ITT: Dumb things people that read books say

yeah if someone tried to shove some book down my throat as kid, I'd have probably stopped reading even street signs.

Your analogy doesn't fit. Light exercise and cutting down soda is a fine start. However reading just whatever garbage you can find doesn't do anything for you.

You're getting this idea that simply the act of reading is a great thing. It's not. What you read matters. Are Anons being enlightened by reading thousands of shitposts every day? Of course not.

I recall that I started reading Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson is the man if you want to introduce kids to engaging literature.

If a 8-12 years old reads Harry Potter, that's fine, nothing great or good but fine, but if your 14+ years old child reads Harry Potter it's a complete waste of his potential, he could read books that have actual value but are still very easy reads.

I started reading seriously when I was 16 and by the time I was in college I already had read all the books any class is analyzing and doing assignments on, reason why I dropped out.

reading shit books will still do wonders to fix an iphone-tier attention span

Light exercise and no soda can also effectively do nothing for you health-wise. Reading Harry Potter can teach new words and how a narrative is established. If you think a 10 year old reading Harry Potter has no benefit for them, you're too ostentatious to ever concede the point.

>by the time I was in college I already had read all the books any class is analyzing and doing assignments on, reason why I dropped out

You're either a genius, or much more likely, you're gonna realize how stupid that is in a few years

>his potential, he could read books that have actual value but are still very easy reads.

Maybe reading it's just not his thing, and he's reading harry potter so he can pull bitches that are into it.

I don't know why you all think everybody has to pursue a devoted interest in literature. Or maybe this whole thread stems from the usual Veeky Forums hate for casuals.

Is learning new words and establishing how narrative works really all it has to offer? I think a 10 year old should have done enough reading by that time to know how a story works, and they can learn new words from reading all sorts of shit.

>really all it has to offer?

maybe the kid could have fun while reading it, who knows

>I think a 10 year old should have done enough reading by that time

There's your problem. Yea, they probably should have, but many, if not most, haven't.

And no, it can offer lessons in empathy and friendship and courage and all the lame shit that most kids' books do, but the former two are more literary.

hedonists shall be purged come the revolution

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

?

>I didn't personally identify with the protagonist so it's a bad book
If god exists why does he allow these people to write book reviews?

>I watched the movie so I don't want to read the book

this is fine for the target demographic to read HP/YA. If you seen 20+ yrolds doing this, you are allowed to publicly shame them.

>tfw Harry Potter got me into reading
>tfw been reading Harry Potter-tier books ever since

hehe

Do you think that technology and smart phones have made it harder to get young people to examine large pieces of text? I'm only 20, so I have grown up in the midst of the "tech revolution" where tech isn't something we just use to play a game or do some work, it's something that is a part of our daily lives and absolutely everything we do. I remember being younger and spending entire summers reading outside with ease, but now I seem to struggle to get through a chapter or two without taking a break. Is there anyway to reverse this or are we as a society doomed to deal in ever smaller bits of text?

I am very aware of that challenge. Because of my physical disabilities, I now teach two groups of students in my own living room. One group is always on Shakespeare and the other on the reading of poetry. I select my students from sixty or seventy applicants, and they are the cream of the cream; they are remarkable students. But if I was still a younger man like you and was trying to communicate the power of a proper reading of the comparative literature to undergraduates, I would find it very difficult.

We are in a digital age, and this is to say a visual age where young people grow up with the television screen and, above all, the computer screen. It is very, very difficult for them to learn how to read properly. I always tell my own students, as I am sure you tell the very best of yours — one must try and set an example: go by yourself, whether in your own room or outdoors somewhere in good weather and start by reading aloud, and listen carefully to what you are overhearing, and read it again and again. If it’s Wallace Stevens or if it is Hart Crane, Faulkner or Emerson, Whitman or Dickinson, or Proust or Kafka or Beckett, or Tolstoy, or any of the great thinkers of the past, you need to hear them, you need to live inside them.

>Do you think that technology and smart phones have made it harder to get young people to examine large pieces of text?

I think that, on the contrary, internet databases have made it incredibly easy to procure a scholarly article and then cite it. Easier all the way when you can pull articles up immediately instead of letting them languish without a member of the lit department.

Veeky Forums is never more pseudish than when it obsesses about harry potter and the hivemind posts this load of old tripe

the rest of us get it. some of you don't like harry potter. now go back to your book of self indulgent whiny disquiet, i'm sure girls will be really impressed by your pain and sadness

Your babies are mine, baby

wow, that's one of the best written comments I have read on this site.
Yet I disagree about cause and effect. Even if Harry potter is setting kids up for shitty literature, it at least makes reading an option for them.
I have a few friends who never acquired the habit of reading books, and at 20+ years old feel like they cannot start.
HP is shit, sure, but it isn't it better than not reading at all?

It's a harold bloom copy pasta you dip

>start by reading aloud
this idea intrigues me. Are there references of people actually doing this in public? It just seems so very entitled and edgy

>Are there references of people actually doing this in public?
lmao being so insecure not to be able to start new practices in humanity

>kids reading harry potter will eventually read DFW
>kids watching CSI Miami will eventually watch Evangelion

"the book was better than the movie"

Harry Potter is absolute drivel, you morons. It's not good for any age because it is terrible. I'd rather read ingredients for shampoo than Harry Potter.

...

When I was 14, I enjoyed War and Peace 100x more than Harry Potter
Classics can be fun too

Harry Botter

...

>classics can be fun when you don't understand them and can't relate to the characters and the maturity of the plot

bump

I hope you're not implying what I think you're implying but implying what I hope you're implying.

Once upon a time children/teens were reading shelley, keats, byron and weened on dickens but the education as a whole while becoming more accessible is also becoming more simplified, unless you have private schooling or private tutoring which comes with money.

Being somewhat well read in philosophy was the norm by the time you reached college level, culture and intellect are continuing to take steps backwards and that's that.

Harry botter doesn't encourage people to step out into anything but more YA, of course some break out of this but it's inevitable.

If Veeky Forums talked about ya fiction and 1984 everyday instead of actual books it's user rate would sky rocket and we'd be the new reddit.

You don't have to read aloud in public.

Reading aloud does do wonders for comprehension though.

>Once upon a time children/teens were reading shelley, keats, byron and weened on dickens but the education as a whole while becoming more accessible is also becoming more simplified, unless you have private schooling or private tutoring which comes with money.
Children without money were cleaning factory chimneys in the times you speak of mate.

>Once upon a time children/teens were reading shelley, keats, byron and weened on dickens.
My sides

>ITT

Who's going to be the first one to call someone "Mugal"

im sure the workers and the farmers were super into Byron, bro

>Why you so stupid? Why don't you go read a book or something.

Pic related - a book to read.

Muggle

>TT: Dumb things people that read books say

>>"Well, just as long as it [reading Harry Potter/any young adult novel really] gets them into REAL books, it doesn't matter."

Bothan