about color, composition, etc:  indeed, it’s only because graphics programs have come so far that I’m willing to consider doing comics:  finally, tools to be able to create them at the level I’d like, in a reasonable period of time, which just wasn’t possible, before the advent of cheap graphics editing.

I’d love for our culture to `require’ people to acquire visual language (i.e. in a formal way) the way we’re (supposed) to do language; but until that time comes, I think the barriers to entry, both for reading and writing, are simply lower, in a whole host of ways, than other media.  It’s also, as other commenters have pointed out, a very robust way to transmit ideas, and has a proven history of being so, for thousands of years.

Of course, the cool thing is, technology is, in fact, lowering those other costs, hence the explosion of manga, film, video, etc.  Which I think is fabulous.  But it’s gonna be awhile, and I think in the meantime, encouraging kids to `read dreck’, a la Peter Dickinson is a good strategy.

p.s. coincidentally, spawn sent me this link deconstructing Piers Anthony: and needless to say, yes, you will need the brain bleach if you click.  That said, though I thought the misogyny was nasty, one thing I did appreciate about Chameleon was that there was a cost to the woman’s magic:  she could have one thing or the other (and her talents shifted with the phase of the moon, or something which I thought cool).  Nasty as it was, it did zero on the societal pressure for geek girls:  do you want to be pretty, or smart?  Personally, there’s probably a (dark) novel (or really, that would work well as a comic) to be found in that choice.

And yes, I do think that, to a certain extent, loving and being good at something is innate rather than learned.

That is where you are wrong. I really don’t have much to add beyond that. If you can’t get over this misguided belief of yours, then the rest of what people are talking about here isn’t going to make much sense.

EG @ 72 & @110:
Think of reading as learning a non-native language.  When you first learn it, it is laborous and you miss most nuance.  The funner the excercises are, the more most students will practice them.  Until one gains fluency (in language or reading), one can’t get most of the good stuff.  You probably don’t get this because reading was easy for you.  It was for me, too, despite mild dyslexia.  It was not, at all, however, for my sister and youngest brother nor for my son.  I have been aware of the differences in how people read, what gets them to do so, and seen the tipping point where suddenly reading is whole new worlds rather than just a source for data.
Even if not, being able to read fluently does give power since we still do all outr contracting in writing and if you can’t read well have to either trust the writing is straightforward (contracts, good luck with that) or the person explaining it to you is both well informed and honest.  Reading for pleasure makes one a more fluent reader and so less vulnerable to being conned legally.
Bitter scribe @ 94: not entirely on i.
thecynicalromantic@ 97: yes on Pierce, though some of Moon’s SciFi female characters are pretty kcik ass.

@bananacat: Anne McCaffrey’s Freedom’s Landing series?

Yes, that’s it!  TVtropes claims it was a fleshed-out full novel based on a softcore porn short story, but that doesn’t really make it better when rape is considered standard softcore porn and not some sub-category.  I wonder if this is what romance novels are like.

Getting kids into the habit of reading for pleasure will affect them for their entire lives.  To give an analogy, think of it like liking exercise.

Would this include all kinds of reading, or just the “right” kind?  What if someone spent hours online reading TVtropes or Wikipedia?  You could argue that since things don’t go through a publication process the grammar won’t be as good, but because anyone can edit them, the grammar is as good as most books.  I just find it interesting that a lot of people I know whine that kids need to get off the computer and read more.  I’m probably learning as much from this comment thread as I will when I read a novel later.

Also, I’m another one who has been in the habit of exercising while hating every minute of it.

I can’t imagine not reading for pleasure…but then, I can’t imagine watching sports for pleasure. I made sure my kids had ample opportunity for the former, and for the latter they were on their own.

Surprise, they both read for pleasure and neither watches sports unless they’re dragged into it by a friend.

That is where you are wrong. I really don’t have much to add beyond that. If you can’t get over this misguided belief of yours, then the rest of what people are talking about here isn’t going to make much sense.

