>finish book>go online to read what it was really aboutis this normal?I don't have media literacy genetically
>>25595040what books are you reading that are obscure allegories for something else?
>genetically You don't have media literacy cause you outsource it to some guy that might be wrong and just tried a little harder than you. HAVE YOUR OWN THOUGHTS EVEN IF THEY'RE "WRONG!' ARGHHHH MY VEINS ARE BURSTING FORTH FROM MY SKIN AND THE TRAILS OF MY VITALITY DRIP TO THE FLOOR AS I WALK TOWARD THE ABYSS
>>25595049Rainbow Fish
>>25595054But then everybody here has a meltie when someone makes a thread "misunderstanding" Steppenwolf
>>25595040I look like this and say this
>>25595054i do the same as op while recognizing it as bad. i can sit for an hour and think what the thematic connections are between different scene, and what the ending signifies, and not really get anywhere. and then i can look up a very basic interpretation, and use that to build my own thoughts on. i might disagree, or want to be more nuanced, but that foundation is still what takes me there. sure, maybe if i read a thousand books and spent ten hours with a notebook after each one, i'd develop something resembling basic literacy, but that's not gonna happen anyway.
>>25595098same, I think beside IQ, for me it's also due to ruining my brain with being an extreme night owl + weed, 15 years of this leaves you in a neither here nor there kind of state. also i dont put in the work, cant tell you lies
>>25595093Let them melt. We all do in the end.
>>25595040you will be alright just continue reading
>>25595098Oh damn a whole hour?
>>25595098I relate to this. Personal half baked theory of mine is that it's a combo of having high enough intelligence that you don't have the false confidence of an idiot, but the other other half of that is that one might also be an insecure loser, and those two things combined make one not confident enough to form an opinion. Over time this gets more and more baked in and we essentially become stupid... we just took the long way. If youre a social successful person with an iq below 120ish then my theory falls apart.
>>25595159Crab bucket lookin ass nigger
>>25595169I'm being a dick, but what I'm getting at is to try harder. Literally the opposite of what you're implying.
>>25595040I like to read the plot summary on wikipedia and the TVtropes page. when I'm done with a good book just to summarize everything. I don't think reading evaluations of a book's themes or underlying message is in and of itself a bad thing, especially because it can help you to better understand books, but you shouldn't put too much emphasis on it, and you shouldn't use it in lieu of mulling over the themes yourself. Supplementary reading, essentially.
>>25595181Oh. Well I'd say an hour with zero progress at a theoretically easy task is probably an indicator of what the next hour would have in store. I get your point though.
>>25595185But how do you cope when the Wikipedia summary is wrong? Do you doubt yourself, or do you doubt your ability to fight an Edit War to correct Wikipedia?
>>25595190No one can understand everything about a novel/book worth understanding in an hour. It can take years and plenty of AHA moments reading other works it was alluding to. It's more beneficial to do the work of understanding on your own even if it takes longer. The more you do it the more you might realize how differently you actually feel to what the guy outsourced the thoughts to had to say about the work.
>>25595040Some interpretations are obvious, some are less obvious can actually change how you view the book (Confidence-Man, Bartleby, Magic Mountain) and some are just straight up bogus. There is no gold standard for this, some stories are just more interpretable than others, while other are more straightforward. It's not a question of difficulty either, Gravity's Rainbow is very straightforward in its messaging (CIA niggers glow in the dark), while the actual act of reading the book feels like a vague dream you can't quite interpret.
Whatever meaning people seem to agree exists in a book is not necessarily meaning in that book. The points an intelligent and well researched critic has about a book are not necessarily the meaning in the book. There are many cases where what an author thought the book is about turns out to not be what the book is about. What you're looking for is assembled in each reader's mind individually. There are some minds that are better than others, some interpretations that are more correct than others. But this doesn't mean that being a good reader has to include an ability to actively identify and then be able to communicate what you got from a text to another person, or even to yourself. That's separate. You are a good reader when the literal and/or aesthetic and/or notional aspects of a book take firm root in your mind and your mind meaningfully interacts with them. You can mask not having this with theory or wide shallow reading or having a knowledge of common criticism, but those people fall like wheat in front of a schythe when confronted by someone with an honest question who has read the book more deeply and fully than they have. Even if they don't appear to fall they fall. The world has plenty of people who wear the costume of a reader who have never actually read a book. Even as children their professor Dad or 2nd grade teacher Mom said to them before the story was read what themes to look for, paused on sentences to try to tease out their own understanding of authorial intent in their kid before the story was done, who corrected impressions they didn't understand when the kid provided them. All human beings fear death and are nauseated by meaningful uncertainty. These things cannot be removed from a conscious, mortal mind. If something in a book takes hold of you take hold of it back. The uncertainty about if you have understood will never disappear completely, but it will lessen as you and the book grow closer, and this growing closer is what real reading is.
Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was a-couching his Iliads and Odysses, had any thought upon those allegories, which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer, as the Gospel sacraments were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, though a certain gulligut friar (Frere Lubin croquelardon.) and true bacon-picker would have undertaken to prove it, if perhaps he had met with as very fools as himself, (and as the proverb says) a lid worthy of such a kettle.
>finish amazing book>immediately start reading a new book>forget about the previous book
