Way to damn it with faint praise! (And this from someone who can sing lyrics from Once More With Feeling.)
A Monkey with a Gun writes:
> We’ve established that people read a good deal more than you asserted.
Reading four books a year isn’t a great deal more than reading one book a year in my opinion. For someone like me who reads about sixty books a year, four books a year isn’t very much at all, and that’s the maximum for about half of all adult Americans. And a quarter don’t read any books at all. A lot of times the only books that people will read are the few current series or authors that they have gotten hooked on. If asked to read something else (like a classic), they will say, “No, I don’t really have the time. I barely have time to read my favorite authors. I’m not going to try anything else.”
Incidentally, there were some news stories a few years ago claiming that indeed the median number of books that an adult American reads per year was 1. Here are some random websites making that claim:
http://lifelivewell.com/2011/02/03/four-principles-the-wealthy-apply-others-neglect/
http://redroom.com/member/gary-g-gach/blog/less-than-one-book
These websites may well have been wrong (since it sounds like they all got the idea from one source), but the claim was out there.
I studied English lit at university and it was astonishing that most of the students weren’t reading the classics but were acting as if they were.
The reason? In that kind of environment, everyone was constantly name-dropping, being entirely pretentious by quoting Don Quixote without having read the entire book, all to appear more intelligent and to fit in.
Yes, I noticed your sneak bragging up thread when you had to name drop all the classics you have read. Thank you for your contribution.
You must realize that even among people who read, you are an extreme outlier, right?
Did you even read your own cites? They come from Ron White, a man who gets on infomercials and sells a speed reading/memory improvement kit for the LOW LOW PRICE of [del]$79.99[/del] $29.99, BUT ONLY IF YOU CALL WITHIN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES!
Forgive me if I don’t put much stock in his claims.
Justin_Bailey writes:
> They come from Ron White, a man who gets on infomercials and sells a speed
> reading/memory improvement kit for the LOW LOW PRICE of $79.99 $29.99,
> BUT ONLY IF YOU CALL WITHIN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES!
Oh, you’re quite right that his claims are very likely to be wrong. My point was that I had read several repetitions of those claims in quick succession several years ago and not in advertisements, since I don’t even listen to such things. Yes, it appears that the actual median is probably closer to 4 than to 1. I had gotten the number 1 stuck in my mind from reading some news stories several years ago that probably quoted the same mistaken source. Yes, I should have looked up the number before posting it and I should have checked it with several sources. Are you happy now that you can make snide comments about me because I got a number wrong?
A Monkey with a Gun writes:
> Yes, I noticed your sneak bragging up thread when you had to name drop all
> the classics you have read.
What bragging? What does the fact that I read a lot of books show except that I have no life? Does it make you happy to have this to make snide comments about that too to me? I had to list both the books that I have read and the ones that I haven’t read in order to make a very distinct point, which you have missed completely. My point was that even if you have spent essentially your whole life reading and have made some attempt to read the classics, there will almost certainly be a vast number of classics that you will never get to. (And I’m a month short of my sixtieth birthday, so I’ve had a lot of time to read books.)
Justin_Bailey writes:
> You must realize that even among people who read, you are an extreme
> outlier, right?
I’m at about the 95% or 96% level among all adult Americans in number of books read per year, from what I can extrapolate from that survey. I don’t call that an extreme outlier, since about 4% to 5% of people read more than me. I have close friends who knock off about twice as many books a year as I do. Among my friends, only reading four books a year would be quite different. I don’t say that as a moral judgment on such people. I don’t say it as an intellectual judgment on such people. I don’t say that as a social judgment on such people. I don’t say that as a financial judgment on such people. I and the people I hang out with know perfectly well that people who don’t read much are no less moral and aren’t even consistently less intelligent (yeah, and a lot of them make more money than us and have more interesting lives). The people who read less just have different social interests than us. Is it really that hard for you to accept that someone who reads about 60 books a year might say that someone who reads about 4 books a year doesn’t read very much in their opinion?
Look, would it make you feel better if I listed some other things about me in which I’m much further into the “extreme outlier” range than merely the number of books I’ve read so you can make some snide comments about that too?
Do you not know how to use the quote function?
One versus four is a huge difference… a 400% difference if you will. It changes the whole conversation as people love to trumpet the “fact” that no one’s reading anymore, even though the fact is ridiculously untrue. Reading is way up. The only thing that’s down is new book purchases. People have just found new avenues for their books (free Gutenberg books on eReaders, Amazon Marketplace, Half.com, library usage is up, etc.) that bypass Barnes and Noble’s new rack.
This is what makes me go :dubious: at the question in the OP. People are reading more classics than ever, but there are so many classics and so many readers that it’s easy to forget that.
And not to pick on you, but someone who reads more books than 96% of the population just isn’t going to realize that. You toss off a classic like it ain’t no thing. The rest of us have to struggle with them, and that’s where the four number comes in.
Justin_Bailey writes:
> Reading is way up.
Cite?
