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Prowler wrote:Schools shoving books down kids' throats doesn't really help turning them into readers, from my experience.
I'm familiar with all of these. Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield were running in the newspapers when I was a kid. (Garfield still is.) The others I didn't start reading until college (unless you want to count the translated excerpts of Astérix which appeared in our Spanish-language learning materials in high school.)Prowler wrote:As a kid, I read nothing but comic books and strips. Grew up reading my parents collection of franco-belgian comics. They own every Astérix and Tintin book to date. As for comic strips, I read my brother's Calvin & Hobbes strip collections. He owns every strip in book format. My mothers owns this big book that's a collection of Mafalda by an Argentinian cartoonist known as Quino. You might have heard of it. Also read a lot of Garfield, but that one was always easy to understand even as a small kid.
In the USA, comics were long regarded the way video games commonly are now: violent juvenile entertainment which rots your brain. When my father was growing up, the only ones he was allowed to own were Classics Illustrated, since at least those introduced him to "real" literature. My grade-school teachers simply disregarded them entirely. We had to give regular "book reports" to class on books we read, and I don't recall anyone attempting to give one on a comic book. It simply never would've occurred to any of us.Prowler wrote:A lot of times though, I've noticed that teachers, the ones I've had, at least, came across as elitists to me when they talked about comic books. Okay, I get it they were trying to tell us that we should value novels and such more than comic books. But it was almost as if they disregarded them as a form of literature.
The old man and the sea was the only Hemingway I actually liked. We had to read For whom the bell tolls for class sophomore year of high school and it nearly caused me to flunk that quarter. Never heard of Nat Hentoff before; he seems to write mostly about jazz.Prowler wrote:The Old Man and the Sea? I don't even know what made me give that one a try. But I was like 13 at the time. Too young to find it anything other than boring. I remember enjoying a novel by Nat Hentoff titled This School is Driving Me Crazy, though. That one was read by many people at school here back in the 80s and 90s. My brother had to read it for 7th grade class. Not sure if it's a well-known book by well-known author, though.
I don't understand people who don't read. I mean, I get that some people don't enjoy reading, but I find that baffling in the same way that I'm baffled by people who believe in pseudoscience or love talking about cars.Prowler wrote:Of course, there's always those people who read the occasional book... too bad the authors they like turn out to be Nicholas Sparks or Clive Cussler. Dan Brown is very popular too, ofc. And many people have read Harry potter books or even TLoTR as kids.
It's probably the only strip that I both read faithfully and can remember both the birth and the death of. I don't think anyone has captured the mentality of an imaginative child more perfectly than Watterson.Prowler wrote:Calvin & Hobbes is a timeless classic. Naturally, as a kid, some of the humor went over my head.
By the time Zits came out, my 10th high school reunion was around the corner, so it never had much resonance for me. I could relate much better to FoxTrot, since I had both a sister and an annoying little brother in my family.Prowler wrote:In my teen years, I was introduced to Foxtrot and to Zits. The latter was quite easy to relate to when I was a teenager. In Foxtrot there were teenagers, but since the comic strip wasn't about being a teenager, I couldn't really relate to the characters in that sense.
IME, if you don't read long-form texts (fiction or non-fiction), then you don't really know how to read at all. I meet too many people for whom "reading" seems to mean "perusing until you get bored". They glance at articles but don't finish them and often show a shockingly poor understanding of what the author's purpose or salient points are. It's a mindset which is so far from mine, I literally can't comprehend it.Prowler wrote:As for people who don't read... they might not read books, but still read magazines, newspapers and news articles on the internet.
Varislintu wrote:The names characters had! (I was also fascinated with how "Swedish" the names sounded. I mean, 'Mandorallen' and stuff. )
Johanna wrote:Varislintu wrote:The names characters had! (I was also fascinated with how "Swedish" the names sounded. I mean, 'Mandorallen' and stuff. )
In the Swedish translation of the Elenium and Tamuli trilogies they had to change the name of one of the main characters because of that He used an actual Swedish name, it was just that the character was a knight in training, and later a knight, and the name in question was Berit
For those of you who don't know Swedish, that name is a female one, and not particularly badass or elegant either, when you hear it you think of the woman behind the desk when you visit the tax agency or a cashier or similar.
The name used in the Swedish translation is Beril, which we think sounds completely different and much more fitting for a fantasy story.
linguoboy wrote:I don't understand people who don't read. I mean, I get that some people don't enjoy reading, but I find that baffling in the same way that I'm baffled by people who believe in pseudoscience or love talking about cars.
Prowler wrote:people who can only talk about cars and sports aren't exactly the most interesting individuals out there.
Yserenhart wrote:People who can only talk about languages also tend not to be the most interesting individuals out there. Same goes for anyone who can only talk about one thing.
Varislintu wrote:A bit of a hard question, since I guess children's novels don't really count here?
vijayjohn wrote:Varislintu wrote:A bit of a hard question, since I guess children's novels don't really count here?
I don't see why not.
Levike wrote:My case is more simple, I never got into literature and never will.
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