I'm running low on ideas of what to read to my son [7]. We're working our way through the Mr Gum books and if I can't think of something when we're finished my other half will probably subject him to Enid Blyton. We've read The Hobbit and all of Ronald Dahl's books for children but I don't know where to go next, possibly Harry Potter (although I've never read them so I don't know what they're like) or maybe something by Terry Deary as he's obsessed with ancient Egypt. Goosebumps?
I'd be grateful for any tips. Any books you were particularly fond of from your childhood?
>>7725 >The people you're fantasising about being, the sort portrayed by those actors, would have kicked the shit out of you for being a posh poof who plays with toy soldiers and reads.
Never mind that the few of them who survived lung cancer and heart attacks until now will be far too busy on Facebook organising protests against 15 minute cities and the NWO to post on here.
I think you may have missed the context. The writer's intent isn't relevant to the fact that bigots find a work appealing, if bigots find a work appealing regardless of the writer's intent. This may seem like a tautology but the lad who thinks he's a character from a 1980's film has been having trouble grasping it.
JK Rowling is a modern martyr who sacrificed her career to force a certain demographic of women to get a personality. It is only when she dies and her accounts open that we will discover that she lived a double life a ftm Juche activist.
Did she have much of an active career before she started kicking the hornets nest? Harry Potter was rather poorly written but it was wildly successful because of how easy it is to insert yourself into the story and fantasise about studying at Hogwarts. Everything she's tried since, where she hasn't been able to rely on the self-insert trick, has failed miserably; nobody gave a shit about her Robert Galbraith books.
You're also barking up the wrong tree completely, I posted that picture because much like that scene in the film, you are a tourist who doesn't realise how badly you stick out here.
How about you just calm it down a bit from here on in, alright?
I'm not going to bother engaging with you on the arguments you're trying to have, because they are too deeply tedious. But I have confidence you'll snap out of it when you've had your fill of the intersectionalist academic bird you're trying to shag and we can put this all behind us.
Come in late to the thread and trying to catch up...
So the argument here appears to be. Reduction and projection that ignores all nuance is acceptable in order to push mean-world postmodernist morals.
I'm going to take a counter position to denying it's existance. What if two flower is a stereotype of a Japanese tourist. Why on earth should that be a problem? Is observing a real social phenomenon that existed racist?
I understand that (and for the exercise will take this to the logical extreme) portraying for example black people in the media of the 1940s and 50s in America as subservient and ignorant (due in reality to poor education but it is a TV show not a sociology lecture), is very uncomfortable to the people in that group, or people who have guilt over their treatment, but that isn't the same as dolphin rape, in many ways the most uncomfortable parts are the parts that are not mean spirited just a plain observations. I get it, watching ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ makes me wince.
And I guess that is what content warning are at their best about, disolving personal responsiblity from the media you are selling. The thing is writing a content warning is about appeasing and stroking the ego of the sensitive. And consequently people will humour them by telling them they are right, because what does it cost them? The danger is of course that the nod and a wink in subtext to others that you are pandering gets lost or the idiots gain power and start deciding since you said it was wrong anyway censorship is fine. Putting content warning on things becomes the thin end of the wedge for Fahrenheit 451 style bottom up censorship. Content warnings are fine, everything beyond it that it invites is not.
Why has this changed and is relevant now? the argument is usually a moral shift, which it is, but I think the biggest shift it technology, no one would have given a shit what these cunts thought before but now that they are on social media we get to listen to their every outrage till they get bored and move on, and companies listen.
Penguin house at some point decided at some point to weigh the economics of which group they wanted to appeal to more and decided that they were going to take less of a hit from the likes of people like me who consider this ego pandering, and question if it even was necessary, making a rant, but reading the book anyway anyway than they would take the hit from woke twitter. Ultimately they just want to sell some books they don't want controversy (apart from when it is good for promotion obviously). And most of the time it is a cheap win. The only and notable instance I can think of this having a backlash is with the Bud light boycott in the US. It will frame as being fuelled by transphobia. But I prefer to think of it as people not wanting their fucking food to tell them how to think and feel. They want to just do basic things without it being a political statement. And when your product is highly elastic like, being one of many choices of shitty beer, you can maintain a boycott indefinitely because you actually sacrifice nothing by doing it. Sadly one cannot buy a new copy of terry Pratchett without pre-injected guilt so it can hardly be boycotted. it is inelastic. But maybe the lesson from bud light losing billions will be repeated by marketing firms and we can return to guilt-free consumerism again. One can only hope that the transphobes win for the sake of the rest of us.
>>7740 >So the argument here appears to be. Reduction and projection that ignores all nuance is acceptable in order to push mean-world postmodernist morals.
I don't think anyone has said that.
I broadly agree, it's just that culture has pivoted over the last decade or so and it's really a futile effort to argue against it nowadays. What used to be the preserve of the Christian moralist right wing has swung all the way across to being the mainstay of ironically puritan social liberals.
I don't think it will stay this way forever, but it is the current zeitgeist and it's more or less wasted energy trying to convince someone who thinks that way otherwise.
