Something Thoughtful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

                        CAN YOU READ REAL NOVELS?

I don’t know if you saw some weeks back an article written in the Listener by a woman called Leah McFall. She was amused by the fact that, whenever she is traveling in a plane, people are surprised that she would be reading a book. Others would simply be watching a film or scrolling their phones. Reading a novel is not thought of.

Isn’t it true that reading real novels [not kiddies books, not short stories in magazines] has become passe? Yes, there are still many novels being published and many readers, but not as many as there used to be. Why should this be so?  Obviously there is for some people the lure of movies, television and phones to be scrolled… but this leads to not reading long books and especially not reading classical books [by which I mean books written in the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th  centuries]. In the United States, it has recently been shown again and again that students who come to university to study the humanities now find it difficult to read full-length novels, whether it is Harvard, Princeton or any other illustrious university. Previously students had to read at least one full-length classical novel each week, and then critique it. Now this is seen as too difficult for the students. And two things happen. A: students look up  synopses of the book rather than reading the book; or B: lecturers give them “notes” about the novels rather than reading the book.  Recently I came across an essay written by a young woman, an American student, who was deeply upset that her tutors said you didn’t have to read any book in full because it was too difficult. She thought that she was being cheated.

Alas, this is not only an American phenomenon. It is seen in New Zealand and elsewhere. Some many years back, when I was a high-school teacher, I went to a teachers-only day in which we were to think up ideas to help teenagers understand literature. One bright fellow said that reading can be too difficult for teenagers, so what you should do is pick a novel that has been turned into a movie, show the movie, then give the class some notes about how the movie was different from the original book. See folks – you don’t have to read the book at all. All of which means that many school-children grow up thinking that books are boring anyway… and literature in unimportant. Wonder why, in Auckland’s University, few people now choose literature as their major?