> > Lord of the Flies. If anything needs to be condensed, it's Lord of the Flies. (How DARE they put that rotten piece of *so-called* literature on the required reading list?!?!)
>
> Uhm, why they bother putting 4/5 of the stuff they do as "required" reading astounds me. I can think of very few books I read in high school that strike me as good (I'm currently in college and have yet to take an English class, but I doubt it's any better). Of course, the absolute worst offender, IMO is the Iliad, simply because it manages to make scenes of battle incredibly dull and tedious. And all the "great characters" it has are nothing of the sort; they just struck me as whiny people all squabbling over silly things (and the same thing goes for the gods, only multiplied by a power of 10). But I digress...

Well, here I go again, about to reveal myself as "one of *those* people"...I like the _Iliad_.

I never had to read the _Iliad_ in high school, but I did have to read it for a college class in Ancient Greek history. I found it difficult and sometimes dull reading, but very interesting for the ideas with which it grappled. Achilles, the central character, refuses to join the battle for much of the story because he's trying to work through the meaninglessness of his existence. He realizes that his comrades fight only to enjoy the spoils of war, which have lost their savour for Achilles. He also realizes that the gods exist only to seek admiration from humans, to be seen in their inevitable divine successes, which is also a meaningless existence. Achilles decides that these things are not enough to make his existence meaningful, and the work represents a time in the development of Greek thought, or that of the author at least, when such issues were focal. Anyway, that's the perspective our professor lent to the reading, and that was the philosophical hook that sort of drew me into what would otherwise have been a real chore of an assignment.

Might as well fess up to everything at once; I really liked _Lord of the Flies_ as well, both for its story and for the philosophical issues it raised. I'm interested in the "state of war" which Hobbes posited as the natural state of the human, into which we would devolve if it weren't for the restraining measures of a structured society. LotF really dramatized for me such a descent into a barbaric state.

The same goes for lots of other stuff that I had to read: even if I had to just trudge through the actual reading of a book, I loved picking apart its ideas.

This is more true of my college reading than my high school reading, however. I really don't know whether children of high school age have enough experience to appreciate the discussion of much classic literature. That was one of my biggest handicaps in studying history in high school as well; I just didn't have a well-developed frame of reference that would allow me to understand why such-and-such an event might have been important.

I'd better stop now, since I don't know where I'm going with any of this. Sorry for the big, self-indulgent ramble (which I will nonetheless go ahead and post for the edification of all). :-)

Iss "huh? what?" achar