Adapted from two posts from the reading section of this site: How to Choose a Book and Holt’s Checkpoint, Choosing to Read, and After You Read.
Responding to a Text: Goodreads
Throughout the reading process, you’re asked to consider the purpose of literature outside of a high school classroom. The video we watch ends with a particularly powerful quotation about this:
We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
The key word there is tool, as in a tool for our makerspace. Books are a way to solve problems and treat ailments and create meaning. They aren’t assignments to be endured (or circumvented, as the case may be); they are the most important part of the Humanities.
After you have finished a book, play, poem, or other work of literary merit, you are equipped to respond through the logic of that quotation. You are answering these questions:
- For what “range of ailments” would you “prescribe” this text?
- What problems is the text you’ve read “best suited to addressing”?
- How could this text be a tool “to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity”?
The rest of that video gives you more questions worth asking about the work you’ve read:
- What “range of emotions and events that would take countless lifetimes to encounter” are you experiencing through this reading?
- How is what you’re reading developing your empathy through “the chance to see things from someone else’s point of view”?
- How is the text helping you reflect on who you are — and the idea that “everyone is a strange and interesting person”?
- To what extent is the text helping you to “see that failure is a part of life”?
To some extent, you are always answering those questions when you respond authentically to a book, poem, piece of nonfiction, and so on. Your answers can be shaped into a narrative, a literary criticism, a reader’s response — anything that deals authentically with the experience of reading.
The real world is full of examples of people doing this. In our course, we’re going to use Goodreads to help you see beyond the four walls of a classroom.
Here is a list of common texts taught in our school by grade level:
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried [English 12]
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye [English 11]
- George Orwell, Animal Farm [English 10]
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird [English 9]
Each of those links to Goodreads, which holds reviews from thousands of real people who have written not as part of a class assignment but because they were moved to write.
And the writing is key. You might start with the ratings, since it’s fascinating to see what more than 2.4 million people think about The Catcher in the Rye:
The 50,000 reviews are more enlightening, though, if you’re looking at a classic like Catcher. What did the folks who loved it write? What about the one-star reviews — what prompted those?
This isn’t to discount formal criticism. You can (and often should) look for what literary critics have said, and that can help shape your choice. If we stick for a moment with The Catcher in the Rye, you can find through The New York Times a complete page of resources, including reviews, for the novel. For more recent novels, Google will return dozens of newspaper, magazine, and blog reviews.
The benefit of going to the masses of a site like Goodreads is that you are seeing people much like you, not the critics hired for a national publication. Both offer valuable insight; Goodreads just so happens to offer a habit-forming platform, too, and one goal is to develop in you the habit of reading.
It’s also important to see reader’s respond in writing. It’s not enough just to read, as those 50,000 reviewers of The Catcher in the Rye tell you. You also have to see where your reading takes you:
Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.
That’s Neil Postman, arguing in Amusing Ourselves to Death for a greater focus on reading and text in an increasingly technology-impaired society. He was talking about TV, though; the Internet, mind-numbing as it can be, also gives us places like Goodreads.
So your assignment, as a reader, is going to be to log into Goodreads, look up your particular book, and enter that conversation. To give it some structure:
- Download the app or load the website for Goodreads.
- Register a new account, or decide to revisit this step later.
- Search for the book in question — the one you are assigned in class, the one you choose on your own, the one that is recommended by a peer, etc.
- Dive into the writing and other data on Goodreads about this book.
- Discuss what you find, in writing and in person, with peers and your teacher.
- Write a response — the one you are assigned, the one you choose to write, the one inspired by the writing process, etc.
- Decide whether or not to post the finished response to Goodreads.
- If you publish to the site, wait to see if you get feedback. Otherwise, get feedback in the usual way.
You’ll never be forced to post on the Goodreads site itself, of course; you can always write your response and hand it in without publishing it.
The opportunity is there, however, to be part of a real-world discussion of a book. It doesn’t matter if you loved or hated the book or fell somewhere in between; it matters what you do with that reaction.
You can even engage with Goodreads (and any site like it) without having read the text, which means there’s no more need to game the system the way Elif Koc describes in “My Insane Homework Load Taught Me How to Game the System,” an article she wrote when just out of high school. You can let yourself be persuaded to read, or you can analyze the reviews of those who did. You can find a book you will read.
Look for specific instructions on how to enter these conversations on Google Classroom. Ask questions about the work here in the comment section.