Christine,
It must have been extremely frustrating to be a teacher. I would hope that the curriculum and standards reflect the desires of society, and primarily of parents, but that could be naïve. To show you how removed I am from it, I had to look up ADHD. By the sounds of it, ADHD could be a byproduct of finding school boring. Your right - parents should expect more of their children instead of expecting less, but maybe there’s more of the former than of the later.
Yes, people are surprised when someone actually reads a book like The Brothers Karamazov . One can buy books by the yard(s). They aren’t intended to be read, just put on display to fill up shelf space.
I can definitely related to leather bound, gold-gilted books. That’s about all I’ve been reading for several years, and will be for several more. I pretty much limit myself to Easton Press, with a dash of Franklin Library’s thrown in. It enhances my reading experience to have such a nice looking book. It’s like using china and crystal for dining. Doesn’t really make the food taste any better; it just seems like it does. Also, since there are so many books “out there”, it helps to have someone do some screening. You might say I let Easton help me pick out the books I’m going to read. It’s not a perfect method, but considering the millions of books that have been published, it helps to have some kind of a system to decide which books to read.
It’s odd to think about all the current technology available for writing. Computers, word processors, spell checkers, grammar checkers, and online thesaurus. I try to envision the effort it took to write, edit (talk about cut and paste), publish and distribute a book a 100, or more, years ago. No laser printer, no Xerox machine, probably no typewriter (definitely not a Selectric). Think about the effort and cost it must have taken to get something published. Maybe, because it was so difficult to be an author, the lack of technology restricted some of the want-a-be authors. I wonder how much difference today’s technologies would have made on Tolstoy or Hugo.
I’m afraid if a movie version does come out, Christopher Lloyd will be playing my part. But you know how distorted the movie versions of books are lately so they’ll probably use Brad Pitt. That distortion seems more of a recent trend; say the last 10 or 15 years. And, it seems more of an American thing.