Speedy Reads

why can’t i stay in bed all day reading books and listening to music while creating fake scenarios in my head like there isn’t a law against it so wtf

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

…………the take on Great Gatsby is driving me INSANE. Gatsby… very much dies. Like. He gets punished by all of his actions and gets himself killed for them. That’s very much the point of the book? Its about how the 20′s was an era when people tried to pretend eveything was fine and great while hiding ghosts in their closets. Gatsby represents everything wrong with 1920′s america. How can you read The Great Gatsby and think its about how stalking is ok? Like, I’m sorry if you are a published author who lacks the reading comprehention to undestand of a book we all read in high school.

I attribute a lot of this to the fact modern English/literature classes don’t teach the thing they are allegedly around to teach: critical thinking. English is increasingly about memorizing superficial details in classic literature, with less and less dissection, introspection, and historical context. After all, which one do you think shows up on standardized tests?