121–130 of 163 posts
Or it could be only a correlation. Smart parents have books, but they also have smart children.
Maybe.... natural predilection is no replacement for experience, though, and reading is a type of experience. Arguably a high quality one. Also, there are obviously countless examples of seemingly intelligent people having kids which aren’t.
I never enjoyed reading fiction. Fiction trains your mind to look for fictitious narratives in real life; it distorts your perception of life and makes the world a worse place for others who don't follow those narratives.
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I think that last part is especially true. Due to school and forced reading assingments, reading gets associated too often with work or boring assignments.
They tend to try to make reading excruciating, particularly before high schools. I don't know if they still do this, but for some reason it was a big trend when I was in grade school to break up into "reading groups", and you'd go around in a circle reading a paragraph at a time out loud. I still despise reading aloud for that reason; I always got a rash of shit for being a few chapters ahead when my turn came up aga…
My parents would basically (with a few exceptions due to price) buy me any book I wanted growing up (without it hitting into my allowance); they thought it was incredibly important to grow up well-read, and even more important to learn how to teach yourself stuff, and similarly every standardized test I took was insultingly easy. I'm definitely not some pillar of intellectual vigor either (I don't even have a college…
Buying as many books as we read as kids would have cost a fortune.
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>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house, I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading comprehension. As far as I'm…
I read a ton as a kid, and I always struggled a bit on reading comprehension tests. To me it generally seemed like the "reading comprehension" questions would focus on minutia I didn't consider important, and simply didn't bother to remember. It's been a long time since then, but I want to say I'd read a story about a kid sledding on a hill with his friends, and then later to test your reading comprehension they'd as…
But if, for example, the author made it clear that the other kids were all wearing the same color shirt and the main character was not, you might infer something about their relationship from that--like maybe that the other kids all went to the same school, but the lead character went to a different school.
Details do matter for reading comprehension, because every detail is chosen. The real world is full of superfluous detail... writing, especially good writing, is not. Every word on the page represents a choice by the author--a choice to put that detail in, and to use that particular word instead of a different one.
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Fiction certainly can have that downside. But good fiction is also one of the most effective ways--apart from deep listening--of training empathy because it lets you step into someone's inner life. Rarely do we get a chance to see the world through someone else's eyes for long stretches. If you're not an immigrant, you can vicariously live the life of one through fiction and see what they have to deal with. If you're…
I might think that of biography, or autobiography. But fiction writers often don't know what it's like to be that sort of person, they just make it up.
Just making it up without adapting from anything real usually isn't something that good fiction is built up from, though. That path goes directly to cliche, and it's easy to find cliched fiction.
Halfway through the article, when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home. If kids in the 90th percentile for their country (for number of books in their h…
Per the abstract to the original article, they didn't need to address parental education as a confounding factor by such an indirect means, since parental education (as well as the subject’s education and occupation) was one of the directly studied factors, and the library size contribution existed even after taking those other factors into account.
> and since it's Elsevier I can't look at the original.
Well, yeah, I'd like more than just the abstract and secondhand reporting, too.
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I read a ton as a kid, and I always struggled a bit on reading comprehension tests. To me it generally seemed like the "reading comprehension" questions would focus on minutia I didn't consider important, and simply didn't bother to remember. It's been a long time since then, but I want to say I'd read a story about a kid sledding on a hill with his friends, and then later to test your reading comprehension they'd as…
I can't imagine why just memorizing shirt colors would be worthwhile. But if, for example, the author made it clear that the other kids were all wearing the same color shirt and the main character was not, you might infer something about their relationship from that--like maybe that the other kids all went to the same school, but the lead character went to a different school. Details do matter for reading comprehensi…
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That's true. I was reading a lot as a kid but I barely read anything we had to read for school. Reading assignments took the fun out of reading because now you had the pressure to be able to report on the reading.
To be fair, interpretation and writing are just as important as reading.
Even beyond school though, I find the idea that good novels require careful analysis antithetical to the concept of a good book. Good writing should be excellent at every level. It is wonderful if new narratives and ideas can be discovered upon careful analysis, but if that analysis is necessary for comprehension it ruins it for me. I believe that reading a story should be something natural and seamless.