I think this person needs to look up "snob" in the dictionary. From http://etymonline.com:

snob
1781, "a shoemaker, a shoemaker's apprentice," of unknown origin. It came to be used in Cambridge University slang c.1796 for "townsman, local merchant," and by 1831 it was being used for "person of the ordinary or lower classes." Meaning "person who vulgarly apes his social superiors" arose 1843, popularized 1848 by William Thackeray's "Book of Snobs." The meaning later broadened to include those who insist on their gentility, in addition to those who merely aspire to it, and by 1911 had its main modern sense of "one who despises those considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste."

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Doesn't like blue herons? I was fortunate enough to grow up in the country, beside a slough with a resident great blue heron (called a shypoke in the local vernacular; I don't know why). This summer, visiting my parents, we saw that there are now two inhabiting the slough. They are stunningly beautiful birds.

So obviously everything this personage says is tainted by this strange prejudice.

By the way, I am a big fan of your writing (although not an academic, so can't offer any literary cachet), and my 18 year old is currently devouring the Vatta books.

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We sometimes have a great blue heron visiting our place (our creek is seasonal only)...I never get to see it wading (it flies off when it sees us coming) I love watching it fly in and out. One evening it came soaring in over the barn, gliding over our heads and down the gentle slope to the little pond behind the #3 gabion.

So I, too, don't understand not liking herons. Sure, it eats fish and frogs and crayfish and small aquatic snakes...but as Sesame Street says "Everybody eats..."

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Idle hands indeed if you took the time to google and read a speech she gave. I'm just shaking my head over the blue heron comment. They're incredibly beautiful. They always take my breath away. Sure they eat fish. We'd be overrun in fish if something didn't eat 'em sometimes.

But I think you're right about people then thinking they're not supposed to like certain books or they're supposed to like others. And we wonder why so many people never pick up a book after they finish school.

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In Texas, the number one book given as the reason why people quit reading books is SILAS MARNER, which for years was the required novel in English classes in 10th grade (I think it was 10th grade...I'm old enough to claim a senile moment now and then when it comes to when I read something.)

I don't know how many people have said, when I asked "What do you read," that they haven't read a book since SILAS MARNER. Including some who, when introduced to something less depressing and more interesting, started reading again. They didn't know what all "adult" books (using adult in the sense of books-for-adults, not XXX rated) were not as depressing and boring as that one--they gave up. Some dropped out of school rather than face another year of depressing books. (Why anyone would want adolescents, who are already emotionally vulnerable due to their developmental stage, to read depressing stories and books, I don't know--but it seems schools routinely pick "downer" books for teens.)

I knew a woman with dyslexia who quit reading when her teacher and school librarian refused to let her check out books she liked (and thus struggled hard to read) and tried to make her read the books she "should" read.

If I were designing English lit classes for schools, I'd do it very differently. But only once have schools been rash enough to turn me loose with a classroom...

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I escaped Silas Marner, but was subjected to others. Even before high school. The Yearling (Marjorie Rawlings) and The Red Pony (Steinbeck) were particularly painful reads for me in 5th and 7th grades, respectively. Their pets die! I also had to read The Pearl and that was it for Steinbeck. I've never been willing to read him since.

In high school, they honestly thought The Return of the Native was appropriate fare. I never understood Thomas Hardy until I was in my late twenties. Even then, he made me angry. These are not only depressing reads, they're covering very serious topics that require life experience to understand.

I credit my reading habit to my earlier reading when I never read a 'bad' book. My older sisters handed me the best of the best in science fiction and fantasy. And while I also read lit, I read mostly older pieces, like Ivanhoe. Which is depressing. But also exciting and romantic.

What do you remember reading outside of school when you were a teen or younger?

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Steinbeck just about killed me. Someone in my school district must've adored him because we read some Steinbeck every year (I think they may have even squeezed something in to the British Lit year).

The Red Pony. The Pearl. Of Mice and Men. Grapes of Wrath.

mrrrrrrphh. Vicious flashbacks.

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The only book Steinbeck ever wrote with any redeeming value (says a former English major) was Travels With Charley.

Which is too bad, because if the man had just used his talent... [g,d,r]

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Large tracts of Steinbeck's King Arthur were just awesome. He missed his calling, I'm tellin' ya.

