When did reading become a thing to hate?

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Most over-hyped? Well, I'll get slaughtered for saying it, but I'd have to say J K Rowling.

10 points right there

 

[Anarchemitis]

[humor]So we can all agree that reading is a good thing as long as we hide it from the peasant obsessive gamers, lest they gain literacy?[/humor]

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

[humor]So we can all agree that reading is a good thing as long as we hide it from the peasant obsessive gamers, lest they gain literacy?[/humor]

Unfortunately not, I'd suggest stealthily stuffing it down their throat so they can enjoy reading as well. And not just Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code crossovers.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

One of the coaches saw me reading and said that if I read too much my head would explode, he also suggested not eating to lose weight.

And that's why he's still a coach

 

[cleverlymadeup]

One of the coaches saw me reading and said that if I read too much my head would explode, he also suggested not eating to lose weight.

And that's why he's still a coach

and not a good one if he says stuff like that

 

[Rissa]

[humor]So we can all agree that reading is a good thing as long as we hide it from the peasant obsessive gamers, lest they gain literacy?[/humor]

No, we can flaunt it, and they will still fail to gain literacy, because "BOOKZ R FER FAGZ!!!1!!"

*Shudder* I am a book worm, but I still enjoy real life. I have a girlfriend, an ex-wife, and a daughter to prove that... As well as a job, and go to college.

I was raised on books - both my parents are very literate, my mother has an English Language degree, so we were read to and encouraged to read. It's a running joke in the family that if I can't get my hands on a book, I'll read the back of the cornflakes packet. When I was about fourteen, our school decided they should encourage reading too, so the teacher asked us all to bring in a book for twenty minutes' supervised private reading a day. One of the boys in my class said he didn't have any books in his house. My jaw dropped. Of course, his chavvy mates thought it was brilliant.

 

[ilves7]

I'm pretty young (24) and have always read a lot. Then again my entire family reads a lot. I think I read LOTR around 6th grade all the way through and have steadily consumed a large amount of Sci-fi and fantasy in my youth (since I graduated college my reading has plummeted like a rock because a) i have no time b) no money to buy books c) too lazy to go to the library). I think most people don't see any advantage in reading books anymore when shorter, more colorful (i.e. oooh shiny) media is readily available.

I think my two all time favorite books are Ender's Game and the Hobbit (both of which I read very, very young). My other major in college was also English, so I've read alll the classics and all of shakespeare... I think I really got sick and tired of reading old english works and analyzing them, takes all the fun out. I'm much more of a fan of modern literature than old, also enjoy poetry. And for those who didn't undertand the point of poetry, there is also emotional context in much of poetry that cannot be replicated in such succinct fashion in regular prose. I really like Irish poets for some reason, Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats (When You are Old is one of my favorites) are definitely up there for me.

 

[Zemalac]

Most over-hyped? Well, I'll get slaughtered for saying it, but I'd have to say J K Rowling.

Yes! It's good to know I'm not the only one who thinks that.
Good on yer. And Khell as well. (Accidental rhyme)

I don't know very many people who don't read at least a little bit. Though there was a strange conversation with one of my friends the other day...we were talking about science fiction books and I suggested that he read the Polseen War series by John Ringo, because it's military sci-fi and he likes stuff like that. His first question was, "Does anything exiting happen in the first twenty pages?" Apperantly he can't read books if they don't meet that requirement, and since almost the entire first book of that series is basically setting up the others, he declined to read it. That sort of reasoning seems weird to me, but that might be because reading a book is sort of my base state of existance.

 

[awmperry]

You know, on the basis of these seven pages, I'm starting to really like this forum. I'm home!

Oh, and to give an idea of the extent of my book addiction, I recently got some new fitted bookcases installed so I could start unpacking a few of my book boxes. The next room over's being turned into a library when we figure out where to put the stuff in it, but I wanted to get at least my most read up on a shelf. Unfortunately the books aren't sorted as carefully as I'd like, but to get the right book density I had to sort by size first - and yes, several of those shelves are double-stacked...

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c192/awmperry/NewPC003.jpg

There are many more books to go up. (Actually, quite a few more have gone up since that picture, and I've completely reorganised the bookcase, but yeah.)

 

[Sylocat]

If anyone has seen FMA, they will know what I mean when I say that my bedroom looks like Scieszka's living room (I can't reproduce everything I've ever read from memory, though).

For those of you who haven't, just picture books from floor to ceiling. My room contains very little else.

I just finished reading The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey, and my new mission in life is to get as many other people to read it as possible. It is one of the funniest and one of the saddest books I've ever read all at once, and it makes you think like few other mysteries do.

I could list a few other recommendations, but I've got so many that it might crash the servers. ^_^;

 

[Sib]

My house is beginning to look like a library, seriously in every single room there's a minimum of one bookcase and in one room we have these 2 gigantic oak ones that take up half the wall heheh.

