Responding Better to Literary Reading

flickr-CaptPiper (creative commons licensed)

My students found little of interest and much at fault in the book I recently assigned to them, Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. This has caused me to reflect upon what I might have done better to prep them for a more productive read.

On the other hand, I expect my English major students to be more sophisticated about their reading strategies, and I'd like to call them out on that point. By and large, what my students wrote about Rainbows End has been uninteresting and perfunctory. Their blog posts about the book are mostly personal reactions to their reading experience combined with brief criticism of the book's literary failings. These are not unreasonable responses, just not that useful. I want them to respond better to literary reading.

Now, to be fair, I am encouraging my students to be personal in their blogging style, and I also want them to feel comfortable posting informally -- especially about their reading. And if they post a review from to their Goodreads account, it seems perfectly reasonable that they write a short, candid, personally-oriented response to a novel, with a dollop of aesthetic critique for good measure.

But I had hoped for so much more.

The Self-Directed Student of Literature

I recently completed listening to the audiobook version of a biography of Isaac Newton by James Gleick. I was both impressed and disappointed over Newton's life and his tactics. On the one hand, he exemplified the life of an autodidact, someone who taught himself and was continuously engaged in attentive learning. On the other, he often delayed publishing his work, or worked in secrecy, paying too much attention to issues of prestige and academic politics.

But I'm glad I read / listened to the book, and this has spurred me on to read other books both about the Enlightenment and books by James Gleick. Recommended by a friend, Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is now on my to-read list. I have lots of books on that list, and I face the same problem described by Ben Wagner, that my lists of things to read grow much more quickly than my capacity to read them. (This all started because of a post by Nyssa Silvester in response to an NPR piece about never being able to read everything that you want to.)

So, does an institution direct your reading of literature, or do you?