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My mother liked Steinbeck's earlier work; I spent a summer in high school reading Steinbeck. Some of it I liked and some I didn't...the man could definitely write, but the literary fashions of the day led him in directions that were, ultimately, of passing interest. He let himself become a "message" writer. My opinion, anyway.

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Ah. Somehow that wasn't one in my college curriculum [g]. Maybe someday. If I run out of everything else to read...

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I don't know what it is with English teachers, unless it's that they had English professors like the one whose opinions started this thread...if you want kids to read (and you should) then you give them stories about things that interest them (for me it was horses and dogs and outdoor adventures), and plots that are positive, not negative.

Books written for serious adults are not suitable for most kids (there are exceptions, and I read serious historical fiction early--because my mother had those novels on her shelf. Still, the description of the kid being walled up and left to die in the priest-hole in _The King's General_ (English Civil War story by Dauphne du Maurier) and the torture scenes in Samuel Shellabarger's French Revolution story (can't now recall the title) were not a good influence on me as a pre-teen and teen.) They work if and only if the child/adolescent is facing the same issues (race, war, death in the family) as the protagonist and only if the book offers some effective strategies. Books written for YA can certainly deal with typical YA issues, but again should offer some hope that these can be survived and coped with--that things can get better.

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As a former English teacher (and current school librarian), I've often gotten frustrated with policies that seem expressly designed to teach all but the most academically adept kids (who can juggle school reading and "fun" reading with ease) to hate books. I personally don't think that literary snobbery among individual English teachers is so much the problem--the problem is an obsession with standards, and test-taking, and making kids read the books that people think they should know for college, and getting things approved by notoriously conservative principals, as well as school or district reading lists, which are often particularly skittish about anything modern--witness the furor that results when popular, contemporary books like Harry Potter are put on summer recommended reading lists. That's not to say that some English teachers aren't literary snobs--I'm sure many are, and even more absorb the mindset about what is and isn't appropriate to the classroom from college classes. But I don't think it is the real source of the problem.

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Ooohhh! Now there's something I hadn't thought about (and since my students show up Monday, procrastination has set in big-time). If we could design an English lit curriculum, what would we put in it? I may have to spend a couple of hours thinking on that . . .

One of my very positive school experiences was in 10th grade English - we read Romeo & Juliet and then watched West Side Story. It was great to see the connections between the two, and how a story that might seem a little distant and old fashioned can be re-envisioned to have more immediacy.

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I had no such positive school experiences in tenth grade.

I'm going to start two new threads, one for "what we read outside of school" and one for "designing a good lit curriculum."

Stay tuned...

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My mom suggested Silas Marner to me as a kid. Usually mom's suggestions were good ones, so I read it. It was an awful awful book, and I've never touched another George Elliot book. The only other real dud was Podakayne of Mars.

She made up for it with Georgette Heyer, Darkover and all the other SF she threw at me tho.

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I've learned that one should regard any English professor who dislikes Shakespeare with suspicion. He (and most other playwrights) had a decided fondness for plot. If said English professor can use their literary toolbox to say *why* they dislike Shakespeare, and can offer up some other playwright they prefer, they're probably ok. If they just dislike an entire major genre tho, it's a good sign that they don't particularly love the study of people writing things down (aka literature).

It's not just commercial fiction that has plot *g*. Thank god.

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Thank you for this post! I am a good reader who enjoys a pretty wide range of novels, but I gravitate towards genre fiction - mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy. I try to be pretty outspoken about it to my peers, because I have so many college educated friends who feel ashamed about wanting to read a book by a popular novelist. They hide them under the bed and fill their "display" bookshelves with the books they think they should read instead of the books they love reading.