Do you have any evidence, or even personal experience supporting that assertion, or am I just supposed to recognize the innate superiority of your position and concede it?

think the barriers to entry, both for reading and writing, are simply lower, in a whole host of ways, than other media.  It’s also, as other commenters have pointed out, a very robust way to transmit ideas, and has a proven history of being so, for thousands of years.

Yes, that makes sense.  On the other hand, oral tradition is also a robust way to transmit ideas and has a proven history of being so.  In an age in which it’s much, much easier to shoot a movie than it ever has been before (don’t cell phones these days often have video capacity? not mine, because I’ve had the same cell phone for God knows how long, but others?), is reading and writing likely to retain primacy?  You yourself mention protest songs, which have served quite well to transmit ideas among people, you really don’t need to know musical notation to learn to sing them.  You also don’t need anything more to write musical notation than you do to write prose or poetry—pen and paper will do the trick. 

indeed, it’s only because graphics programs have come so far that I’m willing to consider doing comics:  finally, tools to be able to create them at the level I’d like, in a reasonable period of time, which just wasn’t possible, before the advent of cheap graphics editing.

Ok, but one could say the same about writing—prior to the advent of the internet, if you wanted anybody to read your writing, you either had to break into the publishing industry, for which you needed a high level of skill, or resign yourself to mimeographing or xeroxing zines and stapling them and suchlike, and then finding some way to distribute them—very onerous and time-consuming.  The computer and internet have done the same thing for writing that graphics programs have done for comics.

Even if not, being able to read fluently does give power since we still do all outr contracting in writing and if you can’t read well have to either trust the writing is straightforward (contracts, good luck with that) or the person explaining it to you is both well informed and honest.

But, again, when it comes to contracts and credit card agreements and the like…my experience is that reading extensively and fluently does not help a person, or at least, this person, get through them, because they are not written in anything resembling the kind of prose that one reads for pleasure.  Hell, I can get through middle English better than I can get through most of those contracts.  I do find that leases tend to be written in much more straightforward language, though.

It was not, at all, however, for my sister and youngest brother nor for my son.  I have…seen the tipping point where suddenly reading is whole new worlds rather than just a source for data.

That is interesting, and good to know.  I’ve never reached that point in any foreign language, alas, in part due to circumstances beyond my control, and in part due to some poor choices on my part.

It’s just that I’ve heard very similar arguments made about the value of sports, always by people who were athletic enough and good enough at sports to make it a primary part of their lives: professional athletes, extremely talented amateurs (Olympic athletes), gym teachers (god help me), that kind of thing.  Sports teaches you teamwork, they say, and good sportsmanship, and fairness, and respect for others, and opens up relationships with people with whom you’d never otherwise have met, etc.  And every time, for years and years, I’d think “That’s a bunch of bullshit right there.  They never did any such thing for me; they were just a source of misery and unpleasantness and boredom.”  And then, when I got a bit older, I realized that it was not a bunch of bullshit.  Sports did do those things for them, because they were good at and enjoyed sports.  It just didn’t do those things for me, or the other people I know who weren’t and didn’t.  Around that same time, I noticed that the people who waxed eloquent about the importance of reading as a leisure activity, including me, were almost invariably the people who were literary enough and good enough at reading to make it a primary part of our lives: writers, English professors, English teachers, librarians, editors, etc.  Which made me think, gee, I wonder if the same holds for those who feel about reading the way I feel about participating in sports.  And I’m still not convinced it doesn’t.  Woodland sunflower, you’re the first non-literary person I’ve met (at least, who cops to being primarily a visual artist rather than a writer/reader professional), who has made this argument.  I think I’d find it a lot more convincing coming from somebody who said “Hey, I hated reading until I was, I don’t know, 10 or 11, and then I read Captain Underpants, which I now realize is kind of crappy, but I loved it, and within a few years I was reading, I don’t know, Jane Austen, say, and loving it, and now, even though I’ve decided to pursue a career in banking or as a neuroscientist or something, reading is a major, wonderful part of my life that opens up worlds to me.”

Yes, that’s it!  TVtropes claims it was a fleshed-out full novel based on a softcore porn short story, but that doesn’t really make it better when rape is considered standard softcore porn and not some sub-category.  I wonder if this is what romance novels are like.

