As KIDS, that's what PhDs are like?

I t heart Amy. I get it. Like, how could you have been a kid and never read at least one Encyclopedia Brown book. I am not a big mystery reader and even I read Encyclopedia Brown!

Maybe she is out-genreing kid's lit as not broken down into further sub-genres?

Moreover, if you had to take an survey classes, how did you do Victorian without Robert Louis Stevenson or certainly Arthur Conan Doyle (in addition and alongside, of course, Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Carlyle).

Or she could just be one of those people that is proud of stuff like that, like the people that "don't own a TV."

Bleak House is also in some ways considered the precursor to the detective novel.

As KIDS, that's what PhDs are like?

Did you see The Squid and the Whale? Some families are like that, where only serious literature is condoned or worth discussing in the house. And some kids don't read for fun at all, but get into a fairly academic approach to literature as early as Middle School, which continues as college prep in High School.

I remember Rebecca Lizard talking about how unbelievably liberating and eye-opening it was for her to discover fan fiction online. How it was so different from what she grew up with and was exposed to.

What megan alludes to with this:

Most people there didn't get that at all. Not just the romance thing, but that I'd want to read for fun.

is what I'm talking about. It's a huge cultural difference and, frankly, its the reason there have been some very heated discussions in this thread.

The academics I knew didn't read for fun. Or their idea of fun was parsing Ulysses text. They were usually precocious readers of "high" literature from an early age and their idea of pleasurable reading was locking themselves in their bedroom for a weekend to read War and Peace. (Something my first girlfriend did every year for her birthday.)

You should have seen when I wanted to teach a class on bande dessinée, or anything heavily based in pop culture. There are a lot of departments out there where that is really frowned upon.

Some families are like that, where only serious literature is condoned or worth discussing in the house. And some kids don't read for fun at all, but get into a fairly academic approach to literature as early as Middle School, which continues as college prep in High School.

I guess you know a lot more academics than I do. I don't know a single person who was raised that way.

I'm going to remain surprised that Raq's step-sister has never read a mystery, though.

I do know people who were raised on serious books and only read "literary" novels and nonfiction. Some of them talk about reading like it's a dose of medicine.

I guess you know a lot more academics than I do.

Well, some but I don't know if I know more than you. That was just what I felt in college, and how my professors talked about their educations.

What megan is describing is what I experienced. Reading wasn't a matter of fun or pleasure. It was a tool for deeper inquiry etc. And that approach preceded college. I mean, I read more novels the year after I got out of college than I did at any point in my life because I was so hungry to read for pleasure and read what I wanted.

Anyway, a lot of people don't come to Ph.D.'s in English because they love reading. More often it's because they love studying and researching the subject.

I've never read anything by Agatha Christie.

Also, David, you should at least read And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express. And maybe The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for good measure.