I had an ongoing feud with my 10th and 11th grade English teachers over the idea of literary merit. For some reason my 11th grade teacher accepted both Kurt Vonnegut and J. R. R. Tolkien into the literary fold, but that was it - and he insisted that these two authors didn't write science fiction and fantasy, because they were literature, and literature to him definitionally did not include science fiction or fantasy. I tried to get him to read "The Last Unicorn" and he tossed it aside because, and I quote him exactly "unicorns are always male" so a story with a female unicorn was unacceptably preposterous (presumably had the character been a male unicorn, it would have been perfectly reasonable). The weirdest part about this prejudice on the part of teachers is that it is so influenced by the age of the work. Frankenstein is literature, but a Stephen King novel isn't. Thomas More's Utopia is literature, but Joanna Russ's The Female Man isn't. Jane Austen is literature, and so are the Brontes, but no modern female romantic novelists get to be literature. It is unfair. And for some reason if a book is depressing it is more likely to be considered literature than if it is uplifting or funny, despite the fact that I think it requires more skill to write something true and funny than to write something true and sad.

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"Never apologize for your reading tastes." Rosenberg's first law of fiction, from the widely-respected (by librarians, anyway) book Genreflecting.

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Ok, if ummmm, we take a piece of fiction and eliminate plot, what we end up with is a bunch of meaningless encounters that sort of ramble along with no theme or purpose. Sure you can build complex characters and explore interesting and original concepts but you can do that with a plot too. And while I wouldn't call Kevin Smith's movies high art, he does explore some interesting concepts and at times engages in some rather provocative conversations between his characters. He also has a plot. And if we want to rely on high art, if a plot was good enough for Shakespeare, then it's good enough for me.

I read primarily science fiction and fantasy. My father and I have arguments over it because he feels that I am limiting myself and that I should broaden my horizons by reading war stories, or westerns or maybe a mystery or two. I keep telling him that I am reading those, they are just set in an environment that spurs my imagination further than seeing the mundane contemporary world. Most of the books I read, I am happy to say are not only page turners because of the plot, but because they often cause me to ask questions or see something from a particular and interesting point of view. Perhaps they have an interesting character that shows a strenght of character or unusual qualities that we all should strive for.

This woman sounds like an well educated idiot, further proof that a piece of paper is not proof of intelligence.

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When I was a junior in high school, we were supposed to have two quarters of literature, 19th & 20th century. The 19th was ok--yay, Emerson! [In many ways, I am still becoming a transparent eyeball.]

Because I thought 20th century lit would be too depressing, I took a tragedy class. Not only did I get to avoid Faulkner, we read Jean Anouilh's _Antigone_ [which I got to recycle for the independent study French class]. Talk about win-win.

The next year, in Advanced Placement English, we spent 6 weeks with Hardy's phallic turnips in _Tess_. Ick. Now I need something cool to cleanse the palate; fortunately I know this rather prolific author ... ;)

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The posts in this thread scare me .. your educationalists really need to get with the flow from almost anywhere else! No wonder my internet friends from the States only read SF!

We have people like that Prof too, but they are, fortunately, not in academia - they fill up Sunday ABC tv with precious comments about which books to read, thus artificially inflating books sales, influencing Booker Prize nominations and such. Some of the fashionable modern novels are just plain unreadable, but Im not allowed to say that, of course, because they are by current icons of AusLit ...

However, that said, she is also characteristic of post-poststructuralists who delight in word play and challenging the readers preconceptions. Unfortunately their novels often turn out to be more muscular exercise than entertainment (but then, Literature isnt entertainment, is it?). I do wonder what she is reading "for fun" that she cant remember a single aspect of it ... Harlequin books maybe? >:>

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When I run into someone like that (even in print) I start oscillating between fury, amusement, and despair. I tell myself not to be so sensitive to these things, but if I shut off all the sensitivity, then...that's not good for a writer.

My UK publisher is putting out the whole Serrano-Suiza series in omnibus format; I've just reread 4-5, something I haven't done for years, since they first came out. And--though lightning may strike me for saying so--there's a lot in those books. I find things I might change--a couple of instances of multiple uses of a word too close together, a place where a contracted verb form would read more smoothly, several instances of paragraphs of dialogue combined in typesetting so it confuses who said what--but on the whole, those are solid books with complex plots and characterization and a story arc that really does span the series. I'd forgotten a lot of the details (having been concentrating on other things for years) so it was fun to see it all again fresh...and to realize that they were still readable, still capable of dragging me in as if I hadn't written them. (Newly written books can't do that for me, because I'm too close to the construction...)

I still wonder if this is one of those English profs who always wanted to write a book, and maybe even wrote a book, but couldn't get it published.

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