GOAT books for me as a kid

I meant in that video, when they throw water onto him thinking it will wake him up, but he is sucking air unconscious and he starts choking.

phantom tollbooth a contender for the best book ever without harry potter in the title

i had a crazy goosebumps phase where i read almost one of those each day. Cant say I remember anything from the stories, but I remember it being pretty captivating.

yeah when i was around ten i would keep getting them from the library and read all of them in order. i even kept a checklist

roald dahl and phantom tollbooth obv elite reading material for children.
i'd like to point out the existence of the multiquote button
50 item lists with one item per page can go **** themselves.

think i disagree with 50 though. movie was pretty disappointing imo.

dfw commencement speech was awesome.

to wayside school, phantom tollbooth, and encyclopedia brown.

Both of these. I think I got to about book 45 in the series before I stopped reading them.

Wayside school A+. I also loved incognito mosquito books, the Bruce Coville (book of monsters, book of aliens etc), and baileys school kids.

Think reading got ruined for me when I had to read the secret garden in 4th grade for a book report.

Roald Dahl was great. Danny the Champion of the World so elite.

I would probably pay a decent amount to see a forum full of it people, engineers, and finance majors discuss classic literature.

in high school they made us read a bunch of terrible books and annotate them. we were expected to have notes on every single page. it was awful, i just highlighted random lines and scribbled words in the margins but while doing that couldnt remember anything i read

i used cliffs notes for the horribly boring **** they made me read in high school like return of the native, ethan frome and tale of two cities.

which reminds me, to that saul bellow essay that get linked earlier. i always wanted to yell at my english teachers that not everything has to be a goddamn symbol.

guess im the only one who thought the dfw speech was all kinds of meh. ya, youll be miserable all the time if you dwell on all the bs u gotta put with in live and hate everyone around you for various reasons so its better to focus on the positives or at least learn to ignore as much ugliness and annoyance as possible. most ppl learn this pretty damn quick.

anyway, mostly feel sorry for ppl that dont like to read. its a bit more engaging and active than tv or movies while still being more convenient. it gives your imagination and perspective more details but also requires you to construct more details and ideas. often provides more insight. and grasping the insight tends to be more rewarding via books.

the way to parse literature taught in schools is ldo horrible - if it doesn't strip you of a love of books and turn it basically into math-for-novels, you must've had lazy english teachers.

One flew over the cuckoos nest is my best forced read.

not an expert, taking a stab.
It's hard to specifically explain what I get out of novels. Simple descriptions fall short; the best way that I can compare how I'm hit the best novels (e.g. Infinite Jest) to other artistic fare is that is that the best novels just have a full extra dimension. My best guess is that some of the experience you seem to be missing from art, in general, has to do with mindfulness.

If you're looking for music or art to be, essentially, simply functional - to raise your mood, teach you some specific lesson, or just entertain you for a few hours - sure, fair. That type of stuff is all well and good, but I also want something more. A transcendental state that I can't get through most media, one that's difficult to reach in most areas of life. To be fully engrossed by what's in front of me, to be in awe of the universe that's unfolding. When wrapped up in great art, the boundaries of the art become the boundaries of your universe, and that's a tremendously liberating and thrilling feeling, one worth actively seeking out.

I'm engulfed by a great novel, and, when I come out, it's with fresh attentiveness, a new lens on the world, and a renewed sense of mental vigor. The whole experience once engrossed is the return on the time "investment" it takes to become engrossed, but it's never failed to be an amazingly worthwhile investment for me, and it's one I should be making more often. It seems like an inability to reach this type of mindful state may be what's hindering your conception of the value of the novel as art form (or of the value of art, in general.)

this all sounds fairly pretentious on the page and is in addition to/in complement with the type of stuff victor said, which I also agree with, but it's my best shot at presenting the case to you, at least in reasonably condensed format. you read novels because a ton of them are great art; you invest yourself in discovering what, for you, is great art in search of this type of experience.

This seems pretty universal, which is insanely ******ed, because it more or less made me stop reading for pleasure in high school. Like, I probably would have hated Catcher in the Rye had it been assigned reading but I loved it since I read it on my own. **** high school English straight in the ass basically.

We had to read Catcher in the Rye twice in high school, the second time specifically looking for deeper symbolism. Die die die

forget all the books we read in hs, Sound and the Fury was pretty awesome though. Don't think Catcher in the Rye has aged all that well.

@Dean again: I'd also second all the recommendations to try out short stories. There's some great stuff out there.

For real. Holden Caulfield tops my list of fictional characters I'd murder.

Yikes @ reading The Sound & the Fury in high school.

lol at you fish who actually read everything teachers "required." Only book I remmeber kinda liking was Huck Finn.

High school especially felt too old for it to fully resonate on some level. We read it like immediately after The Great Gatsby, which is obviously awesome, and the comparison didn't do it many favors.

AP Lit, senior year, private school. My English classes were all ****ing awesome in high school tbh, school had elite English teachers and I had four great ones in a row.