When I was in high school I was re-reading The Elegant Universe when the teacher took it from me

[conuly]

Just for a bit to gape and ask "Do you understand this?", the implication being that he didn't. (I *let* him have it, it wasn't, you know, snatched out of my grasp.)

I just kinda shrugged at him. I didn't see that as the point.

I'm browsing around a bit and remembering that I re-read Emma in Winter a lot as a kid. I never really understood it, but I liked it.

Oftentimes a "kid's review" over at Amazon will whine "I didn't understand it!!!!! And it sucks!!!!" except they'll spell it all wrong and forget to capitalize. They always do this about books I thought at their approximate ages to be perfectly plain and obvious, but... honestly, as a kid I never really thought understanding it was the point. You read a book, you take what you can, you read it again. After you read it several times you understand it a bit more. Sometimes you understand one chapter only to lose it the next time you read it, that happens.

Some books, of course, were transparently easy to grasp. The various series fiction might've been incredibly formulaic, but that meant that you never had to figure them out. The Giver might hit you over the head a few times, but once you stop trying to work out the math it's painfully obvious what's going on. But just understanding a book is not the same as liking it, and the two never seemed (or still seem - I read most PTerry books twice before I really get the surface of them, and that's not even getting into any sort of annotation, but I don't know why this is) to correlate.

Textbooks should be clear and simple, which is why they're so often boring, but book books? I don't know.

But maybe I'm weird like that, and most people value clear comprehension somewhere higher than I do?

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Looking up info on Emma in Winter... I didn't know Charlotte Sometimes wasn't just a stand alone book. I read and really enjoyed that book as a kid, but I don't think I've read anything else by that author.

I didn't always think to look for more books by an author I liked when I was young. Especially because I liked almost everything I read, so I just read what was easily available, which meant what was already in the house. As there were hundreds of books in the house, this worked out fine. (Thousands is probably an accurate statement,)

I should eventually check out some more of her books. Although there are already several books I want to buy when next I have a book buying budget. I have read book 1 in the Farsala series and I have managed to buy book 3. However, I find this leaves me slightly annoyed with my current situation. And then I found another book I read recently is the start of a series...

[conuly]

What about book 2? You need to read them in order.

Emma in Winter is a lot more... mystical than Charlotte Sometimes. Charlotte Sometimes is pretty straightforward.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The store was out of book 2. Thus why I am annoyed. I haven't started book 3... it just sits there. And I used up my budget and I have book 1 and book 3... *sighs*.

[conuly]

That's so friggin' annoying! Ugh! If it doesn't remedy by your birthday, poke me.

[leora.livejournal.com]

It'll be fine. I can fix it soonish. It wouldn't even be an issue, except we halved my discretionary budget with basically no warning. We're doing it to help my housemate pay off his high-interest debts while accumulating no-interest debt with us. Which we're doing because the debt all got created because the cats got cancer and treating it has been expensive. So, we're doing some things to help out. And when I go to buy luxuries... it's hard to do that right now when I think, well, I could buy this thing, or I could put it off and help keep the cats alive, and how much do I value them being alive... and then one of them curls up in my lap and purrs...

But it's a short-term thing. Very fortunately, Lao-Tzu is in full remission and maintaining that mainly requires luck and medicine that isn't too expensive (the luck is really a big thing, but we can't control it). And Mina is now being switched to a maintenance routine since her blood counts are now normal (this is fantastic) and so she's off the aggressive (and expensive) chemo and onto something much cheaper that will hopefully have fewer side effects as we just need to keep her where she is rather than fight back cancer.

So, soon we'll have more of a budget again. In fact, I might be able to do it with May's budget... but I'm getting into an expensive time of year for me, since among other things I want to give my grand-nephew a nice birthday gift once he gets around to being born. (In all fairness, he's not late yet, even though my niece seems a bit eager to have him outside her body by this point.)

So yeah... things got annoying and it meant delaying all luxuries. But I'll get the book. And I have other books to read. I do live in a house full of books.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Mysterious further depths was always a plus for me.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

One of the classes I worked in this week is doing science fiction. Uglies, Maximum Ride 1, Gathering Blue, The Last Book in the Universe, and The Memory Boy.
A lot of the kids I've talked to complained about not understanding, which often made things boring.

[conuly]

Out of that list, I don't know about Maximum Ride or The Memory Boy, but the rest of them seem to be the basic Obvious Message group. (I just now dug up my copy of Last Book. I'm not sure if I'm thrilled or not.)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I told a few confused groups that SF is something you learn to read. You have to get used to the uncertainty. It's mostly entry-level SF, aimed at teens, so that helps.

I have had days where I looked at the available books and thought, "I just cannot do worldbuilding right now." Not all days are SF days.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

As a child, I didn't care for books supposedly written down to my age-level. Quite frankly, as a child I regarded most of my age-level as morons, and thought that the books written for them were dull, saccharine and formulaic. I started reading adult science fiction in third grade, and never looked back.

I believe this complaint about "I didn't understand it" to be school-engendered. What we're hearing is Test Anxiety, a result of the increasingly test-centric school environment. These kids don't like a complex book because they've been conditioned to think that the purpose of reading is to be able to answer test-questions. "I didn't understand it" really means "It made me think, and I'm not comfortable thinking independently because I might be Wrong."

[inboxfive.livejournal.com]

(Hey, I found your journal through the whatwasthatbook community - I hope you don't mind me commenting, I just find most of your posts to be fascinating.)

When I was a kid, if I couldn't understand a book I didn't read it because it couldn't hold my interest. However, I think this was more of a technical grasp of language problem as opposed to understanding of the theme. I tried to read one of the James Herriot books when I was very young (I don't remember the exact age, but probably seven or younger) and put it down simply because it was too advanced for me technically, but read the whole collection later and loved them. On the other hand, I read Animal Farm when I was nine or ten and adored it, even though I didn't grasp ideas and themes that I found in it later.

Same with The Pearl, by John Steinbeck; I read it when I was far too young to really understand it, but I thought it was a good story, and the style was readable. That was all that mattered.

I think I enjoy books more when I feel that I understand them, but provided there's a good story and an enjoyable style, I'm good.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*nods* I agree with pretty much everything this comment says. (Care to be friends?)


I also definitely forced my way through a few books much too young and missed appreciating much about them, but I reread them all later and loved them then.

I do, though, think I know what a lot of those kids mean: I suspect they don't mean "I don't understand" so much as "I can't identify," which was my primary reason for hating books (mostly realistic fiction, especially historical) as a kid and teen (including a number of books I had to read for school). If I couldn't get an emotional grasp on what the main character of a book was experiencing, I tended to dislike the whole thing very much.