|
|
|
|
| Google |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
Moby Dick This, Buddy
|
|
 email Michael Z.
 email this story
 print
|
I wasn’t much of a reader in high school, at least not formally. Just off the top of my head I can list at least half a dozen books that were assigned to me in English class that I never bothered cracking the spine of: The Chosen, Jane Eyre, Emma, A Merchant in Venice, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Howard’s End.
That’s not to say that between the ages of twelve and eighteen that I didn’t read.
Because I did read. I read a lot.
Every morning at school, I read the Op-Ed in The New York Times. Every Tuesday I devoured its Science section. Every evening, at home, I read the sports section of The New York Daily News.
I read William Safire and Mike Lupica and Carl Sagan.
If I went to the library I pulled out Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
I liked reading so much that even though money was tight for me, I would spend it on books. I made room in my budget for Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, for Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, for Richard Dawkin’s Selfish Gene.
These are books of fiction and books of war and books of science, and they were all hundreds of pages long, and in an era of video games and television and movies, I read them all.
My teachers may not have thought of me as much of a reader, but I knew otherwise. My teachers could have used me as an example of reading being a lost art among teenagers, that we didn’t have the attention span for it, or the preference for the printed word over fancy special effects—and they would have been completely wrong.
Science is English Too
English became the class where books were assigned, even though the really interesting books had nothing to do with 19th-century English romances. The truly great books I needed to read discussed the human body being a disposable coil for our genetic information.
They were about supernovas being the birthplace of heavy elements. They were about the multi-dimensionalism of space.
They were about Darwin sailing to the Galapagos. And Linneaus breeding his peas. And Kepler stealing Brahe’s data.
These books certainly were written, and they were full of words, and they had sentences and paragraphs, and punctuation, but for some reason, when it was examined whether or not I was a big reader, the conclusion seem to come: No.
He doesn’t like to read at all.
He hasn’t read The Chosen. Or Jane Eyre. He refuses to read Moby Dick and Howard’s End.
I guess he doesn’t like reading.
Sure, the books on science I preferred weren’t fiction, but they went far beyond any scope of imagination a novel could take me.
There is no frigate like a book, wrote Emily Dickenson, but a great book on science surpassed that: it was a spaceship, a starship, a battlecruiser blowing smoke past Pluto.
Take that, wimpy frigate.
Moby This, Buddy
When Melville sat down to write Moby Dick, I’m not sure that he had it in his mind that his book would be assigned to teenagers a hundred years into the future. He certainly didn’t write Moby Dick for teenagers, and no book is ever really written for people a hundred years in the future.
Which begs the question: Why do they make high school students read books written for adults, then wonder why they hate reading?
The same logic would state that because women do not watch sporting events, then they have no interest in television.
Or vice versa: men don’t watch soap operas, therefore television has lost its appeal.
Kids do read. Teenagers read. Adults read. They read a great deal. They read emails and instant messages and magazines and newspapers.
They read about politicians screwing prostitutes.
And one shouldn’t think that because they don’t like to read a very specific type of book, written in a completely different era, on a particular topic that has little relevance to their lives, that teenagers, and children for that matter, don’t like to read.
I’ll offer the opposite. Most people love to read, the way most people love watching television.
So what they don’t like novels. Most people don’t like Charlie Rose or Jim Lehrer.
That doesn’t mean they don’t like television—they just don’t like what’s being offered to them.
To most students who are assigned it, Moby Dick is a largely inconsequential work of art. Even the most generous of literary critics admits that Melville spends too many chapters discussing the trivialities of the whaling lifestyle, such as the hafting of harpoons and the day-to-day activities of a whaling ship.
Later publications would abridge many of these chapters without a corresponding sacrifice of narrative.
Even with these edits, Moby Dick is a challenging book to read, and it’s certainly not a book intended for all audiences to enjoy.
If the goal of English class, and school in general is to instill some love of learning, or more categorically, a love of reading, then it seems a counterproductive exercise to teach a student a love of reading, by forcing them to read books most students could never love.
|
|
|
|
|
Reader Comments
|
|
|
post comment
|
|
