Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
the future is r-slurred 
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!bookworms good to see rdrama's bookclub is on the same level as Ivy League classes.
https://archive.li/9NlT0
Here's the full article without the paywall
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You plebs need to get on MY level of autism
I only read 50 year old science fiction slop books like Left Hand of Darkness
Where transgenders are the norm and cissoids are the freaks in fiction
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You guys should read the Eisenhorn trilogy. It's good.
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Same people who think 3 Body Problem is the height of literature
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they need to read the fricking diamond age
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Snow Crash too
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When I was doing addictions recovery volunteering I tried getting a few of the nerdier guys to read Snow Crash to discuss it with me
and nobody got past page 50. 
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!sophistry
LETS FRICKING SOOOOOOO
PHISTRY
!ifrickinglovescience
Or maybe we could encourage people to learn things that matter instead of dog shit that 18th century inbreds felt comfortable with?
I have some good book suggestions for college students:
Calculus
Linear Algebra
Ordinary Differential Equations
Partial Differential Equations
Physics
Thermodynamics
Quantum Theory
Organic Chemistry
Inorganic Chemistry
Biological Chemistry
Physical Chemistry
Cell Biology
Genetics
!physics !chemistry !biology !engineering add to the list
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Fakecel
Not books
All of this shit is incredibly useless unless you're a researcher in that specific field. Occasionally linear algebra comes up in some software context, but even then smart dorks already made a library for you.
OChem at least you can make drugs if you get gud, but you'll probably get arrested.
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Twilight
50 shades of grey
Twilight 2
Twilight 3
Whatever they read at drag queen story hour
Twilight 4
The lgbtq+ bible
Twilight 5
Harry Potter (lgbtq remaster)
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Extremely
!engineering !chemistry
Add Transport Phenomena to it
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so like do you do chemistry and drive a train or something
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You can enjoy both if you are not a complete neurodivergent
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If you can't do real analysis should you even have human rights?
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The modern day Ivy League is basically just pure signalling. Their graduation rates are sky high: the difficulty is in getting in, not in passing the course. Compare to stuff like the Sorbonne where every graduate is offered a place but less than 40% of the class manages to make it past the first year. Or even better: elite European universities like Cambridge/Oxford/ETH Zurich where getting in is hard but then the courses are super challenging too.
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Public LATAM universities are the same. The reason American Universities rank so high is because of research, but that's in STEM though. My foreignercel impression is that Ivy League Unis renown and alumni outcome is due to networking and prestige.
If you're a lawcel graduated from Yale or Harvard then you'll be acquainted or friends with people who'll become federal judges, politicians and big shots on large law firms. I'm sure it's the same for journos.
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Literally the only reason to get into Ivy Leagues is for networking and prestige, that's it. They generally teach worse even because the professors are generally there for research and not teaching so give 0 fricks about you even understanding shit.
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Idk what Dostoevsky is doing in any great books course, who invited him?
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he's the best.
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nah, he sucks bro
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wrong
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overrated at least
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Crime & Punishment is definitely overrated, can't speak for his other works
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Dostoevsky is super overrated, if Juice Wrld said this nobody would care.
If you want good Russian literature read Gogol or Bulgakov instead. Dostoevsky is just the Russian author that appeals to the west, he was an anglophile, if you want something more authentic this is not it.
Dostoevsky is just a Russian version of an anglo writer, he is not really what you would describe as "Russian literature"
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This is actually the same opinion Nabokov had of him, he said Dosto is more revered as a writer in the West and that in Russia he's more of a mumbo jumbo mystic.
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I wanna call this a contrarian take but honestly Dostoevsky was pretty polarizing even during his time. I've only read a couple book by him (Demons and The Brothers Karamozov) and they both have high highs and low lows in terms of what you're getting.
What I will say is that dunking on a random quote like that is funny but pretty much on the same level as /r/MenWritingWomen when it comes to critique. Yes his characters are often extremely melodramatic but those characters often had very realistic and cold aspects to them as well. The psychology of his characterizations are fantastic, and the way he manages to capture seemingly contradictory emotions and actions of people is probably his strongest aspect as a writer. I think a big reason why he was so appreciated in the west was thanks to 1) solid translations and 2) a kind of sincerity that looked in the face of rampant cynicism honestly and attempted to give its own answer.
