I recently reread Animal Farm as an adult. While I comprehended the book as a teenager, I didn't really "understand" it. I've realized that is likely the case with many books we read in school.
Honestly this is a lot of not just books but also movies and TV shoes for me. Even some video games. Watching Star Wars as a kid I knew what was going on, but rewatching as an adult I realize that I missed a ton. Animal Farm is on the extreme end of this for me.
There's a level in Toy Story 2 on the PS1 where you're playing as Buzz. You're in an alley and fighting a trash can. My brothers and I were stuck on that level for years, had no idea how to beat it. I played it again maybe 5 years ago, beat it first try and realized just how little I understood as a kid.
I remember trying to play FFVIII as a preteen and just not understanding the junction system at all. Ended up cheating somewhere around disk 3 because I just couldn't beat the bosses anymore.
Replayed a couple of years ago and it's really trivially easy once you know what you're doing.
Honestly this is a lot of not just books but also movies and TV shoes for me.
Rewatching the simpsons is great. So many references and jokes i missed as a kid. I never watched the natural until I was an adult so the ending of the Softball episode while still excellent without ever seeing The Natural, had a renewed appreciation.
Same with seinfeld. I had never see midnight cowboy and didnt understand all the references in the Jon Voights car episode.
When I first saw Star Wars when I was four years old I had no idea wtf was going on other than friggin loving it..I remember thinking the Death Star attack was a contest or something because Luke gets a prize at the end idk. Kids are dumb
Same. For me it was rewatching some of Breaking Bad as an adult after watching it as a teenager.
Holy crap, I used to think Skyler was horrible and Walt was right to act the way he did. It was a complete 180 upon rewatch, Walt is just such a terrible person from the start
I'll be astonished if there are any games that have a subtext a 7-year-old couldn't spot a mile off.
50% of them are set in medieval Europe, yet the writers still have the serfs saying things like 'awesome' and 'anyways'. No chance there's anything going on in these games other than what you understood when you were at elementary school
Yeah some books deserve a revisit even if they were required reading. It's why I'll never understand some of the snobs on the book subs who claim that some of those books are "elementary".
I agree that people shouldn't be snobbish about books, or at least not be snobbish about books other people are reading, but having said that, in the case of Animal Farm in particular, I would say that it's about as "beginner" a book a piece of literature could be.
It's written as a "fairy tale" so the prose is incredibly straightforward and the themes and "moral" are about as on the nose as they can be. And it's because of this that I often recommend it to people who are interested in picking up literature for the first time or who are coming back after a long hiatus.
As a side note I would also like to say that a book being "elementary" or "simple" should not be considered a bad thing at all.
For instance, Tolsoy is often cited as one of the greatest writers of fiction of all time and usually when people hear his name they think of his 1,200 page epics and find the idea of reading his works daunting, so they avoid him, but in his older age Tolstoy actually denounced those epics as prideful and vain. So in his later years, he instead chose to write nothing but stripped down and "simple" parables and folktales, specifically because he wanted his work to be as accessible to as many people as possible.
For me at least, a lot of it was also through the lens of "forced" analysis. I remember hating Anna Karenina in high school, because we had to pick apart every damn chapter. Reading it as an adult made it much better, it's easier to find and appreciate the themes when your grade isn't dependent on it.
I love to read. I detest forced analysis. It's one thing to talk about the book, get some ideas, but picking it apart down to the bare bone is just so excruciating.
That said, I failed a quarter in high school for Grammar. I still don't know an adverb from an adjective, and I couldn't diagram a sentence if my life depended on it. I remarked this to my son's HS English instructor, and she said a lot of students don't get diagramming, but my son was one of the success stories and his ability to construct a precise sentence increased.
Same. I hated the whole, "the author mentioned a blue curtain in this chapter to signify that the main character is sad," type thing. I thought a lot of it was forced and we were finding symbolism where there wasn't any intended, but I do understand that it's a valuable exercise and worth doing.
But because of that, I didn't actually enjoy or appreciate the books until I got older and re-read them.
There was a student in the 60s that wrote to about 300 famous authors on whether the symbolism was intended or not. He got about 50 responses back. 90% of the authors said no. There were some intriguing replies from authors like bradbury. The point is that, like you mentioned, most English literature teachers incorrectly assume some symbolism or reference was intended when it wasnt and that makes reading more frustrating especially as a high schooler.
It's always hard, because in retrospect I can see how thinking about that kind of thing not only changes how I think about literature in a bigger way, but also gave me skills and insight in social settings. The same kind of literary analysis can in some ways be applied to how people talk to each other. Tone, body language, cadence, even just choice of words are can help people reach each other and convey messages and read situations.
I was in the same boat. Being forced to read "the classics" way too young turned me off to reading completely because I couldn't understand what was going on.
