This is depressing, isn't it? My son really and truly absolutely despises reading anything except the manuals that come with his video games and messages from his friends on AIM, and this year in Eng Lit class he had to read Beowulf and Great Expectations, and he really enjoyed both of them. Not that he's the stick by which all kids can be measured or anything, but there is hope.

I can understand children not seeking out the classics on their own at the younger grade levels, but hopefully once they've been exposed to them as required reading for school classes, they'll continue to read them for pleasure.

Yay, now it's America's turn to laugh at the British for being ignerrant!

Sorry, I've spent too much time at Mefi. I enjoyed Austen, Shakespeare, and Dickens when I was a kid, but then again I was nerdy and spent many lunch periods in the middle school library before I started hanging out with the soon-to-be-dropouts.

People in every country are ignorant idiots. Except to the Ukraine, where comes from the Olena, which is pronounced like Olena.

LOL!!!

Over 4,000 schools accepted the gifts, 100 said they were about to close down or didn't have a library (that's more then twice the number of schools who didn't want them). What exactly is the problem? Sounds like the book publisher wanted a little publicity, so they made up some awful story OMG SCHOOLS DON'T LIKE BOOKS.

Plus I'm with the kids, classics are boring. Especially when you're a kid. Let 'em cut their teeth on stuff librarians look down on; at least they'll know how to read once they're older.

Many of them are ludicrously, excruciatingly boring.

Pride and Prejudice? That has exactly how much cultural relevance, now? Red Badge of Courage? Soldiers and Civilians?

Great books. Truly. Ponderous. And weighty. Like so much cultural baggage - the greatest sin of Western Thought of all: Unbridled guilt and remorse, unabashed nostalgia, the stilted, tightlaced land of the what-ifs and could-haves, the Burden of Leadership and Authority - the lamentations and crocodile tears of the Great, All-Self-Important Subjegator of All Mankind.

I digress.

So many of them are textbooks on how not to live your life. Sometimes I think youth need more textbooks on the many varied ways in which one can and should possibly live their lives.

I suppose it depends on the context in which they are presented. Why must we read some of these particular books? I can think of many other which I found more rewarding, fulfilling, enlightening and otherwise edifying - teaching the same important messages.

Recently I divested myself of a great number of weighty classics - all classic HMCO slip-covered hard cover editions, many fabulously illustrated, though growing worn.

I'd been carrying them around for years, assigning a sort of false weight and importance to them for reasons that were never clear to me. "But they're the classics!" my subconscious guilt prodded me.

"Yes, but why?"

Silence. Truly. You should all know me well enough by now that I do not ponder on literature lightly. I'm not being dismissive or glib.

They've lost all cultural relevance to me. And I think this is a fine thing. I think it means I'm evolving.

I'm certainly not advocating an ignorance of history. But I question if there's a better way than making hypermedia-saturated kids wading through dry, musty "classics" is the best way, or the most constructive way, or even the best message we could be sharing in a time of limited opportunities and an extremely competitive idea marketplace.

Why do we assign so much importance to some of these books? It feels rote and dogmatic to me.

"Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and JR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings" were not written in the same english language as spoken today in either Britain or the states. Not even Hemingway's use of english is comparable to modern english. Further, assigning Achebe is nothing more than a PC gesture; "Shit Happens" is not literary by any stretch of the word's meaning.

As for "ugly", here is a picture of the books in their slipcovers.

Everyman's Library, btw, is Random House. What marketing idiot decided Hot Pink was a suitable color for the cloth binding? Scarlet, my left butt cheek.

Here's an interesting link: "... seminal Russian works, including Boris Pasternak's classic Dr Zhivago, to be dropped from the essential reading lists for 12- to 18-year-olds"

"Why do we assign so much importance to some of these books?" Because the publishers no longer have to pay the overhead of intellectual property taxes. heheh

mischief, I would call that a gorgeous raspberry pink. I love it.

As far as the classics go, meh to most I had to read in high school.

I also had to read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Siddhartha in high-school. The mention of JLS makes me want to gag a million times over. This particular teacher was paranoid and too hippie-dippy. He thought all Republicans had guns stashed in the trunks of their cars. He went on and on about it.

In between reading The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Lord of the Flies, and Hamlet my twelfth grade English teacher read The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis aloud at the end of class. Now that's good reading.

Pride and Prejudice? That has exactly how much cultural relevance, now?

Dude. For anything meaningful, it's full of relevance! On class, family and relationships, Jane Austen is as relevant today as ever (in Britain, at least).

And who says "relevance" matters?! Psshaw! </Grumpy old man before his time> :)

Actually, a great author for kids not interested in the "classics" is P.G. Wodehouse. As well as being hilarious, his novels are full of fantastic prose.