The problem I had with his work was that the cynical and realist outlooks presented in his book were too ideologically convincing, and it made the sincerity that tried to answer with look pretty weak in comparison. It feels like the same trap that the "New Sincerity" writers a hundred years later in the west struggled with, where the best writing they did was mostly cynical. Makes me think sincerity and transcendence are things that aren't meant for deeply introspective types who write long novels about human suffering. That shit is best left to Chads like Camus who can just go "Yeah you just gotta accept the absurdity of life dude JUST DO IT!" instead of Fyodor who goes "I don't think any just, omnipotent and omniscient God exists if that God is cool with an incredible amount of pointless suffering with things like war and child abuse happening to people that had no choice in the matter... B-But you should still have faith cause this is just part of God's unknowable 4-D chess! R-Right guys?"
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that's just one sentence, it means nothing.
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maybe
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forcing kids to read russian litrature in 2024 is a microagression
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I also suck at the small detail part. I am good at the overall plot though. It's like my brain just ignores all the pointless descriptions as anything beyond window dressing.
On the negative side people are clearly getting dumber in the developed world.
On the positive side the GDP is still growing steadily which suggests that the technological advancements easily balance out the stupidity.
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Booktok is mostly just verbal porn btw
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More like cliterature imma be all up in that kitty amirite
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You'd be shocked how many people decide they want to not only be lit majors, but writers, and decline to read.
R-slurs. R-slurs everywhere.
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I have read so much self-published trash. People really
think 
they do something 
these days when they put out 100 pages of absolute garbage 
that has no plot or character 
development.
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But think of all the world building!!!
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I read an article a while back by a lit-loving prospective ladywriter that kinda covered how all the fem-slop writers of today (ie, any anglophone foid writer alive today and winning awards) just reads fluffy femslop, and have barely even HEARD of Conrad or Joyce or James. They've read assigned reading in high school like A Midsummer Night's Dream, a recent translation of a single chapter of Don Quixote, Oliver Twist (the longest and hardest book ever), and have heard of Hemingway enough to hate him (ew, I am not reading any toxic masculinity fanfic like omg); and this is sufficient enough now to train the experience-driven lit of the todays.
If you're reading some 2025 book called, like, Daughterhouse Jive, about a transblack foid with an addiction to peanutbutter cookies, and her weight's totally her mom's fault, but also health at any size--if you're reading this kind of subliterate dreck and wondering how it's related to Vonnegut and if this b-word has any comprehension of plot or character or focus or imagination: the answer is the modern age never gave her a chance.
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I think humanity is pretty much hardlocked its IQ to 100 at today's standards and getting any smarter just means you die out over time and getting any dumber means you cannot create any further advanced technology.
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Articles like this make me feel pretty swell about myself.
Im looser. Massive looser.
But at least i can read a book. Not just that. Me not native english reader. When i turned 18. I started to read books in english too. Beocuse you couldn't get everything on my native tounge.
My first english language book was game of thrones. It was little hard and i had to look up words in dictionary. But after few books it was easy as farting.
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!linguistics
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WPD is not sending its best.
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Me not friend of poopfish
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Cool, now tell us how much you earn
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About 3,50
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It's all gonna be ok
Also it's 'loser' btw. Lose is to cease posession of something. Loose is the codition of yo mama's pussay once I'm done with her
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Its what ever me write. Its your job to figure out my intent
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I can respect that
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U homo much
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imagine thinking
Game of Thrones is literature 
that is bragworthy to say you read it cover to cover.
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Aperently its something these educated folx in burgerland cant do
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Literature doesn't have to be hard to parse to be good, and anyone who thinks so is a massive twink. You're not going to need a dictonary to get through Steinbeck or Hemingway. Hemingway won't even take you long to read.
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but GoT is genre fiction, not literature
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Yeah, but literature isn't necesserily harder or more bragworthy to read is the point. Saying "I read GoT from cover to cover" says about as much about your literacy as anything does.
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When I was in college I would read the books that I actually liked, and the others I would find the cliff notes and student made digital flash cards and read those before class or a test. I got near perfect grades
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The trick is to bind the book into a larger collection of books and then ask the students to read a 300 page excerpt.
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Even 20 years ago math-chads were reading more and better literature for fun than average liberal-arts-cels for their major. It's just IQ.
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It's social media. Tik Tok and Youtube and Reddit and Facebook have unironically fried everyones brain in a manner to which long form literature is almost impossible to appreciate or engage with anymore. The quick dopamine hits are just too attractive.
