If it gets the American public to start reading books again, I'm all for it. That's both out of concern for society, and pure self-interest.
I'm very concerned about the dumbing down of everything the typical citizen of the world's (currently) most powerful nation is exposed to, such as the idiotic shouting heads on cable TV and talk radio. The solution is to get people reading more, and developing their critical thinking skills. When I first read
The DaVinci Code I thought it was the most abysmal hackery, and despaired that such a poorly-constructed hodgepodge of half-baked conspiracy theories would be a year-long bestseller. Only in a society deprived of historical education, I thought. Since then I've changed my mind about the phenomenon. I listened to
why people liked it. Almost to a person they said, "Well it really makes you think, you know?" That tells me that there is a real hunger out there for material that
makes people think. People are questioning what they are being told, and that's good. Now it is our job to get them the skills to properly evaluate information for themselves, and to provide truly nutritious food for thought.
So again, if this will get people to pick up books again, there is a chance we can get them to progress on to more adult fare.
And I have to echo Ray's thought about ESL. English is now the
lingua franca of the entire world, for better or worse. But English has something like 100,000 words in its vocabulary last time I checked. This is three or four times the word count of many other languages. So while we might expect the denizens of this board, as English-language creators, to be facile with perhaps half that many, and have the remainder ready to conjure, that is not a reasonable expectation for international English-speakers. A gentleman from Tashkent who is using English as a common tongue to communicate with a lady from Kinshasa would certainly be sticking with the limited core vocabulary. This is entirely proper, and helps avoid misunderstandings, as you will know if you have had to deal with international business partners even through translators.
ChunkyC said:
I can't stand abridged or Reader's Digest versions of books.
Hey now, don't knock the RD Condensed books. Those folks really know their business. Some authors have been known to read the condensations of their own work and not figure out what was excised. And between the fact that Word Processor Edema has the industry publishing books by the pound, and that cost-cutting has reduced the amount of editing authors receive, many of the books on the shelves today could probably benefit from the scalpels and liposuction of condensation editors. Also, you'll notice that most of their fare is pop fiction, and taking a hatchet to Mary Higgins Clark's work can only dumb it
up in my opinion.
But the bottom line for all of this is how it is used. If it is used as "training wheels" that's great. If it is used to get international English-speakers acquainted with the classics, that's also good. But when American high-school seniors are reading
Moby Rick, the 100-page whale tale told in words of fewer than three syllables (beginning with the immortal line
Call me Izzy...), that's when I'll be getting upset.