EDIT: also beasty computer set up you got there

 

[cleverlymadeup]

My house is beginning to look like a library, seriously in every single room there's a minimum of one bookcase and in one room we have these 2 gigantic oak ones that take up half the wall heheh.

EDIT: also beasty computer set up you got there

you should see our friends who own a used bookstore, they have walls made of books. the scary thing is he knows where they all all, in both the house and the store, well mostly author but still it's kinda freaky to see

tho he is handy if you collect certain books, cause he'll set them aside for us or pick them up specifically for us if he comes across them

 

[Rolling Thunder]

I never saw why so many people objected to Rowling's writing.... to me it often seems to be a habit amongst intellectuals to immediately critique anything that acheives popularity.... though again, her actual writing often leaves a great deal to be desired.

But to add to the hate list:

Clive Cussler (Aaargh!The pain! Sooooo.... baaaaaad.)

Tom Clancy (and the American's win, as they did the last fifteen times, with nobody actualy getting killed)

I agree with the Jordan-hate. Jordan is a prick, his charecters are so one-dimensional there only use is for shaving, and his settings are so 'gneric fantasy setting no. 42, violent but beautiful, with excesses of hot, horny women.)

C.S Lewis: Mein Gott, but DULL is the only word. A war should not read like an appenodectomy summary.

Richard Dawkines: Lots of people believe in god, but I'll piss them off for absolutely no reason bar publicity and a lot of incipient rage at the fact that stupid fundamentalists rule America, so I'll descend to their level by slanging off a religon that has so far managed to refrain from killing anyone for a few bloody years.

William Golding: A lot of people seem to share this man's delusion that humans need rules to not descend into killing and lunacy. What the man seems to fail to grasp in Lord of the Flies was that rules, laws and other social restraints are a human invention, wheras Golding is somehow deluded that they are some sort of celestial present from God, a man who is so enigmatic many are unsure of his existence, so he might as well say: 'Without god we would all be savages'- which begs the question why Golding's book dosn't have the children recieving a testament from god and being redeemed etc etc, so really I think its a load of confused gibberish from a man terrified of poor people/atheists/communists/some other generic group used to instil fear.



Thanks for sharing in my thoughts, and I hope you'l post your own.

 

[Melaisis]

Most over-hyped? Well, I'll get slaughtered for saying it, but I'd have to say J K Rowling. She's a superlative storyteller (when she can keep track of what she's said and when, and when she's not introducing new plot elements four minutes from the end when poor old Chekov's had his shotgun lying about since book two) but she really isn't a particularly good writer.

I concur, she's somewhat fickle when it comes to her use of words, and in Deathly Hallows (arguably her worst-written book) she simply assumes that everyone is willing to put up with her lack of structure and patience (really, about a million things happen per chapter) in exchange for explanation of (almost) decades-old plot points. She's right, of course, but still displays outstanding arrogance in front of her fellow authors with such an obvious attitude.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone EVER actually finished "War and Peace"?
I had a bash at reading it and got a few chapters done, but god it's mind numbing.

Managed to get halfway through Anna Karenina; that thing really is a bloody novel of attrition. Still, I found it quite a good read, although the simple size of thing astounded me and thus couldn't bare another 1000+ pages to trawl through in order to reach the conclusion. It has far better and more interesting characters than War and Peace, I think. The likes of Konstantin Levin who is somewhat comedic in his courting ways, Oblonsky and his irrational affairs and Vronsky the reluctant war hero are far deeper than some of the stock tosh which War and Peace is widely criticised to contain.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

There was a elderly chap I knew who had, at his last count, ten thousand books in his home. Seriously, you sent into his house and every wall was stacked from floor to ceiling.

Quite coincidentally, he's one of the cleverest guys I've ever met.

yeah i'm sure he'd be like that but the boss put her foot down and said get some books out of here so he had to cut back on them

another friend of mine, her parents' place is like that, her dad is very clever if not a bit eccentric but he's also a university prof so that kinda goes with the territory. punishment was cleaning up the house. on the plus side tho is if you moved something on him he'd not realized you did and go "wow i must have put it there for some reason" and we, including his wife, would have a chuckle at it

 

[cleverlymadeup]

I never saw why so many people objected to Rowling's writing.... to me it often seems to be a habit amongst intellectuals to immediately critique anything that acheives popularity.... though again, her actual writing often leaves a great deal to be desired.

the think about jk rowling is she's a CHILD'S author, not an adult author. so she's not going to be a great author compared to someone like tolkien or gaiman and such. so try comparing her to kids authors instead of ones that write books for adults.

the good thing about jk rowling is she's gotten kids to read the books and really getting kids to read is a good thing