(emphasis mine)

Erm, meaning what, exactly? That romance novels are all about rape? Because they are not. From what I understand, a few decades ago, there was a “falling in love with her rapist” trend. But that’s pretty much been excised from the mainstream genre. It’s not even acceptable in the spicier, erotic stuff. Read the guidelines for any romance or erotica publisher. There’s almost always a prohibition against rape or any forced sexual activity.

Or maybe you mean that romance novels are sex scenes with some narrative added as meaningless padding. The genre may have its flaws, but as a romance writer, I can assure you that my stories have their genesis in something other than sex. (Current WIP is a futuristic steampunk inspired by a National Geographic article on the growing problem of water shortages.)

I know. It’s fun to pick on romance. Shit, I’ve done it. But the genre isn’t any more flawed than any other commercial genre—mystery, thriller, SF/F/H, etc. Worse yet, the need to deride romance often seems to come from the idea that it’s for women, and therefore inferior.

Do you have any evidence, or even personal experience supporting that assertion, or am I just supposed to recognize the innate superiority of your position and concede it?

I’m not going to get down into the weeds about it, but this is just a mindset/philosophical belief of yours that is going to create a big divide between you and the rest of us on this topic. Humans are enormously malleable, and there’s very little they can’t train themselves to do simply with a large amount of hard word. “Innate” attributes count for hardly anything, but that sort of belief system allows people to dismiss stuff or train themselves in certain things because “it’s too hard.” I think in part Americans believe this because there is such a large diversity of opportunities and paths to take professionally that one is never forced to learn to do somethig well (like reading) unless you and your parents find it just comes “easy” to you. I think you’re a captive of this kind of belief system .

Erm, meaning what, exactly? That romance novels are all about rape?

Yes, I realize that romance novels are the easy target, but I really didn’t intend to come across as a snob against them.

I was wondering if it’s common for romance novels to describe rape in a way that makes it seem like not rape, or that it’s actually a good thing.  Is it a common trope to describe women who realize that they love a man only after he forces her to see it?

In this case I really was just asking, but I can see how it would come across as harsher in the context of how romance novels are viewed by most people.

Humans are enormously malleable, and there’s very little they can’t train themselves to do simply with a large amount of hard word. “Innate” attributes count for hardly anything

Look, if you’re not going to get down in the weeds and argue with me, you really can’t expect me to take your assertions seriously.

What I will point out is that I have some familiarity (not an immense amount, but some) with current thinking among psychologists who study personality development and differences, and what I’ve read and heard from the scientists studying it whom I know is that it seems like personality is far more genetically related than we ever suspected.  I also think you’re oversimplifying my position and deliberately overlooking the qualifier I used.  I said that, to a certain extent, I do believe that what one loves and is good at is innate.  I did not dismiss hard work and training entirely, as you are doing with innate character.

Now, the science could change.  It has in the past.  But I’m not going to adopt a philosophical belief that runs counter to the evidence collected by those who study such stuff unless the studies have some obvious biases. 

Also, we’re not arguing about whether or not it’s possible to train oneself to do something one dislikes or is not good at with a lot of hard work.  Obviously, it is, as every single human being has experienced (there is nobody, but nobody, who has not had to learn how to do something they suck at, whether it’s tying your own shoes, or balancing your checkbook back in the days when that was considered something responsible adults did, or whatever).  Obviously, learning to read is an important life skill.  The issue is whether or not reading for pleasure, in one’s leisure time, is inherently more worthwhile than any other leisure activity because the act of reading itself confers benefits, or whether or not those benefits are going to be readily accessible only to people who already want to read in their leisure time, and whether or not you can train somebody to like and enjoy something they dislike or are not good at.  I learned how to balance my checkbook.  I was reasonably competent at it.  And I hated every minute of it, and at a certain point, even before the dawn of the internet, I decided the bank was always right, and if they were wrong in a sum significant to me, I would notice it even without balancing the checkbook, and the hell with it.  And I was much happier.

I can’t imagine not reading for pleasure…but then, I can’t imagine watching sports for pleasure. I made sure my kids had ample opportunity for the former, and for the latter they were on their own.

