Oliver Twist | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Getting Lost In The Classics

Over the past few days I’ve found that one thing just leads to another when it comes to the classics. One book I’ve been reading, Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, led me to reconsider a reread of some of the books I read many years ago, in the hope that I’d find something different, and maybe something more, than I did when I was twelve, or sixteen. Quite frankly, I thought maybe I needed the break. Some of the characters and situations I’ve been encountering in genre fiction recently have been really annoying, and it’s hard to enjoy a book when you want to shake the characters, or, alternatively, the author. I remembered loving Dickens, so I found myself a copy of Oliver Twist (which is free on Kindle, another benefit of many of the classics). And even with background knowledge of Dickens, I might very well have been stopped by his style and vocabulary in the first few pages if I hadn’t been determined to read it. I might add that Dickens’ dislike of the British workhouse system and treatment of the poor results in such heavy-handed sarcasm that anyone who didn’t understand what he was trying to do would be completely baffled. So I get it. It can require guidance to read one of these books, and persistence. It’s not necessarily easy to get into the flow. When Kelly Gallagher writes about teaching reading in a critical sense in his book Readicide, this is what he’s talking about. Some books are worth the effort. You CAN get into the story, but you need help to get through it.

What reading the classics SHOULDN’T mean is that they’re taught in isolation from context, or taught as a means to an end. As I was looking through my library’s catalog to see if it happened to own Tales of Mystery and Imagination, the Poe book with the terrifying illustrations that I wrote about previously, I discovered that while they didn’t own that particular collection, they did own the Kaplan SAT version. WHAT? I guess it’s one way to learn vocabulary, but what a turnoff. You don’t need Poe to learn vocabulary. And that’s not the reason to read him.

There are so many versions of Poe’s work, including student editions like this one, which unobtrusively provides help with words kids might not know, with a focus on the STORIES, graphic novels like this one, and awesomely illustrated ones like this, all of which give their readers compelling reasons to master Poe’s language and style without getting beaten over the head with the test practice opportunities his work may provide. You can memorize words and their definitions all day long if you want but you might as well just memorize the dictionary in that case- for understanding (which you’ll need for those analogy questions) and for enjoyment, wide and deep reading are what’s necessary.

You might need a push and a little guidance from someone else to get going, but promoting Poe as vocabulary practice for the SAT? That’s not how they’ll grab you. Once you get past the first words and start to feel the terror in the beating of your heart, you won’t rest in peace until the tale is done.

Is This Really A “Dramatic Advantage” For Ebooks?

I’ve seen this a couple of places now, and I just don’t understand it. First, Alan Jacobs wrote about how easy note taking is with his e-reader in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and now an article by educational technology and literacy expert Jamie McKenzie is suggesting that ebooks enhance the reading experience by a.) making note taking easier and b.) using the web to explore topics that intrigue the reader in the midst of the reading experience.

First, I just don’t find it as easy to keyboard notes into the text with a touchscreen or highlight with my finger as I do to write or highlight by hand. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but hunting and pecking on my smartphone or ereader is frustrating and distracting and I’ve been known to just skip over taking notes or writing down questions while reading ebooks. Highlighting is equally frustrating for me- it could be a lack of coordination but I never seem to be able to highlight exactly what I want- I get extra lines, or miss words. It’s a complete disruption for me. I don’t think it’s just because I’m a digital immigrant- I asked a recent college graduate about this, and she had the same issues. If this is frustrating for me, an adult, then what would it be like for kids? As for browsing through the Web to explore words and ideas that I encounter when I’m reading, that doesn’t mean to me that it’s so much an interactive experience or an “advantage” as it is a distraction from the narrative. I think it’s great to have that as a resource at hand if necessary, but to browse further and further away from the book without actually interacting with the text you access doesn’t seem like an advantage… it seems like a reason you might never actually finish the book. Because, as Alan Jacobs notes, we do live in an age of distraction, which can make deep reading difficult indeed.

Jacobs’ argument for the advantage of ebooks over print is, in fact, that ebooks (or at least Kindle books) enable concentrated reading because features like Web browsing are difficult to access, and (at least in Kindle books) the lack of page numbers means readers are less likely to flip back and forth. I tend to agree with this so far. I haven’t been tempted to leave the text to browse the web (but this could have to do with both the kind of reader I am and the kind of ebooks I read) and the location numbers that the Kindle uses make it very difficult to go back. I find the second more annoying than advantageous because I read very quickly and one of the disadvantages of reading quickly is that I end up skipping over sections of text that I need to understand the story going forward. But the lack of page numbers does mean that you keep going forward, and since you aren’t cued by the physical length of the book as to how much more there is to read, you are more likely to keep going. When you’re in the flow, which happens easily when there are no defined physical limits, it’s hard to stop. If you love being swept up in the story, that’s a definite advantage. Unless you’re like me, and reading is like an addiction, where setting limits is REALLY important (especially when you’re reading, say, Outlander).

Speaking of Outlander, there is, I think, one advantage that I have discovered ebooks have over physical books, and that’s flexibility. In reading Jacobs’ book, I was convinced to turn back and look at some of the “classics” that I hadn’t touched since high school. It was a lot more comfortable to reread Oliver Twist on my smartphone than it would have been to carry a clunky physical copy around- Dickens was paid by the word, and his books aren’t short (and neither is Outlander– you could break your wrists carrying around the physical copy). It’s also probably unlikely that I would have sought out a physical copy of The Canterville Ghost after seeing the movie (with Patrick Stewart as the ghost) as it’s a very short work. But it certainly is well worth a read!

Well, now I’m rambling a bit, so to return to my original point- is it really a “dramatic advantage”, as McKenzie describes it, to be able to wander away from the book in midstream, even to explore the events and ideas you encounter? In my personal experience, no. Is note taking and highlighting easier and more organized? Well, my experience is that it’s not easy enough for me to discover whether it’s a better way to organize my thoughts. Do ebooks, as Jacobs suggests, enable more concentrated reading at a time when that’s becoming more difficult? I think they can, and that’s an overall advantage for readers. Can ebooks encourage us to try new genres, different lengths of texts, or more challenging works? I think so, if we consciously attend to what and how we read.

But when it comes to really paying attention to what’s between the covers, I’ll take the physical book, pen and highlighter in hand, thank you very much.