Story on the Brain

As someone who makes (often unwilling) young people read classics as my regular job, a question I get a lot is: how do I learn to like these things? They bounce off. It happens! Everyone has modern expectations of narrative, which is to say, fast-paced, fitting a certain pattern, full of cliffhangers and other excitement. The chunky cloth covers and small type put them off. The feeling that this is steamed broccoli meant to be good for you is definitely not helping. There are a couple great roads into finding ways to love the classics. And I say that as someone who makes people read them practically daily. I also adore them. I talk a lot about genre fiction and so on here, but the classics are my whole thing. The older the better. Here's how you get into them: One , try listening to an audiobook instead of reading. Truly, it counts exactly the same. The voice actors interpret for you and make sense out of the long sentences. Downsides: it takes a lot longer, if you read fast at...

Episode 16 Objects in Space is up! ******* Very strange to rewatch the series! Strange how much I'd forgotten about this specific episode, one of my favorites.  For ages I couldn't understand how the show didn't make it, because I loved it so much, but now I get it. The tone and angle of the episodes are all over the place. One heartfelt, one silly, one dramatic, one truly violent, one horror, one a heist, and so on. I could see how that would make the money people extremely nervous. How would an audience know what to expect? I suspect the fans like me were there for the characters and the world more than anything else. If you're a character person, you'll take anything that lets you spend time with those characters. Not that there's anything wrong with these stories! They're all wonderful. But they are unpredictable. Compare to a sitcom or a procedural or a regular drama. They deliver the same goods every week. This does not. Anyway. "Out of Gas" ...

Update:  Episode 15 is up. It turned out to be about "So much water so close to home" and Agatha Christie's novel The Hollow .   Previous post below: *****  I'm going to work on a short story I hate called "So much water so close to home" by Raymond Carver.  Here's why I hate it: it gets under your skin. And because it's a male writer writing from a female POV about a deeply upsetting topic with a powerful gender divide to it. But even that is different now from how it used to be, or else I think about it differently. The future! It's more nuanced than the past! I also hate how realistic it is. I hate how she goes back to him at the end. I hate the drive with the green pickup. I hate so very many things about it. Sometimes you're supposed to hate things about a story. That's the point of the story sometimes.  How can I get mad that Carver thought about the man's wife's point of view more than the man's? What is up with my brai...