Reading Strategy Help? This Book is Ridiculously Boring...
Ah, August, the month to do all of your summer schoolwork that you haven't even touched yet.
For European AP History, I need to read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester.
David Copperfield is actually a good book. It's really long, but it's deep, the characters are good, and it's a page-turner sometimes. Get past the length of it, and it's a good book. I've been reading it a lot in my spare time.
On the other hand, A World Lit Only by Fire (I'll save you the trouble of googling it) is the most rediculously boring book I have ever come in contact with. Being only 200ish pages long, you'd think it wouldn't be that bad. Oh. My. God. Seriously, just read the first few pages (which is all I read before tossing it on the floor) and it's literally (sorry Hammy) like a bunch of words just barfed onto the page. I can't read it. I can't. It's not that I'm lazy, I seriously cannot read anything this poorly written. It's jammed with way to much information; it's like reading a list of facts.
After 15 and a half years on this planet, I know that if you are not interested in something, you're not going to be able to deal with it easily.
Any ideas for attempting to read this and actually remember anything about it?
As a side note, there's a 'Tube video of the book being burned! :O
For European AP History, I need to read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester.
David Copperfield is actually a good book. It's really long, but it's deep, the characters are good, and it's a page-turner sometimes. Get past the length of it, and it's a good book. I've been reading it a lot in my spare time.
On the other hand, A World Lit Only by Fire (I'll save you the trouble of googling it) is the most rediculously boring book I have ever come in contact with. Being only 200ish pages long, you'd think it wouldn't be that bad. Oh. My. God. Seriously, just read the first few pages (which is all I read before tossing it on the floor) and it's literally (sorry Hammy) like a bunch of words just barfed onto the page. I can't read it. I can't. It's not that I'm lazy, I seriously cannot read anything this poorly written. It's jammed with way to much information; it's like reading a list of facts.
After 15 and a half years on this planet, I know that if you are not interested in something, you're not going to be able to deal with it easily.
Any ideas for attempting to read this and actually remember anything about it?
As a side note, there's a 'Tube video of the book being burned! :O
Comments
I mean, I would've read it, but somehow my library didn't have any copies available until the day it was due. What kind of class assigns a book you have to find yourself?
Also, I don't think I ever finished Fahrenheit 451, despite taking several tests on it...
I think I only knew one person who finished the whole thing. Everyone else, including me, read maybe 50-100 pages (out of around 200), gave up, and then looked on Amazon book reviews to sort of BS the paper we had to write. There WAS no sparknotes for that book, I doubt there is now either.
In the end, the teacher obviously realized that no one read the book based on our horrible essays, and I don't even think she ended up giving us a grade on it and just gave bonus to the kids who actually wrote a decent paper. My point of this whole tangent is... hopefully it's not THAT bad. Another horribly boring book is The Scarlet Letter. Blargh. Maybe you'll get lucky and your teacher will come to his/her senses and think "Now why would I EVER assign something as dull as this??"
My attempt at helpful advice: if you REALLY REALLY can't read it, go with Sparknotes, make sure you can pass the little tests they have on the site, and maybe try to find something on pinkmonkey.com that would help. It's ALWAYS best to read the book, but... for high school, most teachers you can afford to read the sparknotes and get away with it.
EDIT: Reading some of those book reviews for Salt, I wish they had been written when I was writing my paper. The ones I was stuck with weren't near as informative.
Advanced Placement. It's basically a college course in high school so I don't have to do it later.
They always have The Thief of Time on there, so I read a Terry Pratchet book that I was going to read regardless of whether it was required or not.
"Students entering AP European History should expect to devote an average of one hour of homework per day to the readings and assignments in the course"
More than you get in Junior high, Haha. And I'm not sure that any D average kids can get into AP classes.
Still, nothing gets you a better grade in high school than making good first impressions with all of your teachers. Once you do that, writing essays are so much easier than if the teacher didn't like you.
On the subject of two or three hour homework loads, thats what I'm supposed to start getting this year from my Electronics class. I remember in freshman year not being able to wait for our academic cycles to end, partly because I would have two weeks of virtually no homework, and now it's going to probably be more.
Bruce/Anybody not familiar with the American High School System: AP is not Associated Press, but rather denotes an "Advanced Placement" class. In conjunction with the College Board, many high schools in America offer these classes to students who show potential in a subject or are just very studious. The classes culminate in the end with a standardized AP test, administered under the guidance of the College Board (who also administers the SATs, which you may be familiar with). The test is independent of the course gradewise, in that one may fail the class but pass the test, or vice-versa. The classes are recognized by most universities, and you can use your test scores as credit in classes that would otherwise be a waste of time for you, since you've just...taken the class.
Back to the subject at hand: I recall coming across a link to a nifty browser applet into which one can paste text. This text is then flashed on your screen, one word at a time, at a rate of about 150 WPM. I think it would be helpful for Carter here, since the words will flash regardless of whether you want them to or not. I tried it out with Hamlet, and could understand it all pretty well actually. If anything it will help him to read through the boring book FASTER, so he won't spend so much time on it.
Does anybody know what I'm talking about here? I can't remember where I saw the link.
Here it is: http://www.spreeder.com/
I remember now, I got it off of Digg. All you need now, Carter, is the text of the book you're reading. Happy hunting with that, man.
It’s the same in Junior High as well. My bro's and angel A+ child, so any teacher that has had him loves me from the start. But in one of my classes it was the opposite. My English teacher (that I hated) loved my writing, and therefore me. I got away with SO much crap in that class! Kids would have to call their parents when they didn't turn in a paper, where as I would say I forgot and she would tell me to turn it in the next day. I also got to retake spelling test (I can't spell) when she said at the beginning of the year, she didn't allow re-takes on spelling tests. I got away with speaking out of turn, bending the rules for assignments, and other similar things. The other kids in the class thought it was so funny that they forgave me for being the teacher’s favorite.
If your feeling bad for her, DON'T! She's the worst teacher I've ever had. And I've had some messed up teachers.
EDIT: the only thing that kills me is the dashes- they put two words into one, and those are the only words that go by too fast to read. Other than that... this is awesome ^_^
In one of my college classes I would end up spending 8 hours every week trying to read 30-40 page chapters. That didn't include the homework time. That class was not the most demanding class I took either. I had figured the number of hours I used to spend on homework once when I had like 3 classes and one of them had no actual homework and anther had relatively little, but the 3rd required a good 20-30 hours a week by itself. Let's just say that learning how to use 3D studio Max in a 12 week class that meets once a week for 4 hours at a time isn't for the lazy. Then there were those summer classes that compress full semester classes into 16 days spanned across four weeks. Ick.
Of course, there exist situations in life where a square peg just will NOT go into the round hole; I don't know if this is one of them.
Edit: I just noticed that one reason can become harder to comprehend in the spreeder is a paragraph change, when the subject changes that fast it stops working the way that should.