Surprise, they both read for pleasure and neither watches sports unless they’re dragged into it by a friend.

Ok, but you realize that your example could go both ways, right?  That one could argue that you’re wired to enjoy reading but not to enjoy watching sports, and so you passed this trait on to your children (I am assuming that your kids are genetically related to you, and if they are not, I apologize for the assumption), or that you taught your kids to enjoy reading but not watching sports, or that it is some complex interaction of both, which is what I suspect to be true.

And you know, I’ll see your anecdote with my own anecdote about me and my sister.

I was wondering if it’s common for romance novels to describe rape in a way that makes it seem like not rape, or that it’s actually a good thing.

According to a friend of mine who reads a lot of romance, it is—the last time she mentioned it, it was about a hero was kind of trying to extort sex from the heroine, and she’s kind of turned on by him, but won’t admit it, and then somebody else threatens to rape her, and she turns to him for protection, and then she falls in love with the skeezebucket who was trying to extort sex from her in the beginning.  And yuck.

Another anecdote: that same friend was writing up an article on the effects of the Twilight series, and for research purposes (she swears), she went to the first midnight screening in the city of the first Twilight movie and interviewed several of the young woman on line.  She asked them whether they thought they’d continue reading other books now that the Twilight series was over, since they had enjoyed the Twilight series so much.  None of them seemed particularly enthused, and one young woman told her that she would never bother to read another book, because nothing else could possibly be as good as the Twilight series.  And then my friend began banging her own head against a brick wall in despair.  Not really, but she considered it.

I wouldn’t call Lackey the best writer ever either, but she at least can imagine more than one (straight, cis, 50’s-era) sexuality, unlike Anthony. And her female characters were much better than his, though Tamora Pierce might win that fight.

Peirce and Lackey write in separate genres. Peirce is, in my over-educated opinion, the better writer but she writes youth literature not adult. She scales down the vocabulary, syntax, and plot complexity for the age group she’s writing toward and ages the next book/series along with that audience. Lackey writes adult genre fiction which tends to be pretty simple. Teens will often read that level of adult fic when they age out of children’s books (YA actually exists to fill that gap and the adults that panic over dark themes in supposedly kid’s books are forgetting teens used to read Steven King and V.C. Andrews. when they got tired of Sweet Valley High.)

I’d also say Peirce writes better female characters because she’s worked to expand the female warrior trope and has gotten more and more progressive over the years. Lackey has been getting more conservative which is really heartbreaking. For a lot of kids Lackey was one of the first positive examples of queer folk and it’s sad to see her retreating away from that.

You also don’t need anything more to write musical notation than you do to write prose or poetry—pen and paper will do the trick.

Yes, if you don’t count needing a ruler if it’s blank paper, or the increased cost of pre-printed music paper.

Did you know that Schubert used blank paper to write his compositions on because of his poverty?

You yourself mention protest songs, which have served quite well to transmit ideas among people, you really don’t need to know musical notation to learn to sing them.

If you want to get above the level of a barbershop quartet or a campfire sing-along, it becomes more helpful, or if you’re Paul McCartney, who literally can’t read or write in conventional musical notation, you hire someone to turn your ideas into a written form that can be passed down easily.

Sometimes people modify existing literacy as well.  My great-grandmother used to read and sing in ‘shape-note’ music at her church and at home, and I have several books from the 1st half of the last century that are printed in this unique American invention:

Shape notes are a music notation designed to facilitate congregational and community singing.(Unless they’re folk songs, of course. Ed) The notation, introduced in 1801, became a popular teaching device in American singing schools. Shapes were added to the note heads in written music to help singers find pitches within major and minor scales without the use of more complex information found in key signatures on the staff.

Shape notes of various kinds have been used for over two centuries in a variety of music traditions, mostly sacred but also secular, originating in New England, practiced primarily in the Southern region of the United States for many years, and now experiencing a renaissance in other locations as well.