I think it’s because schools teach the classics that suck. Other than Animal Farm and The Great Gatsby, I can’t remember a single book I was forced to read at school that didn’t bore me to tears. Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Pride and Prejudice, everything written by a Bronte, most of Shakespeare - they all made me want to kill myself. Ethan Frome made me want to kill everyone; it was my least favorite literary/film work not named Pearl Harbor.
And I like to read.
On the other hand, I read Catch-22 because I’d always wondered where the term came from, and it was the greatest thing ever.
My husband is not much of a reader. He’s dyslexic, and he’d very much prefer to just plop in front of the glass teat most of the time. When we were living in Spain, and didn’t have a TV in our house (and it wouldn’t have mattered because he didn’t know much Spanish), he DID read a little, mostly the men’s adventure novels with titles like The Destroyer and The Punisher, and Westerns and some science fiction (mostly space opera). He’d still go to the base and watch TV in the community center when he could.
He got a tablet this Christmas. And he’s asking me for book recommendations. And he’s actually reading. I don’t know why he loves reading on his tablet, but he’ll actually read on his tablet rather than watch TV…sometimes. And I’ve let him know about Project Gutenberg, and he’s checking out classic novels, things that he always meant to get around to reading.
When I go out, I see a lot more people reading ebooks than I used to see reading paper books. I think that more people are reading, and people who used to read are reading even more.
I didn’t want an ereader, but my daughter bought me one about a year and a half ago. It took me a while to start using it, but now I love it. Oh, do I love it. The graphics aren’t wonderful, and the proofreading is non-existent, but still…I used to carry 3 or 4 paperback books in my purse, because I’m addicted to reading. Now, I can carry my nook, and still have room for other things.
First of all, do you seriously not know how to quote? I almost missed this.
Secondly, the National Endowment for the Arts studies the reading habits of the US every few years. The problem is that their studies are solely related to fiction (which I guess is great for the OP, not so much for the general incidence of reading). Not a great measure of the amount of book reading the public does. Even still, they saw an increase in fiction reading in their 2009 study.
http://www.nea.gov/news/news09/readingonrise.html
I’d lay down good morning that their next study (coming in the wake of eReaders and all) will show an even more extreme increase in reading.
Same here. I’ve also read all three volumes. Not only is the translation good, and the work of a poet, his notes on the text are excellent.
I dashed this off before lunch, but it’s supposed to say “I’d lay down good money…”
You just gave me a college flashback. I had an English professor who pronounced it “Madame Bo-VAH-ray.” He was also terribly obsessed with sex, but then again, we all were. 
One of the reasons that his writing is so “dense” is that at least for many of his works he was paid by the word. And so he used lots of them. On and on and on and…
Not exactly: he was paid by the installment (at least for many of his works); and each installment had to be a certain length. Cite: Was Dickens Really Paid By The Word?
(And in trying to track down a cite for that, I ran across a couple of interesting old threads discussing Dickens’s style, here and here. A search for “Dickens” and “paid by the word” turns up a lot of hits on the SDMB alone!)
He hates that the quote boxes put in information that the person did not actually say. He previously would use the quote feature, but list who said them on the outside, but that means that, when he’s quoted, the actual quotes are missing, making it appear like someone said something they didn’t.
For example:
Jon Doe said
BigT is stupid.
becomes the following when quoted:
Jon Doe said BigT is stupid
I’m pretty sure I’m the one who led to the change of style. I got a bit mad when he told me to “be more careful” when I used the quote function, leaving a post like the one above. I think he didn’t get that I wasn’t upset about his style, but that he blamed me when it was his refusal to use the normal quote style that made it happen.
As for my opinion on the subject: It’s almost entirely style based. The classics are invariably written in another style. Sometimes that style is easy to get past, and other times it isn’t. And which is which differs for different people. I mean, I to this day thing that Nathaniel Hawthorne is a horrible writer because he thought it was okay to address the reader directly in the Scarlet Letter, which destroyed my suspension of disbelief.
I think the only way to make the classics truly popular again is to stop freaking out when people want to adapt the language to a more modern style. I think the classics I’ve best liked were the ones where I read an abridged or children’s version first, decided I liked it, and then went and read the original. The next best are the ones that were written closer to modern style, like Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories–and even then I already knew about the main character beforehand.
Why can’t he just put the poster’s name in the quote box like everyone else?
[QUOTE=God]
Look, Wendell, it’s easy!
[/QUOTE]
Longevity. The vast majority of books have traditionally gone out of print within years. There is something in a classic that makes it readable years later. They may not be read much, but they are read often enough to remain in print. There is a certain feedback loop with some classics and debate about the loop. For instance, I’ve heard it said that it’s possible that The Great Gatsby may have gotten labeled a classic too quickly…that it may not have the chops to stand up over time.
Some classics are read popularly, Austen is one that is popularly read. Others are only read by people who are “literary”. Not many people read Heart of Darkness for fun.
It will be interesting to see how ebooks change this dynamic.