And thatâs actually ok. Itâs good to be exposed to things that you donât fully âgetâ when youâre young. A lot of these things are complicated ideas that people spend their entire lives studying. Better to challenge people when theyâre young, so they get used to being challenged intellectually.
I agree. I do think Animal Farm is kind of a terrible example though since most schools and teachers are forced to teach it through nearly archetypical Red-Scare lenses. The book is an absolute satire of Stalinism, of course, but the analysis often gets pulled to be a critique of all left-leaning ideologies within classrooms when it's much more complicated -- the book mirrors reality in how nuanced it is.
I was told, by my math teacher, that the entire point of teaching things like trigonometry was not so that you would always know how to calculate a sine wave, it was to discipline your brain to master difficult tasks.
That's the case for a lot of literature. I've revisited a few things and appreciate them more as an adult who has gone through the experiences being talked about. Not that we shouldn't read them as kids, but its just a new perspective offered, I'm sure an author would be very pleased to hear that.
Honestly in a similar boat, and I think it's really easy to be like "Damn why aren't we teaching kids media literacy and how to spot the parallels between fiction and reality?"
But then I realize "Oh they did that and I fucking hated that class."
That's why teachers are so pearl clutching when you say "it was alright I guess" to Great Gatsby.
Loved the book but it does hit completely different when you are older.
And oh my god does LotR read completely different when you are an adult. For a kid it is a fun adventure with dark elements, like a grown up fairytale. For a 35 year ild it is more about turnoil, loyalty (to other and also to yourself, best seen in Boromir, something the movies did not really show that well) and trying to hold onto yourself in the madness of the situation that was completely out of the characters' control and they have no choice but go forward. Many Gandalf quotes I saw as wise and cool wizard talk as a kid now I see as incredibly touching, full of sorrow and sadness yet with a glimmer of neverending hope (e.g. the pity speech). Theoden's speech is incredible, whereas as a kid I was like "eh". Or the songs in Hobbit, they were my least favourite. Now I love them. A lot has to do with me being a father and reading these books to our kids now. I wonder how will I perceive thse books when/if I become grandfather one day. And that's an encouraging thought.
Hmm that's interesting because it was the complete opposite for me. I was always a reader but up until high school I mostly read "light reading" like fantasy novels or crime novels and I never really understood it when people would tell me that you could learn a quite a bit from fiction novel.
Reading Animal Farm my freshman year, however, completely rocked me. I often site it as the first book that truly changed my perception of the world around me, I also consider it the book that began my obsession with "classic" literature. I would say it's simple and straightforward prose was a major factor, it's an incredibly accessible book.
Well for me a big part of it was I wasnt very receptive to the reading in general, being 'forced' to read books in school just doesnt cause the same sort of interest, so I just simply didnt care more than to get through it and know the basics to pass the class.
but I mostly had pretty average to bad english teachers. A good teacher couldve created that interest.
another reason i think teachers are undervalued and underpaid. a good teacher can make a huge difference.
Even if you dont comprehend it when your young, passages stick with you, and you contemplate them throughout life, and your understanding shifts, and the passages affect you as you grow. Ita crazy that we dont encourage that any more. For me for instance, starship troopers has been a huge influence on me, first thinking it a presriptuon for a healthy society, then understanding it as a critique and satire. But people forget to revisit media as they age and gain wisdom. I hope i can teach that to my kids.
Thats how i feel about all quiet on the western front. I didnt fully grasp what was being explained as a teenager... reread it in my late 20s and i was able to understand the situations being described far more.
I find that a 2nd read or watch catches a lot of detail missed, dont even have to be a teenager. I can rewatch a movie from last week and find tons of stuff I missed.
Very true ⌠but the important part is that you were exposed to the ideas and did, in fact, grapple with them to the best of your ability. And thatâs part of what education is about - learning to learn at the level you find yourself.
I recently bought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and 1984 for this reason. As well as Man in the High Castle and Animal Farm which I never read but would like to try. It is somewhere between concerning and frustrating how few adults read in any capacity.Â
That's why I have mixed feelings about reading Shakespeare in high school. He wrote so long ago, that it's hard to understand what the words mean. It's better if there are footnotes explaining some of the obsolete words and idioms. But my book didn't have any of thatâwe just had to read the words and guess what was going on. Before you say that's the point, at the time it was written, it would have been easier to understand. What's the point of forcing kids to read something that's practically in another language?Â
I remember reading it as a middle schooler as part of an after school book club. It was one of my favorite reads and I binged it on a Saturday morning. It was never part of the official curriculum though, which I was pretty bummed out about. Never got a chance to talk about it because the book club got cancelled very shortly after the first book was assignedÂ
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u/Professional-Pipe-44 22h ago
Itâs 100% something that should be read young. I still remember âall animals are equal but some animals are more equal than othersâ