Right.  But the issue isn’t whether learning to read at all is a worthwhile thing to do.  Literacy is indeed an essential skill in the first world.  The issue is why reading for pleasure is considered so much more worth encouraging than any other leisure-time activity.  And I’ve got to tell you, I have been reading voraciously, as they say, for well over three decades now, and I can categorically say that all that experience has been absolutely no help whatsoever when it comes to reading contracts, terms of service, and credit card agreements. 
Comment #111: EG01 on 08/23 at 03:40 AM

I am not arguing from the point of view of “reading is much superior to all other forms of communication and people who read are super special.”  I do not privilege reading over watching TV as a medium.

I am arguing from the point of view that reading is necessary to make sense of a lot of the information available to us.  Some of it is only available in written form, or you only get it in depth in written form.

The reason to encourage reading for pleasure among those who don’t know how to read yet is so they will learn to read.  Supposedly, you have to do something for 10,000 hours to be good at it.  You are severely handicapped in this society if you can’t read.

You say you can’t read contracts.  But you are way more prepared to understand a contract or read an ad critically or anything written than someone who doesn’t read much and so has to sound out or guess the words they’re reading.  If you think it’s bad for you reading a contract, imagine reading it in another language. 

I think you’re focusing too much on the contracts bit.  What about written instructions?  Signs?

Bananacat, not sure if someone’s already answered you, but that sounds like the first of the Freedom series by Anne McCaffrey. They didn’t get any LESS terrible after that, let me tell you.

I’m focusing on contracts because that’s what you and helen w. h. brought up—I was quoting you in that paragraph when I listed “contracts, terms of service, and credit card agreements.”

I think you’re focusing too much on the contracts bit.  What about written instructions?  Signs?

I don’t see many necessary signs in my daily life that I need 10,000 hours of reading to understand.  I also see fewer and fewer written instructions—most instructions for things I come across are as visual as possible, which is a real pain to me, as I can spend hours staring at an Ikea image wondering what the hell it’s trying to tell me.  Well, not literally, because after twenty minutes or so, I get bored and frustrated and call a friend who’s better at that stuff than I am.

You say you can’t read contracts.  But you are way more prepared to understand a contract or read an ad critically or anything written than someone who doesn’t read much and so has to sound out or guess the words they’re reading.

Sure, but since I tend to give up reading credit card agreements in disgust on the first page, I’m not sure I’m significantly enough better at it to make a real difference in how I relate to credit cards, for example.  Those agreements are made off-puttingly difficult on purpose, in my opinion, so that nobody reads them and credit card companies can, on page 5, put in a clause about how you agree to the sacrifice of your first born by crucifixion if you miss too many payments.

And when it comes to ads, I think the majority of people would be much better off being taught how to scrutinize commercials.

The reason to encourage reading for pleasure among those who don’t know how to read yet is so they will learn to read.

But again, I’m not arguing about whether or not it’s worthwhile to learn to read.  It is.  I’m arguing about whether or not it’s important to develop “life-long readers,” as the educational professionals I know say.

Lee, i’m not a huge fan of young woman/older man pairings myself, though i was okay with the one in the first Free Bards novel. Largely because it’s NOT a “standard thing” for Lackey.

Tamora Pierce, on the other hand—i like her stuff pretty well, but i get TIRED of her being brought up all the time as “best YA ever for young women!” Because, argh, she KEEPS having these pairings of young women with MUCH OLDER men. (Alanna and George, Daine and Numair, there’s at least one or two others i’m forgetting.) And ALL her female characters end up wanting to have kids. It’s like Vitally Important to EVERY WOMAN in Pierce’s Tortall stuff. (In fairness, the Circle stuff is much better on that front, and even has gay characters.)

Plus Pierce has a lot of really problematic racial stuff—especially the books about Alanna’s daughter, which are completely and totally the What These People Need Is A Honky story.

Also, a plug for books i think really ARE the best YA ever for young women: Kristin Cashore’s books Graceling and Fire. FANTASTIC stuff. (Read Graceling first; it happens later chronologically, but there’s spoilers for it in Fire that you’d be better off not getting.)

I am arguing from the point of view that reading is necessary to make sense of a lot of the information available to us.  Some of it is only available in written form, or you only get it in depth in written form.

