Though I dislike the idea that it's OK to be stuck in poverty because you'll get your reward in heaven and you'll be doubly blessed etc.

It's a cop-out, that's why. Both narratively AND in real life. Real-life people living in poverty don't dance for joy at the idea that one day they'll be in heaven, not when they haven't had a real meal for days.

Narratively, it's bullshit because it offers no resolution beyond a 7-year-old's "....and then they all woke up, and realized it was a dream!" Kid do that when they've written themselves into a corner; putative adult writers have no excuse for falling back on it.

I'm not going to suggest that people who hate Moby Dick suddenly start liking it especially if somebody ruined it for you by forcing it on you. But there is stuff to love in it. And, possibly a personal character flaw, but I love encyclopediac novelist, the ones who thrown in peripheral diversions. I love when Melville pauses in a whaling tale to tell you more than you need to know about whaling just for the sheer joy of the description. I love when Thomas Mann stops in the middle of his novel when his character checks into a hotel to spend a chapter telling you about the art of hotel keeping. But hell, I also like (not love) the endless travel descriptions in Tolkein. People find pleasures in strange places, Buffistas possibly in stranger places than average.

There have been some unfortunate choices for high school books. I don't understand why you would submit the age group most likely to commit suicide to Ethan Frome.

One of my favorite explanations of tragedy is in Roller Skates, one of my childhood favorites that is still wonderful. Lucinda's Uncle Earle has been reading Shakespeare to her, and says he thinks she's old enough for a tragedy. She asks what the difference is.

Uncle Earle explained briefly. A comedy was a happy affair wherein all ended well; a tragedy ended with catastrophe -- death. There were violent conflicts between people in tragedies; they made mistakes and you followed them through to their bitter endings. But ...in fine tragedies, such as the Greeks and William Shakespeare wrote, what happens must be inevitable -- unescapable. It must make you feel right about the ending. And great tragedies must have beauty in them; otherwise what's the use!...

Think of everything that happens in the play as adding up correctly to make the ending, just as if you were to take 5 and 2 and 6 and should add them up to make 13. Right! Well, that sum was inevitable."

So the problem with Romeo and Juliet is that 5 and 2 and 6 somehow wind up a few numbers short of the full sum? Good to know.

(Man, I hate that fucking play.)

I teach "The Odyssey" but it's to seniors. But I do use the honkin' Fitzgerald version, and make 'em read the whole damn thing. There's just so many things in there to learn that will help them understand other works and it's got some pretty basic human issues in it.

Plus, I gotta give some props to 5 years of Latin. Amo, amas, amat!

I can do some Hemingway shorts, but I held a fiery unrelenting hate for him and for Russian authors after back-to-back Hemingway and Russian Lit units my senior year of high school. I had just learned the words "phallocentric" and "misogynistic" and they colored everything. I blamed everything I hated about Hemingway of misogyny and the fact that his mom made him wear girl clothes for a really long time.

The Russians...well, I am going to give them another try, but I'm going to wait till winter. For some reason, I just can't give 'em another try in summer.

I STILL can't hear "Laura's Theme" without a sick, shuddery feeling. WHY did they pick Dr. Zhivago? And then I chose "The Gulag Archipelago" as my independent book for that unit. No wonder I discovered underage drinking that spring.

I'm not going to suggest that people who hate Moby Dick suddenly start liking it especially if somebody ruined it for you by forcing it on you. But there is stuff to love in it.

People find pleasures in strange places, Buffistas possibly in stranger places than average.

Heh. Too true. I certainly don't have a problem with other people liking, or loving wildly, a book that I dislike. Just because I don't like (for instance) Moby Dick doesn't mean that I think that everyone else should dislike it, too. I say rock the hell on with the white whale. Or stately, plump Buck Mulligan.

Just afford me the same (or inverse) regard: just because you (I'm using a general "you" here; this isn't addressed to Typo) like something, don't tell me that I should, too. Or that I'm ignorant for not liking it.

On the other hand, there's a whole lot of Dickens that I completely adore -- in particular the great monster 900-page late novels Dombey , Bleak House , and Our Mutual Friend. (The order switches, with BH usually in the lead until I pick up OMF again). All of those manage the whole scope from commentary to characters to just... damn.

Amych is me. Dombey blew me away when I first read it.

Think of everything that happens in the play as adding up correctly to make the ending, just as if you were to take 5 and 2 and 6 and should add them up to make 13. Right! Well, that sum was inevitable."

Just like in Nilly's evil dictatorship!

So the problem with Romeo and Juliet is that 5 and 2 and 6 somehow wind up a few numbers short of the full sum? Good to know.

I recently read a fascinating article [The American Prospect, I think?] comparing the depiction of (juvenile, melodramatic, shallow) love in R&J with (mature, real) love in Antony and Cleopatra that made me want to reread both. Actually it was a review of a philosophy book that contained this discussion, but the book itself seemed way above my level.

What is the appeal of bleakness?

It's been so interesting seeing everyone's answers to this question! And I'd imagine many of the other librarians on our board might feel the same way, especially those of us that do a lot of reader's advisory (essentially, librarian lingo for "recommending books").

I had a long conversation with my dad last year about why we read, a topic that's endlessly interesting to me. I'd been reading a lot of books for work -- decent, enjoyable books, lots of YA fare, but nothing that had struck a chord with me in a while -- and was trying to understand what I needed from books that I wasn't currently getting. Anyway, my dad (who reads widely in, let's call it literature and the classics) said that he often reads to see the world from another point of view; because that experience of getting inside someone else's head can be both fascinating and even pleasurable, even if the subject of the book is bleak.

For myself, these days, I read to be transported, to learn something new, to meet new characters and discover new worlds, to escape, to remember, to experience joy, to experience sorrow, to find out what happens next, to feel comforted, to feel challenged, to be amused, to see beauty, to appreciate craftsmanship, and--like my dad--to understand another point of view, and for so many more reasons besides. Hmm, and looking back over that list, maybe it's time for me to finally tackle Moby-Dick!

I remember a Shakespeare class in college where we discussed how R&J was structured so that up until Mercutio's death, it could have turned into one of the comedies, and even some of the devices at the end (the missed communications and the fake/real poison scenarios) were classic tropes for comedy. I think I would have liked it better that way, and I've always been curious if it might have started out as such.