https://twitter.com/ElloEllenOh/status/1333591475888787457?s=19
1984. You're really gonna make a bunch of teens read about Winston being a misogynist who has a vivid rape fantasy about a woman he doesn't know... and act like it's okay because muh Big Brother. They don't teach teens about sexual violence but make them read about it, why?
1984 wishes it could have the emotional impact of Fahrenheit 451. I'm about to cry just thinking about its characters, Winston can choke. Also all the accurate predictions, lol
Every so often I think about Brave New World and how despite it being an open attempt at portraying a content-stripped, mechanised world where only the shallowest of pleasures are allowed it's arguably better and more meaningful to live in than the current one
I read it as a teen and the only thing I got out of it was that everyone fucked a lot and they appreciated a juicy ass. I was a pretty dumb kid.
All 1984 did was give dumb reactionaries a shorthand for the government doing any activity (except war because that's good and you're definitely not propagandized on that front). Now it's like "they're replacing the curbs in my neighborhood, this is what GEORGE ORWELL warned us about!" Just an awful, awful legacy.
I recently read 1984 and that bit was incredibly fucking gross. Pretty much the first thing he says to this woman, when they finally get away from the surveillance and have a moment to get to know each other, is, "Hi. Only a matter of days ago, I fantasized about brutally raping and murdering you." And she's just like "ok, lets fuck"
That was the exact moment where I went from "ok this is shallow and dull and unimaginative and transparent, but i guess it's not 100% terrible" to "fuck this book"
Honestly this. I'm probably more of an Orwell apologist than most c.c posters, but I don't think that or Animal Farm have ever been presented as anything but anti-communist propaganda in American public schools, and they're admittedly quite fit for that purpose.
Yeah I can’t wait til my nephew reads animal farm for school so I can give him some extra nuance about where Orwell comes from and his role in “anti fascism” so to speak.
Well, shit. I didn't remember that bit tbh
Wait, didn't Orwell allegedly try to rape his childhood friend or cousin or something? I seem to remember hearing that at one point. I guess that might explain his literary tendencies, huh
Man, fuck that guy. I agree with one of the other comments in here, Fahrenheit 451 beats the shit out of 1984, and Bradbury was a much, much better writer overall.
Are you sure, I recall enjoy it and I have to second @Leper_Messiah in not remembering that at all.
Maybe I ended up with a bowderlized version.
She’s a YA author lol. Classics hate is dumb. Guliver’s Travels is one the best books I’ve ever read.
Being forced to read Ayn Rand in school is what pushed me away from libertarianism. You can thank her for being such a terrible author.
i legit thought ayn rands books were ironic like machiavelli. for the longest fucking time. like, into college long time
Railroad CEO walking into a random diner in some town in the middle of nowhere and ordering a burger, then deducing that because the burger was really good, the person who made it must also be a super-successful capitalist who shares her philosophy, and it turning out to be the CEO of Exxon, who'd stopped showing up and got a job as a fry cook because he were tired of paying taxes is fucking amazing.
I'm sorry what.
I've read the fountainhead but I've never done the self harm of reading atlas shrugged, is this seriously a sequence in the book
Yes, other great moments include:
Rand self-insert (Dagny), CEO of railroad company, is dating steel industrialist (Rearden). Then she vanishes to build a utopian ancap society with like 8 other capitalists incl her childhood friend (who was only pretending to sleep with a lot of women and be really bad at business for the past 20 years, he was actually saving himself for someone like Dagny, and tanking the copper corporation he inherited so the govt wouldn't get any value when they seized it). Then she comes back and runs into Rearden and explains she ghosted him to fuck her childhood friend. And Rearden recognizes that they share the same philosophy and values so it's cool. Also both of those characters have non-consensual sex with Rand's self-insert.
The military and a passenger train collide in a tunnel and everyone dies. Rand then goes through each passenger room and explains how the occupants brought this on themselves supporting altrusm.
After the economy collapses from all the capitalists going on strike, John Galt, their leader makes a 30 page long speech to every single person in NYC while projecting giant subtitles in the sky over all of NYC (he stole a machine the govt built to draw a giant calendar over the entirety of NYC). And then everyone clapped and accepted their fate and starved until the US govt collapsed.
There's a pirate who stole a battleship and uses it to level the factories that were stolen from the capitalists by workers or the govt, while handing out gold bars to the capitalists.
My god. The fountainhead really gave me a false sense of how bad atlas shrugged is in comparison. Like there's obviously a bunch of dumb bullshit in that too--another weird non-consenual encounter, Roark blowing up a housing project because he's a selfish egotistical little shit, etc.--but that is at least readable and has characters you can imagine actually existing in the real world, and the message (or at least the one I got out of it) that institutions will stifle progress and innovation for the sake of maintaining power is decent, even if her intention for putting that message in there is to argue that a manchild can destroy housing for the poor because the engineer made slight alterations to his blueprint.
