Seriously, this. I can't stand to read "the classics" but I love reading things that interest me. Would be nice if schools recognized that and encouraged reading just for the sake of it rather than forcing kids to trudge through endless stanzas of "ye art incorrect and thou must protest this injustice. Oh Horatio! Oh, lamentation this! Lamentation that!" Like, fuck, I lost the plot 3 pages of lamentations ago.

Just let kids do book reports on Harry Potter (or whatever's cool these days). At least they're reading and their brain cells are firing.

Provided it's got a decent narrator, audiobooks are like literal bedtime stories, and a lot of players have "sleep mode" that will either set a timer or stop it after the current chapter. Seems like an easy way to get people into them, IMO.

I have two of Stephen Fry's autobiographies on audiobook and would basically let his smooth voice lull me to sleep. 😆

I knew someone who hated reading in highschool but shortly after highschool discovered she liked reading for pleasure. She started with books like Twilight and The Hunger Games. I personally don't recommend Twilight but I do recommend The Hunger Games.

Yeah, school does a decent job at putting you off whole genres of things but there's still many things I'll happily read. Classic literature is so dull.

Tbh I hate reading because of school but it's not because we had to read classics, it's because in my school we weren't allowed to read anything out of an arbitrary reading bracket.

Even if you wanted to take home an interesting book from the library you weren't allowed to unless you read all the books between your current level and the level they put the book on. We had to pass comprehension tests to see if we understood the book we just read but we could only do it once a week so going up a single level could take most of the school year.

I think some people are bad at reading through no real fault of their own. Then they feel, consciously or subconsciously, embarrassed and angry when they try.

I also think a lot about a woman I knew that was like "analysis is stupid. Sometimes a story is just a story!", and that was very strange to me. I asked some more questions, and she said she hated how in school they were always reading and being told to find the secret meaning. I was like, your education failed you. The game isn't find the meaning. The game is finding a meaning you can support in the text.

Like, Dracula can just be a book about a dude that bites people. But you can also look at it and be like "hmm so these women abandon their 'motherly' duties of raising children and staying in the home, and the only way to 'fix' them is for some men to hold her down and penetrate her with a big piece of wood? Hmmm"

But, also, you don't have to think hard about everything you read. You don't analyze every TV show, even though you could.

You could convince me that the high school curriculum is designed to take any interest in reading out of teenagers. K-8 tends toward stories that are intended for children to enjoy because that's how child psychology works, but from the age of 14 on up it's crusty old shit written in dead languages or in English so old no one remembers what the slang words mean, about shit no one cares about anymore.

Shakespeare is the classic example. Shakespeare was kind of the Joss Whedon of his day; he not only wrote in Ye Olde Englishe, but he wrote in slangy quippy word play-ey Ye Olde Englishe. Like, imagine high school students of the 2400s taking turns reading the script of Firefly out of a textbook, the kid who got assigned to read Mal's lines tripping over stuff like "And I think you weren't burdened with an overabundance of schooling." 25th century school kids are going to write papers about 21st century attitudes to homosexuality due to the use of the word "sly" in one throwaway line in the episode set in a whorehouse. I really want to hear a 25th century English teacher tastefully describing who and what Saffron is. Then in their Junior year they're going to do three random episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

That's what studying Shakespeare is like in a modern high school. It would blow William Shakespeare's mind that school children in nations that didn't exist during his lifetime are taught what "Romeo and Rosemary begin with a letter" means.

Why do we do it this way?

Some people are hiding in this category as well. I don't trust people who, when you ask their favorite book, tell you it's hatchet, to kill a mockingbird, Atlas shrugged, etc etc. If it was a school read, chances are it's one of like 5 books they ever actually read.

I can understand their attitude, I don't share it but I can understand it.

It is quite hard to try new books when you're not sure what you might like, it is trial and error with each trial requiring a commitment of a few hours.

I agree with audiobooks, they are a easier to get into just because they don't require to stop everything and allow to do other stuff at the same time.

I was a voracious reader but there are so many time wasters now. Well and my eyes are not as good as they used to be making reading sorta a pain.

That's amazing!

Otherwise-smart people who just throw their hands up and say, “I just can’t do this high tech stuff!”

Motherfucker it’s easier to operate than your car, how do you even live

Obligatory answer on behalf of rest of Lemmy: Linux

Just because I'm on Lemmy does not mean I run Linux.

I mean...

I do run Linux.

But it's not because I'm on Lemmy.

(I tried to put this on the Will Smith meme, but my meme creation skills failed me.)

Also in Florida and yes the insect apocalypse is the most ominous sign of doom. And their life cycles are so short, just lay off for a couple of years, they would probably bounce fast!

If it's any consolation I spent some time on a lake in canada this summer, and there is a bunch of wildlife: frogs, ducks, even a loon! And way too many mosquitoes and black flies.

Point being its not quite that bad everywhere

Im a sciencey type but throughout my life I have seen the value of the sciences and very glad my major was in the LAS college.