Raspberry pink sounds good, but you still won't catch a 13-year-old boy reading it, no matter how much of a dork/geek he may be.

"Jane Austen is as relevant today as ever" - An accurate statement but only because she wasn't very relevant in her own day. As Mark Twain later stated, "Jane Austen? Why, I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book." I think perhaps these librarians took his words to heart.

If relevance does not matter then any well constructed prose would certainly suffice, but why teach kids irrelevance when so many graduate to adulthood with no comprehension of, say, floating mortgage rates, just to pick a concept at random.

The (slightly) fuller Guardian article.

For pleasure/leisure reading, I'm totally in the "let 'em read what they want, as long as they're reading" camp, but I don't think the classics should be shunted aside in the classroom just because kids think they're boring. Recent movie adaptations of classics in current everyday English are certainly popular, so the unpopularity of the books stems more from the way the language is written, not the stories and themes. A good teacher can make them more palatable, and to be honest, kids think a lot of things they learn in school are boring.

I don't understand why there aren't more graphic novel adaptations of the classics. I'd buy them and put them alongside my novelized versions. In particular, I saw this cover and was so disappointed when I realized that only the cover was in graphic style, not the contents too.

shakespeare? dickens? tl;dr. i couldnt/cant bare to sit thru that shit. (unless it was required.) just tell me, in five pages or less, the general gist of the story and whatever relevant morals or lessons i should learn from it, e.g... star-crossed lovers, their feuding houses, etc... it all leads to tragedy when the kids, fearing each other dead, commit suicide. the families finally make amends, but at what a cost! dont waste my time with mind-numbingly verbose descriptions of how the feather-like clouds seemed to hang overhead in the midsummer's afternoon sky like a bird's feathery feather; gently plucked from a bird and hovering aloft in the firmament during the clear early evening hours in the middle of summer. other days, the same clouds would appear to billow with large white puffy billowiness, not unlike the billowing puffiness of something similar, such as large, white, billowy marshmallows.

i pause momentarily before pressing the "preview" button. several thoughts cross my mind... should i edit the post? make it more readable? isn't it rude to waste other people's time? perhaps i could present my ideas more consisely? ...that is to say, in a more consise manner. (afterall, it's not like i'm getting paid X¢ per word, here.)

"nah, fuck it," i say to myself. and with the click of a button, my moments of self-doubt (along with my original train of thought) evaporate... *poof!* like white puffy wisps of sublimated marshmallow, fluffering and feathering like tufts of condensed, bird-like waterdroplets suspended in the large dusk sky.

I hated most of the books I had to read while in school and usually didn't finish them. But I have always come back to re-read them in the years after I graduated. And I know I have enjoyed every one of them as I read in my own time, as opposed to being assigned a completion date.

My library now contains 'classics' like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dostoyevsky, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, tons of John Steinbeck, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as many other books I was forced to read in school. I love having these books, I love having read these books. And it is kinda exciting to read Shakespeare and understand what's going on.

I've always enjoyed these more than the writing that goes on today. It seems that a lot of today's mainstream fiction is just mindless reading. So I'd much rather read 'classics' than a whole library of John Grisham. I need books that make me think.

I fell in love with Oscar Wilde in high school, but that's about it. Most of the classics I didn't read until my twenties. And I think I appreciated them better for it.

Poetry on the other hand, I'm kind of glad I was forced to read because I never would have sought it out alone, and I discovered how much I love it.

mischief, I actually have some of those books, I think it's a red that didn't photograph well. They're all in very traditional primary shades.

I love all those "boring" books.
But then, I spent several years and a lot of money reading those books (and not doing that pesky math, which is why I don't have a BA in reading now).

I find this sad.

This is sad. You don't put these here for the video game kids, you put these here for the few kids who have a curiosity about these books. Libraries are the last bastion of education. Don't leave them to the lowest common denominator to choose the stock, especially school libraries.

I didn't have to read many classics* while in school and I'm try to read a few here and there.

*The only three I can remember are Lord of the Flies in my short fiction class (I loved it) and the Iliad and the Odyssey (hated them) when forced into a college prep course.

I love books and wanted to love my jr . high and high school teachers, but didn't. I didn't get around to reading Jane Austen until I took an extension course at UCLA and had someone from Virginia (the second best after a Brit) teaching the class--she had a description of a toddler throwing a shit fit in Sense and Sensiibility that is still accurate today. I never clicked with Thomas Wolfe(or with Michael Chabon today)--I guess it depends on the author.

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Robert Louis Stevenson, baby. Sit a boy down with Treasure Island, and he will not be bored.