Yes, that last sentence makes a lot of sense to me.  I suspect, though, that it’s going to become less and less true as time goes on.

@ Adrienne: George is 5-7 years older than Alanna which seems kind of small considering they didn’t hook up until she was well into her twenties. Aly’s guy is about her age, Keladry and Beka are unattached. I’m more bothered by her fondness for student/mentor pairings than the actual ages involved but that’s something she’s walked away from in later books.
Alanna also doesn’t want kids for a long time, Keladry maybe wants children, Daine and Aly never mention it but have children later, and neither does Beka Cooper though we assume she must of because she an ancestress of George. I’m not that upset that most women in a medieval fantasy world have kids, most women and our world have kids.  The thing that’s cool about Peirce is she puts a puts a huge emphasis on birth control and having children when you’re ready for them.

And did you read Trickster’s series or just pull that off a review somewhere? The actual story is that what these people need are certain skills that once passed on leave their teacher somewhat irrelevant. Aly furthers the cause; she doesn’t save the day. I still wish Peirce hadn’t gone there because the white savior trope is really just that toxic; you can’t fix it even if you try.

If a person does not read for pleasure, reading never becomes fluent. 
Blunt enough for you to stop arguing that the rest of us are saying something that we aren’t necessarily?

Scrumby,

I always got the impression George was more like 10-12 years older than Alanna, fwiw. Aly’s partner is in fact the opposite of the trope—he’s THREE YEARS OLD (though in fairness that’s crow-years, his human form is late-adolescent). Mentor/student is definitely also kind of an icky part of that issue for me, though, you’re right. Numair/Daine REALLY bothers me, still. Which is a pity, i like the books but keep having to ignore the romance subplot when i reread them.

I do grant that Pierce puts a lot of emphasis on birth control. The “everyone has baybeez” thing still squicks me some. And both Aly and her partner mention “nestlings” and explicitly want them, at least a couple times in the second Trickster book.

And yeah, i’ve read the Trickster series. Twice, once about six weeks ago. AndI know that in theory they just needed “certain skills” and the teacher is irrelevant—but the fact remains that Aly is around for the WHOLE THING, she’s intimately involved with these people’s lives (and some of them call her “boss”), the rebellion doesn’t actually kick off until she more or less says “go”, and in general, What These People Need Is A Honky, at least it seemed that way to me.

Mind you, i LIKE a lot of Pierce’s stuff. It’s fluffy comfort reading for me, and of a piece with much of my other somewhat-problematic fluffy comfort reading. But i hate, hate, HATE the fact that it gets touted as “bestest, most empowering wondrous YA literature for girls”, because in so many ways, it is SO NOT. Especially if those girls are gay (in Tortall; girls in the Circle stuff get to be gay), of color, and/or not at all interested in kids ever, because they don’t get anything to do.

(In fairness, re: the books i mentioned above as awesome by Kristin Cashore—there’s no people of color in Cashore’s universe (that we’ve seen yet, at least). But they’re just not THERE, as opposed to Tortall, where the whole world is populated by nations of random non-white people whose job is to be Reduced to Tropes. While neither is great, i think i’d prefer “no representation” to “noble savages”. )

If a person does not read for pleasure, reading never becomes fluent.

Ok, I just have to disagree with this.  I remember when I was about 7 years old, a year after I learned to read, finding it strange that I couldn’t not read thing anymore because it became so instinctive.  I couldn’t glance at a sign without just naturally reading it.

Also, people can manage anything that they do regularly.  People who read street signs every day will become good at it, even if they don’t read for pleasure.

People who follow internet boards will become fluent at reading them even if they don’t read for pleasure (unless you consider websurfing reading for pleasure).

  Adrienne, I actually liked most of the first Free Bard novel or at least most of it despite the pairing. It tended to have some rather good descriptions of the culture and life of the world so I felt that one really got a sense of what living in the setting was like. The subsequent novels were a bit more wasted potential.