But this, fuck me. This feels like it was written by an alien or a dog or something, a being that isn't human but is making guesses about how humans think and feel about things. I might have to do the self harm of reading this book, I'm too transfixed by how idiotic all these passages are.
bitches be like “who is john galt?” bitch who? speak. spit it the fuck out. what do you wanna say? i’m listening. we’re all waiting, and you’re doing nothing. this is nonsense, you can’t even use words anymore. go the hell outside for once damn, goddamn, get a job or something. idiot.
There's a lot of money pushing Ayn Rand's bullshit, it's not uncommon for schools to end up with hundreds of copies of her books donated.
For awhile there was an objectivist dating app.
Yeah good luck with the Texas state board of education coming up with new canon of literature
I too enjoy long discussions about: how do you behead a whale? Where does its head end and its neck start?
it really does. I didn't even know it was in any HS curriculum
Here's a page from one of her books. Nathaniel Hawthorne isn't my favorite but to say his writing "legit sucks" knowing this is your contribution to literature is... Something.
The random paragraph breaks are killing me. Is this self-published? I feel mean making fun if it is.
Lol I mean publishing a book is at all is hard enough, so I'll give her credit for that, but coming after classic novels that clearly have a lot more literary merit than anything she's done is super weird. Also, "man-skin".
The kind of hubris required to publish something more poorly written than bad My Little Pony fanfiction, and then insult some of the most widely acclaimed literary works in in history, deserves unmitigated mockery.
At least give a fucking reason, what's her beef with canterbury tales?*
lol wat? I didn't even know Steinbeck added a bunch of metaphors like that. We just learned about the history of the great depression, and examined the major themes of the book. I had no idea people had to do deconstructions like it was a Shakespeare play or something lmao
This is a nuclear take (also pretty bad). I seriously have trouble understanding why it is such a big deal that there was a "man eating horse subplot" in Macbeth which you think wasn't going anywhere. In fact, about that, I don't even know what you are talking about, the closest thing I know is literally one off handed version that brings up Duncan's horses going wild and eating each other. That is not a "subplot", that is just dark imagery to set an atmosphere that also serves as a metaphor. I have no clue what "man eating horse subplot" you are talking about, I don't remember such a thing in Macbeth. What a weird take.
...but that wasn't Macbeth's point at all? Like, it was pretty obviously not about how curses are bad or whatever. It's a pretty simple case of "if you're a scheming arrogant douche you will get domed by fate, guilt and madness eventually".
It's so incredibly weird to argue that 400 centuries have passed and he is still appreciated solely because some king back then liked him. If that was the case he'd have faded away long ago, just like everyone else who became highly regarded solely for similar reasons.
It was a story about witches who convinced a trusted figure to murder the king, written for a king who was famously paranoid about that exact situation and was VERY big on witch hunts.
Yeah, but is this what you think the story is about? Beyond that, it was the 16th century, people believed in witches, and they used it as a theme in plays. I guess he's cancelled now?
He seems to be only famous because he’s taught in school from what I’ve seen
He's only taught in schools in some English speaking countries. Ayn Rand is taught in many schools in the US but no one gives even a little bit of a shit about her outside the US. People don't even know who she is, even people deep into literature.
I am looking at this list: https://www.listchallenges.com/top-20-most-taught-books-in-high-school At least a third (probably more tbh) of those most people outside the anglosphere don't really care about and probably don't even know them. Unlike Shakespeare.
So I guess you figured out the horses aren't "irrelevant" or "going nowhere" after all, eh?
Yeah he "only" wrote about witches when the guy who thought they were plotting against him (which BTW wasn't "crazy" in 1600) was in power. Which is, like, half of Shakespeare's career.
Yeah that's also a theme. I guess it's the only theme because you said so.
It really feels like you are trying to find weird reasons to declare him a hack to justify not liking reading about him in school lol
Yeah, has some bad takes in places and there should be some judicious rewrites to the dialogue, but it isn't particularly racist and I wouldn't call Mark "Knife a Romanoff wherever you find him" Twain racist.
He had a leading role in breaking to the public what was going on in the Congo Free State. He was pretty much the only public figure against the Philippines annexation. He paid for African-Americans to go to Yale from his own pocket. He was in general one of the least racist people of his time, despite (or because of) growing up in the antebellum south
Rewriting is bad. Just let it as it is, pretending it is something else is weird.
Dear Adult Harry Potter Fans of Twitter: What anti-intellectual grudges have you held on to since high school?
Stop saying Hemingway is misogyny, guys are allowed to have a couple books. It's the most boring, cliche, take to have. Every Hemingway book, the only characters to have things figured out are the women, the point of have his discography is how much better everything could be if men stopped acting like men. Catherine is a shallow in Fairwell to Arms, that's an exception.
I'll second as I lay dead though, sorry faulkner it was just very boring.
all of those books are good books to teach, if taught correctly.
the issue here is that "reading" education shouldnt be done by assigning one book to all students, but a book relevant to each student individually.
this allows for a larger breadth of experience and lead to more productive discussion of concepts. student a likes their book and suggest students c and b read it so they can better understand suchandsuch topic, turning students into teachers.
unfortunately, standardised education does not have any goal beyond bare minimum regurgitation of accepted knowledge
Catcher in the Rye really, really affected me. For some reason, I still kind of choke up a bit when I remember the part where the name of the book comes from.
