http://britadventuress.livejournal.com/50781.html

Excerpt:

you make this point: “The orderly, complacent, optimistic Victorian novel had nothing to say to them. Worse than nothing: it felt like a lie.” I…don’t recognize those Victorian novels you’re referencing there. Not that there aren’t orderly, complacent, and optimistic novels written during the Victorian era; however, the bulk of what’s written in the nineteenth century is almost anything but the three adjectives you chose.

Orderly? Have you read Wilkie Collins? Complacent? Have you read Shirley? Optimistic? Have you read anything by Thomas Hardy or George Gissing? (Or, if you’re going to ding me for both of those gentlemen being too far removed from the heart of the Victorian era — and that would be a fine thing to ding me on — I’ll return that volley with Villette.) Heck, even reaching the end of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (which, I know, isn’t Victorian; it is, though, nineteenth century), one isn’t left feeling terribly optimistic that the marriage between Fanny and Edmund is going to be a success.

It feels a little as if you’re pitting the nineteenth century against the twentieth; however, I don’t feel you make a compelling case of this. Put baldly, it seems as if you’re saying that the Victorian novel is muzak to James Joyce’s Beethoven.

Great story. Any more like that?

Cannery Row I did as a book report. 6th grade. That was the same year we read Animal Farm. I had a terrific teacher that year.

When I was teaching young adults with emerging literacy, I had good luck with a series from Scholastic, the Dear America series. They were diaries from various historical periods, told from the point of view of a teenager going through the time. My students loved those.
Looking out on a roomful of kids reading those was very gratifying. (A number of the kids told me it was the first book they had ever read all the way through.)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers

Well, except Ike Asimov at times, and that was more lack of characterization. But the second part of The Gods Themselves majorly made up for last part.

Of course, the last generation was also a bunch of lazy illiterate stoners who only care about their Ataris, and they’re apparently buying lots of books now, so at least there’s hope.

PS: Fck y.

Since then, Dickens has come to be considered literary largely by people who aren’t very familiar with literature. CP Snow, in his 1959 lecture on “The Two Cultures” (the growing divide between the sciences and humanities) observed that when he asked scientific and technically-minded people whether they’d ever read any literary fiction, they often replied that they’d read some Dickens.

Optimistic? Have you read anything by Thomas Hardy or George Gissing?

Hardy was even a centerpiece of this BBC 4 radio In Our Time episode entitled “Victorian Pessimism“!

Mid-to-late Victorians found that the discoveries of Darwin and the heat death of the universe were… well, freshly depressing.

But it was a challenge to find things to be optimistic about, hence things like H.G. Wells painting a dreary picture of the future for the Time Traveller in The Time Machine, but still giving him something to fight to hope for.

Which arguably is plot. Or at least a cliffhanger, the anticipation of plot.

Is that really so surprising?

Dickens’ social impact outweighed the expectations of his audience to such a degree that he must be considered a literary figure. It’s certainly not the only route to literary relevance, but it is certainly a legitimate one.

Donne, Melville, Tolkien, Gaiman: all considered unserious literature by experts at one point or another. Eventually you stand the test of time, or you do not.

He writes about his relationship with women, writing, sex, drugs. He talks about other contemporary authors and artists and it feels like you are there.

It is a relatively short, easy read, but its not one that insults the reader’s intelligence, which is nice.

I’m with you. I always read whatever my kids read, otherwise I can’t have any sort of meaningful discussion with them about what they’re getting out of their books.

There’s no way I’d prefer a more steady diet of this stuff to more challenging fare. If I can’t find it on the “just in” shelf at the bookstore, there’s always a wealth of classics at Project Gutenberg.

And entertaining literary novels are hardly a new thing; underlined by the fact that the above column cites Donna Tartt as someone who combines literary flair with narrative chutzpah- unless I’m missing something, Tartt’s only major work was The Secret History, first published 17 years ago (making at as old, I suspect, as many BoingBoing readers).

The argument that literary dullness is the reason people are reading more young adult novels also fails to convince; surely an equally strong argument could be made that the main audience of YA novels are people who would not normally read “literary” fiction, but who have abandoned conventional thrillers, etc, in search of something with some more imagination. In other words, something a little more challenging?

I’m especially annoyed as the article was linked as “the real reason people read Harry Potter is because literary fiction is boring” and not because Harry Potter is one of the few book series that they’ve heard of. I find it very hard to believe that there’s a paucity of decent reading material out there- surely there are more entertaining literary novels than anyone could ever read in a lifetime. The difficulty is in raising people’s awareness that literature is not intimidating, and that they’re perfectly capable of having a fun, rewarding time even if they venture out beyond the “Supernatural Romance” shelves.