I used to read several books a week when I was a teen, real literature too out of sheer curiosity. Then I got a computer with internet access at 16 and it was all downhill from there. These days I hardly read at all, maybe a couple of books a year. At most I listen to audio books like an r-slur.
And I have the advantage of being good at reading long form literature, I got so much practice in during my childhood and teens that it's quick and easy. Coming up with 24/7 smartphone access and a constant feed of brainrot right into your hands would make even developing those skills almost impossible.
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I agree. Internet addiction needs to be treated as seriously as any other drug or alcohol addiction. I tried to disconnect and I was practically crashing the entire week without wasting time on the internet. The crash was bad enough to make me feel confident that we should refer to internet usage on a daily basis outside of as a tool as a real and serious addiction that scrambles your brain as long as you keep at it.
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My kid is a junior in high school. I can confirm that his school
is more proactive about getting metal 
detectors than they are assigning an entire book to these children. Of course, most modern 
books 
are complete trash, and he has never 
been asked 
to read Shakespeare.
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You don't learn reading in school. If your parents haven't managed to interest you in reading it's already too late by the time you get to school asigned reading.
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Just get him books at home to read this isn't rocket science.
Start with the small stuff. Go for fiction first but also move him towards the non-fiction department over time.
My go to recommendation is to start with the highest rated section on goodsreads for whichever category or group of books you think your kid will like and match it against the number of pages you figure your kid can read without completely losing interest.
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I had two awkward experiences from not completing assigned reading for a course in college:
(1) In an Italian lit course I took, I only skimmed the reading before writing the essay. So, before the next class, the prof calls me aside and says he has something he needs to talk to me about my essay. He said he was so impressed that he wanted to read it to the class but wanted my approval before doing so. It was a satirical treatment of cheese breads in the style of what we had read; I don't remember anything more about it.
(2) In a rhetoric course focused on political theory, I didn't do the reading for one essay (but had for others). The instructor (a long-standing political author) wrote me an email at the end of the semester candidly describing the chasm of difference in quality between the two essays -- and that he kinda could tell I had phoned one in. The email said that I probably didn't deserve the "A" I had ended up with. I ran into him like a year later, and he apologized, saying I had earned the grade I got. It felt weird because I thought he was right the first time.
The latter was a healthy experience in realizing that someone attuned enough can tell when you phone in a job.
!sophistry
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That's why you phone it in from the start so they never learn to expect more out of you.
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The best instruction is that which hurts a little to give.
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Boo!
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Needing to read books is a sign you picked a dumb major
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The fricking Death of Expertise covers this pretty well (would recommend to read)
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-expertise-9780197763834?cc=gb&lang=en
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Is this worth reading bb?
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What's this from
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Kid pwned her
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Books are for stupid people. They're just like comics or manga. Low brow trash that pretends to be better because it's old.
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Year of the r-slur
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I wonder what the books are. If it's some ye-olde shite from hundreds of years ago, yeah, I don't really expect people to be able to parse those out.
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Anything old enough that you'd have trouble parsing it like say. Canterbury Tales or Shakespear is going to have modern translations, despite being in English.
They're talking about things like Pride and Prejudice and translations of Crime and Punishment. Which might sound a bit archaic but hardly something you'd have issues with parsing if you're not a completely brainrotted zoomer.
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Personal opinion, works till after the 1950s are all alright. Stuff beyond the 1950s gets tiring due to its ancient writing style where it is overly verbose or just plain boring in the way it is written compared to the decades of advancements we have made at improving the quality of writing.
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Weren't most things in the old days written verbosely 'cuz writers were paid by the word? It makes sense haha
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Writers are still paid by the word, the expectation for the quality of words just went up over time.
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could u give me the fricking tldr of that, b-word? k thanks.
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man & girl go out to drive under moonlight. they stop at on at a side of road. he turn to his girl and say: "baby, i love you very much"
"what is it honey?"
"our car is broken down. i think the engine is broken, ill walk and get some more fuel."
"ok. ill stay here and look after our stereo. there have been news report of steres being stolen."
"good idea. keep the doors locked no matter what. i love you sweaty"
so the guy left to get full for the car. after two hours the girl say "where is my baby, he was supposed to be back by now". then the girl here a scratching sound and a voice say "LET ME IN"
the girl doesn't do it and then after a while she goes to sleep. the next morning she wakes up and finds her boyfriend still not there. she gets out to check and man door hand hook car door.
Snapshots:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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