@mathyone: someone actually messaged me asking for advice on developing CR skills, I don’t understand why. Maybe I reported here that I was actually one of those kids who continually played hooky, too much videogames, and was depressed for much of secondary school and all of a sudden, weirdly enough, a 800 on CR and over 720 on the math section showed up when I took the new SAT (writing was atrocious). It was far too late for me to care about school and college, though, so here I am, dreaming of whatever “Cblue” may mean as an older student, and it’s my story that makes the person who messaged me interested in me.
One problem with fantasy novels, though, is that part of good CR skills is being able to read what you dislike, and being able to read it well. For instance, during SAT prep, I read a completely disgusting passage about a middle-aged mediocrity of an academic, and I got multiple wrong answers because it was just so distasteful to me. If you’re Jewish, and you’re doing courses on the Holocaust, you may be required to read Mein Kampf, and being able to read it critically and effectively is necessary to doing well on the course and mastering the subject.
Fantasy novels are the same way, they can help build a habit of reading, but since they are “easy” or fun reads, they don’t help build a habit of reading stuff you don’t like.
I myself have this problem. I have an omnibus of Jane Austen on my bookshelf, and while I was able to get through Sense and Sensibility, being guided by the foreword suggesting that I read it in terms of a Romantic or a Dionysian disposition (Sensibility) in contradiction to Sense or an Apollonian disposition, I think Austen is a judgmental b---- and someone who doesn’t think enough; while she’s obviously intelligent and an astute critic of her social circumstances, she is pleasant and she doesn’t rail about it; she’s not enough of a feminist and thus it’s painful for me to read her and I have to force myself through.
I think about Ba Jin, for instance, a Chinese writer who complained often about the family. In one of his novels (and I deliberately flipped to the back, translated novels are often unreadable, but Chinese translations are worse than others) he wrote an invective against the traditional Chinese family, and in the final scene he has one of his characters storming off in disgusting, remarking that “the family” killed “her”, probably some critical character.
It’s brutal, and probably lacking in craft and tact, which is why I didn’t read the rest of the novel, but sometimes I wish Austen would go ahead and drop a bombshell scene like that and get your blood pumping. It reminds me of something Anthony Burgess once wrote in an essay about gender in fiction-writing about how Jane Austen, or perhaps Virginia Woolf, is immaculately mannered and talented, but as a hot-blooded male he would like to, in a literary sense, of course, seize Austen or Woolf and have his nasty way with her.
But I go on and try to read Jane Austen, no matter how much I may dislike her (the wit that Austenites celebrate to me is mere sauciness).
If you think I’m some kind of robot trying to sell and advertise education as a method of producing drones, I’m completely the opposite. I love literature (Kafka, Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryu, Mishima, Oe, Mann, Camus, Houellebecq, my brief reading of Mo Yan, although I prefer Yu Hua’s surrealistic pieces, Burgess, the single chapter in Moby Dick by Melville where he all of a sudden, in a famously dense and self-indulgent tome, mentions that “nothing happened today” and goes to the next chapter, leaving you scratching your head, Fitzgerald in parts, although the fact that he’s part of the canon has diminished my appreciation of him, Twain, etc…). However, my experiences as being a flower-power unschooling hippie kid has shown me that to get the most out of life, you need to work hard when you’re a child, to the extent of denying yourself a childhood. All across the world kids do this, and even in America people work their asses off. The point isn’t necessarily to become yet another mediocre drone, or protect yourself from the terrible possibility of losing your social class, but so that you become well-educated and industrious enough that you have power. Otherwise, all your dreams, no matter how beautiful, are impossible; the Chinese, or perhaps it’s merely Lu Xun, claim that if you have an unhappy childhood you are guaranteed a happy adulthood (in my own practical experience, this isn’t guaranteed; unhappy children sometimes grow up to be serial murderers or just suicide, but rarely is the high achiever someone who has never experienced some form of trauma or dislocation).
So what I am doing is rejecting my own childhood values in favor of something more Victorian, a trend that I suspect is common among members of my own generation.
I’m really digressing, though, but it’s really therapeutic after a bad day. The imperative to just read, imo, scares me. It often ends up with kids who read Game of Thrones or Harry Potter and never go further than that; it makes them readers, but not necessarily good readers, and definitely not complete readers, because they need to be able to engage with high-literature and analyze it to be fully competent. In Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, you can read critically, but it’s not necessary to your enjoyment of the work, whereas say, Finnegan’s Wake doesn’t even make sense without either annotations or an English degree, and both Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Lolita (which, despite its salacious reputation, is statistically analyzed as the favorite book of high scoring SAT takers above the 1800 level. Not child-safe, or at least parental guidance required. Will impress your teacher, though) cannot be read literally to get the most enjoyment out of it (Humbert Humbert, for instance, is a metaphor for the corrupting influence of words; he’s a poet, a silver-tongued narrator, but a pedophile, a mental-patient, a child-molestor, and a madman. It is a testament to Nabokov’s skill that we are so often able to forget these salient facts).
The other thing, as I told the person who asked me about it, is that you do not want your child to read or misread Ayn Rand and become a selfish narcissistic Objectivist, not even a Nietzschean. You do not want your child to read or misread Camus and Sartre and embrace their philosophy of radical freedom and become irresponsible louts. You do not want your child, as I did, to become enamored of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi and explore all the fascinating ways Taoism can ruin your life. Reading, when unguided and overly restricted, can lead people to read a few books and become in Mencken’s words, “the intellectual slave of a long-dead German philosopher”, who is sometimes a proto-Nazi. Where do neo-Nazis come from, anyways? At some point, they come into contact with that particular corrosive literature, and you do not want this to happen to your child.