Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2022–2025years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- High school also killed my love for reading. I really regret that I didn't start reading again outside of assigned works until I graduated college. Now I read a pretty significant amount, and it's a joy to me! Something about how school analyzed literature and required you to read what they dictated didn't align with me.
I just finished the Odyssey, a required book in high school, after I previously finished the Iliad, which wasn't required in high school. Reading those two together after reading Stephen Fry's Mythos and Heroes books was a wonderful experience that I felt could have been replicated in high school rather than the whirlwind of bouncing around to unrelated books like the Catcher in the Rye.
- > There being something there for others does not mean that we will get the same thing out of it, or even anything at all if we're not in the right place for it.
Sure, but it's reasonable to want to try, especially for a novel considered by some to be "the greatest work of literature ever written". That seems worthy of investigation at least. Giving up when things get tough is a pretty problematic approach if you want to grow. Whether my objection matters admittedly depends on whether the goal is to learn/grow, but I think there's a good case to be made that it is.
> My point being that the original comment sounded more like wishing to check a box of having read a classic book rather than wanting to approach the book for what was in it and growing from the experience
But the point of being well-read isn't just to complete a checklist. I think you are reading very deeply into something and drawing a potentially unwarranted conclusion.
Everyone I know who reads avidly, and who many would consider well-read, who are even aware of the existence of Anna Karenina read not for the sake of it, but to improve themselves, their knowledge and understanding of the world around them, etc.
I think that's where our differences in this thread are coming from. I'm assuming the whole point is the acquisition of knowledge/understanding, and you seem to be assuming a different motivation, although I'm not entirely sure what that motivation is (I don't think "checking a box just for the sake of it" is a warranted conclusion in context, and "checking a box" is just a rhetorical device to help us understand that this person has a gap in their reading that they haven't succeeded in filling yet). Perhaps they primarily value good literature, in which case having a list makes quite a lot of sense.
If someone expressed the same frustration about the Greek myths, a potentially more productive response would be to point someone to Stephen Fry's Mythos, Heroes and Troy, which he wrote exactly for the reason that this comment thread exists: some people find the original material difficult to get through, but the underlying message was important enough to re-tell.
In the case of Anna Karenina, perhaps exploring the various translations that exist and choosing one vs. the other would be the ideal next step.