  The young woman/older man is something that annoys me for various reasons. Most of the relationships seem to end up inherently unequal and at least semi-patriarchal with the woman has happy house-wife/help mate type even if she continues with her vocation be it bard or mage or warrior. It also reeks of middle-aged heteorsexual man sex fantasy even if written by a woman and middle-aged heterosexual man sex fantasy is a real big literary turn off. Its what pissed me off the most about Steig Larson’s triology.

@Adrienne. I’m sorry, I think I came off a little more aggressive in my response to the Tricker’s series thing then I meant too. The quipy way you brought it up kind of reminded me of the response that a lot of people who haven’t read the book picked up and passed around resulting in the sort of nasty internet arguments such things always devolve into. For me it all goes back to that toxic trope thing I mentioned above. Trickster’s Queen is a good example of what privileged folk should do in those situations: offer what knowledge and resources they can to support the movement while leaving the power in the hands of the people who are most affected. But even if she’s doing the right thing (and getting called out when she crosses the line) the story still centers around outsider Aly; it’s not a setup you can ever win.
      Which leads me into one of the worst/best things about Pierce. She created Tortal in ‘83 and made it a pretty bland fantasy realm focusing on a majority white population with enemy nations/peoples of different races. And she’s been digging herself out of that hole ever since. When she created her second world in the late 90’s Circle of Magic, it was remarkably diverse to begin with which made it a lot easier to keep the progressive momentum. That’s why I usually steer new people towards Protector of the Small; the protagonists is a very down to earth person with a strong social justice streak who seriously addresses the realities of poverty, class, warfare, immigration, sex, and sexuality in her country. Pierce stripped a lot of the medieval glamor off Tortal in that series and made it into more of a place people live, not just heroes and villains.
      And just out of curiosity, if you’re even still checking this thread, what’s your favorite YA book written before ‘95? Judy Blume doesn’t count.

People who follow internet boards will become fluent at reading them even if they don’t read for pleasure (unless you consider websurfing reading for pleasure).

Let’s see - is there someone standing over you, bananacat, with a gun pressed into your ear screaming “Read that Pandagon, mother f*cker, or I’m gonna pull the trigger!!!”?

(And if so, Amanda’s new marketing scheme has been more successful than she imagined)

EG01—We had books in the home and I read aloud to my kids. In addition, I read (then and now) 2-5 books a week. We took frequent trips to the library in which I was excited, and therefore, they were too. We never watched sports unless it was one of the occasional times one of us was participating in a sport. Sports was never on our TV, and we never talked about it.

I had no exposure to sports as a kid and find watching sports boring (I’ll play, though).

I don’t think love of reading is innate, nor do I think the love of sports is innate. Some people may be attracted to one or the other based on their personalities or abilities, but most people catch the excitement from their parents or peers.

YA book written before ‘95? I liked Lloyd Alexander and Andre Norton, plus the Bunnicula books (which are just hilarious).

People who follow internet boards will become fluent at reading them even if they don’t read for pleasure (unless you consider websurfing reading for pleasure).
Let’s see - is there someone standing over you, bananacat, with a gun pressed into your ear screaming “Read that Pandagon, mother f*cker, or I’m gonna pull the trigger!!!”?

Well if you’re going to redefine, you know, all reading as pleasure reading that way, then I’m not even sure why we’re having this discussion.

(At least 80% of my web reading is work-related, but my boss doesn’t pack heat, so where does that fall?)

Scrumby,

Fair enough—but yeah. I have read, to the best of my knowledge, all of Pierce’s novel length works. And i agree with you—i think Kel’s stuff is in fact my favorite of them, because of her strong social-justice streak and the sense we get that she actually NOTICES shit. (Like the thing with her maid. That was awesome. Still sort of “nobility should protect the lesser classes instead of exploiting them”, but awesome nonetheless.) And i DO think she’s gotten a lot better over the years, as you say. Aly’s stuff just really rubbed me the wrong way both times, especially when i read it a few weeks back.

Before ‘95? Hm. Have to think about that one for a bit. It’s funny, mostly i didn’t read any YA to speak of until i was a grownup. I was reading “adult” SF/fantasy from the time i was 8 or 9, and mostly didn’t bother with any of the YA stuff.   I’ll think on’t and get back to you.

