Michelle Speed’s, “Kanye West doesn’t read books but he wants you to buy his” is a newspaper article about Kanye’s clear dislike of books and even though he would read a novel, he wrote one. Books “Just be too wordy”. Popular novels like The Odyssey and many others that we are required to read in school are way too long. The Odyssey for example can extremely be shortened. The book is filled with many unimportant details. Novels usually have morals, and most of time you have to carefully read through over a hundred pages in order to under that moral of the story, like The Catcher and the Rye. Time is precious and I am tired of using my time to read through pages among pages of novels until the moral and the whole point of the book is explained within the last couple pages. Reading books in English class may be more pleasurable if the authors got straight to the point and stopped trying to use symbolism to get across their message, for example, Dante’s Inferno.
The world that I live in is filled with people who want answers instantaneously. For instance, when I type a question into Google like, why is reading boring” I want an answer that is two sentences max. The same method works should be applied in books. If someone is having a bad day, they would say to themselves, “I might as well kill myself”, they definitely would not say “To be or not to be”. Some books are filled with so much words or symbolism that I think that it takes away from the whole purpose that the author wrote the book, like the Lord of the Flies. I honestly could not explain the point of the book, because during class we spent about a week talking about all the symbolism. Please, get to the point!
There are other books, like “Of Mice and Men” that contain stories that learn about every year in both English and History class. You cannot successfully complete an English or history class that doesn’t talk about slavery and how “back in the day” children with disabilities were killed or looked down upon. Successful students in today’s world is expected to play sports while being involved in other extra-circular activities, and plenty of community service projects while maintaining a high grade point average. We truly don’t have enough time to read and get involved in a lengthy book, like Crime and Punishment, which probably could extremely be shorted into about five chapters. Books are designed to help pass time. Books are something you bring with you when you have a long flight, when you are waiting for the bus, or even when you retired and you nothing to do besides watch paint dry.
Many books are created from a personal experience from the author. People learn better when they are actually “participants” rather than “bystanders”. Put the book down and go and live. Thank-you Kanye West, you have officially become my role model. I 150% agree that novels “just be too wordy”.
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It's refreshing to see you side with Kanye. Many students might be tempted to write about the importance of reading novels in order to give the teacher what he wants to hear. Others might just want to bash Kanye because it's fun (and easy).
Maybe novels aren't for everybody. Maybe once a student has proven that she is literate, she should be able to choose whether or not she wants to read novels or do other "real" things as part of her education.
This was a very interesting blog post to read. You took the whole article into a completely different way. Even though I do not agree with all of your statements, I think that you presented them in a really well-written manner. I think that symbolisim in books is what makes the books unique and different. The way Dante used symbolism in the Inferno showed a lot of creativity and thinking outside of the box. I do agree with you though on the point of some books like the Odyssey being way to long to say one thing. It makes most books hard to follow and most of the time boring. But all in all i think you did a really good job with this Shanice, keep it up!
ReplyDeleteYour blog post was different than many others that I have read, which made it interesting. I was curious to read an opinion that opposed my own regarding this article. You made some good points in saying that sometimes books are very long and are unclear about the point that the author is trying to make. Many books require you to read between the lines and dig deeper to get the meaning. While this can be annoying, I think it's just part of life. You have to do things you don't always feel like doing in order to learn more and grow as an individual. I also get your point about learning more from people than books. However, some books provide you with things that you would never be presented with in real life. Certain things you would never experience to be able to learn about, which is where books come in handy. Even though we didn't have the same point of view, you wrote a very convincing blog. You did a great job supporting your argument! Keep up the great work!
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