Two romantic pairings that should have happened, in Ivanhoe and The Deerslayer.

In Ivanhoe, >!he should end up with brave, intrepid Rebecca instead of the soggy but oh-so-blonde Rowena. I realize this would mean Ivanhoe would have to convert to Judaism. I have no issue with that!<

The Deerslayer has an ending so miserable that the final four pages actually changed how I felt about the character and I finished it really despising him. And I didn’t think much of the author either. >!Judith, who’s been intrepid and courageous and is actually tried to rescue him repeatedly, proposes to him only to have him snottily turned her down because someone once told him a rumor that she might’ve kiss someone. Slut! Not good enough for ourbchaste hero. Anyway, later he hears that she dated a soldier, so he knows he did the right thing. What a pathetic prude!< It’s why I never read Last of the Mohicans. If Judith had been the main character, I would’ve read it.

I made a longer post arguing a bit with the OP, but if you don’t mind I’ll say here— you’re joining OP in assuming that authors have a single clear intent in writing the text, and your job is to uncover that and then read obediently along. But a good university literature class, especially in poetry, will hopefully be emphasizing things like the legitimacy of reader reaction, the importance of ambiguity, the impossibility of divining authorial intent etc. The text has no life apart from the intent of the author? Derrida and Bakhtin want a word!

It’s a bit reductive…

I think you’re going the long way around to say things that a lot of us would agree with if you stated them more simply. I also think that you’re making a huge assumption: that the way the author would like you to read the book is how the reader should read it. But authorial intent does not necessarily dictate reader reaction.

Whether you want to read passively or dive in critically and take notes doesn’t depend just on the book, but depends on how you’re reading, why you’re reading, and what your personal goal is.

My biggest problems with your approach:

1. So, Charlotte Perkins Gilman probably wouldn’t have written her famous feminist critique “The Yellow Wallpaper” in the form of a horror story if she didn’t want readers to have the option of enjoying it as a horror story. I read it when I was younger because Stephen King said it was the best horror short story ever written. I got the feminist aspect, I thought it just made it more horrifying. But I’ve seen it taught where the horror was ignored completely and instead all we did was look at the parallels with her life, as if it were meant to be solely autobiographical— but is that the way she wanted us to read it, to study it? Or is it ugly and reductive?

You’re assuming that the author has one right way they want you to read and derive things from the text, and that your job is to figure out what that way is and then read it appropriately— but many great writers revel in ambiguity. Is Catcher in the Rye a Buddhist parable or a tale of anomie or a cautionary story about mental illness or part of a larger oeuvre inspired by Salinger’s traumatic war experiences? Good luck! And if you work that our, Henry James is waiting for you.

2. Your elitism. You’re being snobby on behalf of writers who did not share any such exclusive attitude. Shakespeare was always scrambling to make a buck, he put the witches in Macbeth to appeal to the new king who had written a book on witchcraft. But that doesn’t mean you can’t analyze them. Charles Dickens would not have looked down on the many women who read aloud from his serials in order to entertain their sisters and mothers who were spending all day doing piecework and were bored and wanted entertainment – again, it’s how he made his living. Analyze David Copperfield all you want, but look down on those readers and you miss something important about Dickens. (And the book, for that matter.)

As a librarian’s daughter, I’ve always been a mad reader. Living overseas in the 90s though, I had to read whatever used books in English were around, which were either Penguin classics (published in India) or fun trashy novels other travelers left around, so it was a steady diet of Grapes of Wrath and Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire books! Grad school knocked out novel reading for a while for me, but I bounced back 😁

I think two American classics that get overlooked are James Dickey’s Deliverance (because everyone thinks they know what it is about – nope) and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, which is amazing.

Right now I’m reading Edith Holler by Edward Carey and I am simply blown away – the narrator is a 12-year-old girl in a Shakespeare theater in Norwich in 1901 who is under a curse, and the narrative voice is perfection, I’m slowing down reading it because I don’t want it to end!

I read it right after I read Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, in data collection in the way that big data and algorithms are being used all across society against both women and POC. They fit together really well but together they ended up making me feel really hopeless.

Heh heh, still haven’t gotten back to Anna after I was given 4 days(!) to read it in a college course… I tried. No. I read War and Peace, though, so I reassure myself that I AM a real reader 😏

Nothing kills the love of reading than feeling that you “ought” to read and finish a book!

As a teacher, one thing I’d say is that while boys often act out when they get distracted, what we see with girls is classic daydreamy behavior… so she’s paying attention, and then suddenly another student will do something disruptive, and instead of her attention snapping back to the lesson, we lose her looking out the window. Enough that it is having an impact on her grade/ability to relate to others. Then we start watching more closely (some kids just daydream! Just like some kids just get bored and mess around.)

