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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
By 'shame' I meant that we should decide for ourselves what is worthy. But as you rightly point out, Fitz, there are fewer and fewer people who have this ability. I made the comment in an idealistic sense. Of course there are books that we 'should' read but a person must build not only an ability to seperate the wheat from the chaff but also a list of respectable sources from which 'should-read' titles can be gathered. If you see what I mean.
I read 'Choke' (Palahniuk)quite recently and I would recomend it; kept me thinking after I closed it and I can't ask much more than that.
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8/17/2007, 11:42 am
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
quote:
algy wrote:
By 'shame' I meant that we should decide for ourselves what is worthy. But as you rightly point out, Fitz, there are fewer and fewer people who have this ability. I made the comment in an idealistic sense. Of course there are books that we 'should' read but a person must build not only an ability to seperate the wheat from the chaff but also a list of respectable sources from which 'should-read' titles can be gathered. If you see what I mean.
Exactly, and at the moment this is what young people lack during secondary education and, to some extent, even in the current A Level syllabus. (Also, fewer and fewer kids study towards A Level English literature these days; increasing numbers of them have too poor GCSE results or get filtered off to study one of the 'new' subjects--as subjects, English literature, History and Geography are dying on their feet, and the policymakers seem unable to discern their importance as the cornerstone of all other arts and humanities subjects.)
Palahniuk's CHOKE was very good, but I really enjoyed HAUNTED: if you've not read HAUNTED, I recommend it without reservations.
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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8/17/2007, 12:19 pm
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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
when there's such a sheer volume of material, very little of it is of a particularly good quality. Honestly, leaving aside maybe ten authors who have been writing for fifteen years or more (James Ellroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Walter Mosley Jr), most of the current batch of factory-line produced literature is really pitiful: it rarely transcends the middlebrow, and very often it seems to be produced on a factory line like no other era of literature before it. The biggest growing areas are still the 'chick-lit' or, now, the 'chick-crime' (e.g. your Patricia Cornwells, etc) genres and the middlebrow novel, which usually isn't much better--it strives for a social conscience, but ends up simply being about the trials and tribulations of being a young middle-class professional. Steinbeck it ain't.
There's hope for us then! I can do pitiful.
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8/17/2007, 12:21 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
quote:
Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:
I don't know about that; it depends how you spend your time. It's harder for young people to be well-read, because they've got all sorts of other media vying for their attention, from the Internet to mobile telephones (which, with most adolescents, seem to be permanently in hand) and video games. The problem is that no-one seems willing to teach kids how to distinguish between texts that are worthy of their interest and those which are trite nonsense: the delivery of English literature in schools has lost its way, becoming too entrenched in a relativist approach, which is fine for anybody studying above, say, the second year of an undergraduate degree, but young people need to be taught how to evaluate texts--otherwise you end up with a society that sits on its bum watching BIG BROTHER all day, all the while convinced that the show is a worthwhile exercise. Kids need to be taught how to sort out the wheat from the chaff, and at the moment that's not happening, thanks to poor staffing at schools (I've heard horror stories about some schools giving places to people who are qualified in one subject and, to fill their hours, being asked to teach another; English literature is the subject that suffers from this the most, because nowadays school managers are often essentially glorified bookkeepers, and they see the subject as an 'easy touch', not understanding the complexities involved in it.)
Fitz, you clearly have an insight from a teaching perspective that many of us do not, but in my own experiences with my step-son Lewis - who's now almost 17 - the problem arises from the advancing surge of 'new media' that you touched on, and indeed this was part of a recent presentation on comic books that I did at Uni. It's far too easy for kids to lay out on a bed with a joystick - or gamepad as it's now called - rather than do something more physical like pick up a book and read, and God forbid that they learn how to read properly, i.e. separate the wheat from the chaff.
I've tried relentlessly over the years to get Lewis to read comics and books, but he has shown little interest. He read comics for a while when he was around 10, but that only lasted for a few months until he got a playstation, and then the comics were quickly forgotten about. Even now, the idea of reading for pleasure does not appeal to him. However, he is, like many teens, a big movie fan, and shows a general interest and good insight when I explain to him the mechanics of storytelling, but alas not enough for him to actually want to read.
He had to read Steinbeck's OF MICE AND MEN at school, which he really enjoyed, and we had a great lengthy conversation about the novel, but even that experience hasn't prompted him to pick up a book.
Last edited by Edge44, 8/17/2007, 12:35 pm
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8/17/2007, 12:31 pm
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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
It's not just 17 year-olds; my lad's not even three yet and he won't let us read to him. I probably sound like a parent who makes excuses for not reading to their children but this had been an aspect of parenting that Em and I had looked forward to. But guess what he does like? The telly. In fact he can comfortably operate the DVD player. This is, I suppose, our own fault but he did reject books before he discovered the telly. He did! Honest!
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8/17/2007, 2:04 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
quote:
algy wrote:
It's not just 17 year-olds; my lad's not even three yet and he won't let us read to him. I probably sound like a parent who makes excuses for not reading to their children but this had been an aspect of parenting that Em and I had looked forward to. But guess what he does like? The telly. In fact he can comfortably operate the DVD player. This is, I suppose, our own fault but he did reject books before he discovered the telly. He did! Honest!
It's not just an issue now that he's almost 17; he's been that way since an early age. Between the ages of 4 and 7, maybe 8, he wouldn't go to bed unless one of us read to him for a time. Yet, when it came to picking up a book and reading it himself, he's just never been interested.
Technology as a labour-saving concept seems to be eroding our cultural heritage. And for a parent who's an avid reader to see their children (step-son in my case) indifferent to, or even consciously dismissing the worthiness and beauty of books, is not only disheartening, it's also worrying.
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8/17/2007, 4:13 pm
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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
We're hopeful. He's starting to pay more and more attention the story involved in his telly and DVDs (we did have the foresight to restrict him to the CBeebies and the prgrammes seem mostly to have a strong narrative element). Fingers crossed that this means he just didn't like those 'Jamie has a big red ball' baby books and pretty soon we can get him into proper story books. I wonder if my copy of Littlenose is still around?
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8/18/2007, 3:25 pm
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NovelNymph
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
And the award for THE LONGEST POST goes to...
Fitz for page two of this thread! 
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8/19/2007, 12:55 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
And a worthy winner he is, too 
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8/20/2007, 6:52 am
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