I'm sorry this isn't twitter with a 140 character count. Here sometimes the more mature children like to explore the premise of an argument fully then just make zinger for idiots to bark and clap like seals at.
That is litterally the entire premise of arguing over author intent, about if a character is retrocatively [i]really[/it] racist or not. Even if you don't understand the quite part. That is the philosophy that leads to normalising this kind of content warning and defending it.
>>7745 >That is litterally the entire premise of arguing over author intent
Sometimes the more mature children like to explore premises of an argument for the sake of exploring it. To assume there's only one predetermined outcome or intent behind it is asinine. Why is it all these 'Reasonable Centrist" types see everything in such black and white? Rhetorical question.
>>7747 Don't know as I'd call this >>7740 typical of posting on this site (longish posts in other threads read as more considered). It is however familiar from early 00s forum culture, when every board had a local bore who imagined that the more he typed, the more he was saying.
But these asides are pulling the thread even further off-topic, so there's no point drawing them out further.
>>7750 I tried working out how old OP's child would be now that we're recommending books for. By my calculations, probably 16. That's still young enough to be reading shitty books.
>>7751 He's 17 now. He doesn't read much these days, although he did get a couple of Garth Nix books for Christmas.
When I started this thread he was (if my maths is right) in Year 3. He's currently on course to fail his first year of sixth-form; we're waiting on an assessment for autism because he has not coped well at all with the transition from school to college.
>>7761 I know it's just the way society is now, but that really is a disproportionate number of black children.
Of course, maybe these are books that won't sell at full price, and that would be sad rather than infuriating. See? I'm still a righteous dude and tolerant guy.
>>7761 At least when they included Joe Wicks last year most kids knew he was through his lockdown PE etc.
Someone bought my youngest the ladbaby Christmas book and it was genuinely awful. Reads like a first draft from an Apprentice task.
Honestly a much bigger cultural threat than drag queen story hour or whatever.
>Children’s reading enjoyment has fallen to its lowest level in almost two decades, with just one in three young people saying that they enjoy reading in their free time, according to a new survey.
>Only 34.6% of eight- to 18-year-olds surveyed by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) said that they enjoy reading in their spare time. This is the lowest level recorded by the charity since it began surveying children about their reading habits 19 years ago, representing an 8.8 percentage point drop since last year.
>It is also part of a broader downward trend since 2016, when almost two in three children said that they enjoyed reading. Reading frequency is also at a historic low, with 20.5% of eight- to 18-year-olds reporting reading daily in their free time, compared with 28% last year.
Obviously people will say it's all because of tiktok and screentime and bla bla bla but what if it's just because books are shit nowadays? I won't say Harry Potter or Mortal Engines or whatever that one by Philip Pullman was called were great works of literature, but they were good reads that got a lot of kids interested in reading, including myself when I was a young lad. Even a bit later on when I was in my early 20s, stuff like Twilight or Hunger Games were pretty successful. What has there been in the last ten years or so?
>>7819 Books take ages to go stale though. Doesn't each cohort of kids get Harry Potter, or does it take marketing and 'everybody's reading it' to get the uptake? I'd be saddened if kids didn't get a dose of Pratchett at the appropriate age.
I think there's my generation (millennials) who got Potter from the books, then the next generation (zoomers) got it from the movies, but the current one (gen alpha) won't get any Potter because it turns out JKR was a death eater all along.
>>7819 >Obviously people will say it's all because of tiktok and screentime and bla bla bla but what if it's just because books are shit nowadays?
Tiktok has actually led to a number of books becoming bestsellers because of the Booktok community there, but I think that's more for young adult reading than getting younger kids interested in reading.
I don't think there has been anything like Harry Potter since. I was never interested in the series, but I remember it being a big deal when each book was coming out and how Lizo would go mental for them on Newsround. These days they seem to be more interested in pushing dross by celebrities like David Walliams and Lenny Henry.
It's not going to be which YA novels are hitting the shelves that's deciding how much kids are reading. It's going to have far more to do with the quality and methods of English education from children's earliest ages. After having listened to this (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) fascinating podcast about "whole langauge" teaching in the USA, and doing some research into it myself, I think I almost fell afoul of it as well. The "real books" technique, as it's known this side of the pond, isn't going to be effecting the current stats because it's been replaced with "systematic synthetic phonics". However, it's possible that people who had the same shoddy reading education that I did are parping out their own children and raising them in literature-free, or at least semi-bookless, environments. I, fortunately, benefitted from mutliple, hard working, teaching assistants, discovering a wonderful book called Harry the Poisonous Centipede, and my wordsearch enjoying dad's habit of leaving the novels of James Herbert, Guy N. Smith and J. R. R. Tolkein and the odd copy of Loaded lying around the house.
Also, according to the National Literacy Trust "children's enjoyment of reading" has declined from "47.8% pre-lockdown", to "2 in 5 (43.4%)" in 2023, and now all the way down to "Just 1 in 3 (34.6%)" in 2024. But doesn't that seem like rather a steep decline for one year? The variance in those first two figures doesn't seem all that significant. However, a ten percent decline in a single year looks so massive to me as to be potentially anomolous. Linked below are all the surveys on children's reading the National Literacy Trust have done up until this year, so someone more intelligent can point out what a rube I am if they like.