Adrienne, I gotcha. I probably should have made the condition -no Judy Blume and nothing British- since when I made my own list, most of the authors came from that side of the pond.  I love that the YA fanbase has expanded with all this newer and better lit but my curmudgeony old-timer self still wants to shake it’s cane at them sometimes. I don’t think the new fans realize how bad the genre was before Harry Potter. There’s a reason you skipped ahead to adult lit and it’s the same one we all had: most older kids/teen books were absolute dreck. Abstinent romances, white washed historical fiction, kid does drugs/sex/witchcraft/something gay and terrible things happen to them… and people wonder why wizards fighting evil was so popular. The new boom in the genre is a delight even if it spawned Twilight and Uglies. And it seems to have been an inspiration for some of the old guard too. Check out Le Guin’s new series or Patricia C. Wrede’s if you haven’t already; they might even be better than the old stuff.

Agreed that seeing a lot of new good/interesting YA stuff out there is fantastic. I skipped straight to adult novels as soon as possible as a kid, simple adventurous stuff like Jack London’s White Fang, and then moved more specifically to sci-fi/fantasy a few years later (I think my first Heinlein was ~ age 8?) again because it had some of that adventurousness I wanted.

But I still loved best the books with a young protagonist, like a lot of Andre’s Norton’s fiction*, because I didn’t really care about the issues of much older characters as easily. So I’m sure that, if sci-fi-ish YA like The Hunger Games or whathaveyou had been all over the place when I was a kid that would have been really helpful in holding my interest, even if I didn’t need the slightly pared-down reading level.

*I’m not sure where a lot of her stuff falls, actually; it has a adultish/YAish inbetweeny feel, like Chronicles of Narnia or the Prydain books, where it’s not hugely complex or mature but not exactly early tween level either. ...Whatever, I’m terrible at judging book “ages” ‘cause they don’t reflect the ages at which I read them. :p

There’s a reason you skipped ahead to adult lit and it’s the same one we all had: most older kids/teen books were absolute dreck. Abstinent romances, white washed historical fiction, kid does drugs/sex/witchcraft/something gay and terrible things happen to them… and people wonder why wizards fighting evil was so popular.

My previous comment is basically in response to this because, yes, there are only so many fucking Babysitter’s Club or Goosebumps books a girl can try to read. My parents swear I learned to read on Calvin and Hobbes comics, so you know I wouldn’t accept such a huge step down in quality!

Okay, I have one thing to add—this page is full of the kind of stuff that’ll have you laughing at Terry Goodkind all day long.

Wow wow wow. Just started reading the “Goodkind meets George R R Martin” one and that shit is classic.

Scrumby,

Diana Wynne Jones wrote a bunch of great YA stuff before 1995, though it was always hit or miss for me. (I liked Homeward Bounders and Archer’s Goon, but never was that fond of the Chrestomanci stuff (which is WAY BETTER writing than Harry Potter with a semi-similar premise) or the Dalemark Quartet. (It’s good WRITING, in both cases; just never bit me, quite.) I never did Judy Blume (i was really never much of a fan of mainstream literature, period), and i sure as hell stayed away from Babysitters Club and Goosebumps and all that crap. I do remember loving Harriet the Spy, but i think that at least the way current publishing categories are set up that’s “middle grade” and not “young adult”.

I remember Chrestomanci (didn’t realize it was that old) I like the premise a lot but sometimes the execution was a little dry. We could argue forever whether Harry Potter was good or not but the important thing was it made a ton of money which was a great incentive for authors and publishers. Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, A series of Unfortunate Events, and maybe even Twilight wouldn’t have existed without it.

Bagelsan, I am convinced that Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side are the only reason my son learned to read.

scrumby,

Yeah, i’m totally glad Harry Potter exists even though i think it’s pretty meh, for precisely the reason you mention. Hell, they reprinted the Chrestomanci stuff, fairly recently, BECAUSE of HP—“boy wizards” made a good marketing tie-in! (And yeah, i agree, Chrestomanci was a little dry.)

Jodi, your son has impeccable taste. :D