My dad has had some free time lately and has been looking for some books to read. I recommend things like Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies because I feel he'll enjoy them; the women in my family recommend Twilight. No, don't read that ****! Read something good!
I don't understand this ****ty craze and I know it's only going to get worse when the movie comes out and everyone in my household is going insane.
What I don't understand is why anyone would recommend
Twilight to your father even if it
were good.
Seriously, who in their right mind recommends that book to a fully grown man and working father? That's like recommending
Dawson's Creek to your carpenter uncle because he's looking for a good 'retro-20th century' TV show to watch.* Such blind recommendations are really really really stupid. You might as well lend
The Secret to an atheist.
Seldes Katne said:
I can, however, hope that the Twilight series will inspire people to keep reading, so they can eventually pick up some of the really good stuff.
I don't mean to be Negativity McPoo-Poo-Pants, but this notion that one book will inspire people to pick up the hobby of reading is one that fails too often.
I don't subscribe to the "people are sheep, and what many people like must be crap" theory of cultural consumption when I say that. Rather, people end up reading for a variety of reasons and in cases like Harry Potter and Twilight, a fair chunk of their readers read for reasons other than a love of prose.
What truly inspires literacy is the ability of material to really ring true to why anyone would want to consume in the first place --- to learn something new, to feel something different, to get challenged somehow, to have your beliefs reaffirmed --- and not because "Everyone's reading it, so should you!"
In effect, Twilight and other such books, CAN inspire people to pick up the habit of reading, but only if the thoughts and emotions inspired by such reading, compel them to seek out new ways of experiencing that. The problem is that book reading --- as popularized by the Oprah-style recommendation --- has become a 'cultural responsibility.'
By that I mean that after the first wave of people have gotten into a book, the compulsion to read is driven by a desire to 'keep up,' to not be 'left out' of a mass experience. It's not just a societal pressure, but an internal one as well: 'I must know what this is!'
In the meantime, no one's really promoting a personal engagement with literacy and now only around 40% of young adults in the United States actually engage in any pastime reading. This is not a problem of
Twilight being good or bad, nor is it a problem of people being 'stupid sheep' but a problem in which individuals are no longer able to define their reading consumption because the education and culture has failed to teach them how to.
*
I understand that such stereotyping here is not entirely fair. It is however deliberate for the purposes of the point.