Addendum: there was a better version of this post, but I pressed the "toggle reader view" button on Firefox while switching tabs and it was deleted. I was so angry I had to walk to the bathroom and wash my face to calm down.
>>7824 >However, it's possible that people who had the same shoddy reading education that I did are parping out their own children and raising them in literature-free, or at least semi-bookless, environments.
Many of my friends who are parents don't have a single bookcase in their homes.
>Jamie Oliver has pulled his children’s book from sale after condemnation from First Nations communities that the fantasy novel is offensive and harmful.
>Penguin Random House UK on Sunday notified the Guardian that Billy and the Epic Escape would be withdrawn from sale in all countries where it holds rights, including the UK and Australia. Oliver, who is now in Australia promoting his latest cookbook, has issued a second apology.
>Billy and the Epic Escape is set in England but takes a brief sojourn to Alice Springs where the novel’s villain abducts a young First Nations girl living in foster care in an Indigenous community. The book has been condemned in Australia for perpetuating harmful stereotypes and “trivialising complex and painful histories”.
>The Natsiec chief executive, Sharon Davis, criticised implications in a chapter titled To Steal a Child that First Nations families “are easily swayed by money and neglect the safety of their children”.
>“[It] perpetuates a racist stereotype that has been used to justify child removals for over a century,” Davis said. This portrayal is not only offensive but also reinforces damaging biases.”
>The book also contained errors in Oliver’s attempt to use Indigenous words drawn from the Arrernte language of Alice Springs and the Gamilaraay people of NSW and Queensland.
>>7826 Overwhelmingly the funniest part of this, to me, is that Oliver almost certainly didn't write this book. Gives the whole story a very Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of angle.
I have to wonder if the ghost writer was actually some kind of abbo with a chip on their shoulder, or just some loony upper middle class graduate trying too hard and swinging all the way around the horseshoe. Actually come to think of it, probably some loony upper middle class graduate who's like 1/16th aboriginal on their mum's side and has made that their entire personality.
I think books are no longer the main issue but authors. Hopefully he can distinguish the voice of who tells the story. A Pratchett is not an Abnett is not a Hobb is not an Tchaikosky is not a ... If there's a bookshop left near or a library. Ink on paper is universal. There is so much to discover, so much to learn how others saw the world.
>Almost half of parents believe children do not need to know how to use books before they start school, with some trying to ‘swipe’ as if they were phones or tablets.
>A survey has found 44 per cent of parents believed it was not their responsibility to teach their children how to read books while 24 per cent did not think toilet training was essential for those starting school.And some pupils are failing to develop core strength because of excessive screen time and the “Covid baby” excuse is too frequently used, according to the findings.
>The annual school readiness survey by Kindred Squared, an early education charitable foundation, is based on focus groups and studies with more than 1,000 teachers and 1,000 parents of reception-aged children in England and Wales.
>>7840 This smells of "cat-kin must be allowed to use litter boxes in schools" hysteria.
I can't tell if it's a litmus test or of if I'm in a bubble, but I've certainly seen a decline in genuine skills in computing in the under 25s, give or take. It's a broad field, skills and interests differ, that's not the issue. It's a lack of curiosity that concerns me, the lack of wonder perhaps. Yes that works, but why? It's great you know how to type that, but why? This is a craft, you brought the spanner, now use it.
I work with people under 25 and I would say at least in my experience they are slower to type on keyboards than I am, can rarely touch type, and perhaps wouldn't know how to launch task manager or why they'd need to, but it's not a fundamental ignorance, as soon as they actually need to sit in front of a computer for their job they figure it out, because they know how to google and aren't afraid to learn.
This is a stark contrast from my mother's generation, who refuse to even try. I thankfully haven't seen the lack of interest from the younger generation as you have, but admittedly my line of work requires you to be at least reasonably adept at problem solving.
>>7848 > can rarely touch type
I've been a professional "programmer" (to avoid jargon) for more than 20 years and I still don't touch type. I learned without tuition and never made the effort to change that muscle memory. It's a failing to be sure, not least because split keyboards are useless if you can't, but you can get by well enough as long as you have a "system" that is not hunt-and-peck.
That said I certainly respect the craft, but in many instances typing efficiency beyond a certain level is a marginal benefit. For human language people who can chord on steno keyboards are wizards as far as I am concerned, but for most tasks ~5-10 accurate keystrokes per second is plenty.
>>7854 Tough typing is so pleasurable when you've spent a lifetime utilising single digits to type almost everthing. It doesn't take much to relearn, either, being that you've already the keyboard mostly memorised.
Every now and then I spend 5 minutes practicing but inevitably fall back to regular lazy typing.
>>7855 > Every now and then I spend 5 minutes practicing but inevitably fall back to regular lazy typing.
Yeah, I know the principles and theory. But I learned my own 6-finger system with little finger doing the odd jobs and thumbs dedicated space hitters. It works, what can I say. It's not as elegant as touch-typing, but preference here is probably better kept in /e/.
