Across the board, Australians are reading less than ever before, with young men reading the least and older women reading the most.
The trend is reinforced from a young age, with parents more likely to read to their daughters than sons.
Australia Reads, a book industry initiative, is calling for a national strategy that reminds people of the fun and comfort that reading can bring.
Deceptichum@quokk.au 3 weeks ago
For me personally I blame school.
It went from reading in the library for fun to breaking down texts and trying to make-up some deep meaning for a grade. It destroyed the fun of reading and made it a slog, I've never recovered the passion since.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 days ago
I have to agree with @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network. I have seen the perspective that @Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone, yourself, and others have shared many times, and obviously I haven’t been in your lives to know exactly why you think that way, but I can’t help but think that you they had an exceptionally bad high school English teacher, or just completely failed to understand what your teachers were saying.
You should never be “making up some deep meaning”. You’re reading the text and working out what meaning is contained in the text. This might have been meaning intentionally put there by the author, but it also might have been subconsciously done by the author because of their own life experience and the culture in which they live, or even something that becomes possible to interpret out of the text based on the reader’s lived experience which may not have made sense as an interpretation when and where the author wrote it. Often a combination of all three.
Recognising how a text can contain ideas that carry more meaning that just the surface leaving reading adds so much depth and meaning to them. How a text can actually say something about the real world and the people within it. Reflect our hopes and fears. Reinforce or reject society’s norms and mores.
I’m reading Dracula right now, as part of a book club in !vampires@lemmy.zip, and it’s one of my favourite books because of the many possible readings and themes contained within it. Its commentary on “women’s place in the world” (as @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network put it) is an incredibly strong one. The difference between Mina and Lucy; the one engaged and later married to her one love and completely chaste, the other a rather more sexually free woman (by Victorian standards) who receives three marriage proposals in one day, and regrets “why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” This latter is the one turned into a vampire who, as a woman vampire, feeds on children and babies, unlike the titular male vampire who feeds on adults. But before she is turned, she receives blood transfusions from each of those three suitors. I’m sure there’s no possible subtext in that: the three men who loved her each, in turn, injecting their bodily fluids into her in the aim of giving her life.
And it’s not limited to books. Film and television are literature too. As I write this I’m watching a video (not available on YouTube yet) that does literary analysis on my favourite TV show, Avatar the Last Airbender. A show I love precisely because of how deep and ripe for thematic analysis it is. Earlier today I had a chance to ramble some of my favourite themes at an unfortunately uninterested audience in a thread on Lemmy. Earlier this year, discussion about Star Wars: Andor was very popular because it is full of themes with very obvious applicability today. Heck, learning how to analyse literature can help you better appreciate dumb meme stories shared on the Internet.
If you didn’t learn an appreciation for literary analysis in school, you have my sincerest pity. Because it adds so much richness to the world when you can do it.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
Funny how folks are different. I always enjoyed reading stuff and making up the ways it can mean stuff. Like, it’s easy to read Dracula and think about feminism and women’s place in the world. (a foreign entity shows up and now women are abandoning their motherly duties, wandering the streets at night? That won’t do. Get some men to hold her down and penetrate her with this big wood. Hmm.)
I often find the opposite mode, the absolute refusal to think about the story beyond “some things that happened”, tiresome. Like, “Ok I get that the story is about how they have to remove, possibly with violence, the competent women ruler and put the child boy on the throne because the rules say that only a man can rule, but why do you have to make this political? it’s just a fun story.”
Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
I read a lot of fiction books in my own time when I was in primary school for the enjoyment of it.
When I got to highschool I hated English so much. Analyse what the author’s theme was in this bla bla fuck off! Sucked the joy out of reading. Didn’t give me any useful skills for the career path I was heading in to either.
There needs to be an academic English subject for people who just need it to get in to STEM courses.
Took some years after high school to get back in to it, but I do occasionally read fiction when I have time these days.
DeviantOvary@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
We had that basically from the first grade of primary school. Each month a new book. It started with just summarizing the text, then gradually went from writing what you think the moral of the story is, to giving a full breakdown and analysis. 12 years of that, for the books I found mind-numbingly boring, that I ended up weaseling/cheatig my way through most of it without even reading. I remember giving my best to try read through the entire Crime and Punishment, but giving up 1/3 into the book. All the classic literature—just not for my brain.
Didn’t help that while my primary school teacher had tried to cultivate my creative writing (45 minute, graded assignment), my secondary school teacher was a snob who graded me lower just because she “didn’t like my style”. God, I hated school, lol.
I still like reading modern fantasy and some other genres, so there’s that, but school almost completely turned me off from reading.
Tau@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
You’re certainly right that the way I did it in school felt rather performative and didn’t leave me with positive impressions of the books I had not read previously. I’m not going to say there’s no purpose in trying to understand the meanings/symbolism in a work but it’s not going to make a good impression on someone if that’s their first introduction to the book - or worse their introduction to reading books in general.
Ilandar@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I know it’s almost exclusively negative experiences here, but I do think it depends heavily on the student and their teachers as to whether that type of coursework is appealing. Personally I devoured English throughout high school, it was my favourite subject by far and the only one in Year 12 where I felt empowered, confident and challenged myself. It really established my ability to think deeply about complex issues and articulate my arguments with more clarity (and listen to and engage with those of others), which are some of the most widely applicable and useful life skills I learned in school.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I can report something similar; the last several years of high school, literature class is just miserable shit written hundreds of years ago that seems to be deemed important because the limp dick grey hairs in charge of writing the state curriculum were forced to read it when they were in school, and they were taught not to question their elders so you WILL fucking study this.
Anyone who goes back in time to kill Hitler, could you get Emily Bronte as well?
Baggie@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Fuck me that might have been me as well. Never even considered that.