Girls are underdiagnosed because their behavior (usually) isn’t disruptive; boys are massively overdiagnosed because parents sometimes are looking for a medical solution to their kids just being kids, as well as biases from within the system.

I’ve been finding out about the controversy by reading this, and your comment is really helpful. If he’s literally saying that this book is based on and inspired by the event, then I don’t see what his excuse is. It sounds like he was making a grab for relevance and it came back and bit him in the ass.

It’s a lot easier if you’re reading about something you’re already familiar with. For example, I know a fair amount about the time period in which The Wager is set and so a bunch of anomalies jumped out at me.

Anytime you run into anachronism should set your radar off (The Wager, again…)

One thing you can do is look at the one-star ratings on Amazon. This may sound weird, but most of the time it’s just people who didn’t finish the book or have really dumb things to say (“it had a lot of pages” “I haven’t read it yet but I don’t like the cover”) but if the facts are wrong you’ll probably find somebody who cares and lists everything that the author got wrong.

Second that! Finishing it was like coming out of a deep sleep and realizing you had the most incredible dream and you blink your way back into the real world.

That said… And I know a lot of Zelazny fans don’t love everything he did… But the first five Amber books are all 150 to 180 pages, and they’re an epic.

Have you read Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters? It’s poetry, but it’s written as epitaphs for all the members of the town. As you read the poems you get to see all the relationships, secret and public, the points of view of husbands and wives, it’s a lot like Winesburg in that sense but was written earlier.

I find nonfiction more tolerant of interruptions, so I’ll read it in a break at work, or when someone else is being noisy in my household, or when I’m watching tv (during the ads). Which my English teacher would probably weep over, but whatever. I also like reading it in the evenings, it doesn’t have that “you just have to read one more page” thing so a lot of times I’ll read it just before bed. I think it pairs well with reading a fiction book at the same time, though. It’s a mood thing.

Oh F, I liked that. I wouldn’t be bringing it up on a first date but… it’s not as bad as the rest of this list. Is it? 🥺

Yep, we read parts in my college class on the Holocaust. I got it out of the library, though.

I love opera and have a few books on Wagner, and I regularly get asked if I’m a Nazi when people see them, that’s enough for me. I don’t need Mein Kampf on the shelf!

Yak’s Corollary: if they have incorporated the Confederate flag into their wardrobe in any way, it’s over.

I was surprised at how readable it was. Honestly I’d expected a turgid Mein Kampf experience. (I feel I need to add quickly that I’m a historian. Read part of MK for a college class.)

I was interested at how early it was for the “group of plucky resistance fighters up against occupying force” storyline. It was only a few years later that V was a huge miniseries hit. I also expected it to be 100% racist and antisemitic and was interested that while it was those things, it was focused on hating the federal government. I think even now a lot of liberals miss how much resentment of the federal government underlies a lot of the bigotry that draws more attention.

I have never discussed it on a date! I don’t even admit to my friends that I read it.

What a thoughtful answer! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it laid out so clearly.

I agree completely! And yet… I know I’ve gone back to books after a few years when it niggled at me that I hadn’t quite gotten a handle on them the first time, and I’ve usually been glad I did. Wuthering Heights is actually one of them! I went down in defeat when I was in high school, dnf, so glad I went back!

I run into students struggling with this when they first encounter the idea of analyzing authorial intent as well as talking about what happens in the story. As wormlieutenant says, you’re expecting continuity in the characters and the world they live in, so you can talk about them in context as making decisions, etc. if it’s decently written. Sometimes, however, the decision of character makes clearly also serves a purpose in the plot and it’s OK to discuss that as well. Where my students really run into trouble is when they try to apply the world created in fiction to the real one as if it’s not fictional.

So (my opinion!):

Good: Bobby, however, doesn’t launch the canoe in time because he’s paralyzed with terror.

Adding plot mechanics: It’s easy to criticize James Dickey for making Bobby, the subject of the assault, into the “weakling” of the party as well. However, Dickey is facing a challenge because, if Bobby launches the canoe on time, the protagonist Ed will be stranded on top of the cliff. Bobby has to falter in order for Ed to re-join the group, and by portraying him that way throughout the book, Dickey has prepared us as readers for that moment.

Awful: In class we’ve looked at lots of examples from history of times that quarantines have failed, but the movie Quarantine shows that sometimes they can work. (this last was an actual student paper in a history class…)

I’ll put 100 bucks on the people in the cellar… the only McCarthy I’ll never reread.