UPDATE: I’ve given up on the book.  It’s way too nice out to be able to focus on something like this.

I just read a post on The China Beat about Wolf Totem’s reception among Western reviewers.  I haven’t read more than a couple of pages of the book, which I found out about through the Very Short List*, but I feel like I’m going to be into it pretty soon.  Anyway, without knowing a whole lot about the book, it’s interesting to see how varied the response to it is.  Over on Paper Cuts, Jennifer Schuessler calls the reviews of the novel “strangely fevered, if not always appreciative.”

In my own classroom, I’ve just distributed copies of The Odyssey to my sophomores.  For some reason, I always end the year with it, even though it’s the toughest read of our three district-required works (the others are Macbeth and Huck Finn).  I’m not sure why, but every year I feel the need to really sell The Odyssey to my sophomores.  I find myself engaging in some serious used-car-salesman-esque hucksterism (”It’s so good–there’s action, adventure, romance, sex, the works. I can’t believe you’re refusing to even open this book.  You’ll love it!”) to convince my students that a 400+ page epic from almost four millenia ago is going to be fun, or even interesting, to read.

I guess part of the problem is that I feel the need to convince my students that reading a book is going to give them a similar experience to watching a movie or playing a video game, when that couldn’t be any less truthful.  We read books for very different reasons than we watch movies, and that’s okay.  A movie is a two hour commitment, give or take.  It is meant to be consumed in one sitting (I only give five stars on Netflix to movies during which I don’t get up to go to the bathroom or anything).  We can get a lot from watching movies, and some even go as deep (or deeper) than do our greatest books.  TV shows like The Wire, too, can play out as almost Dickensian, introducing us to characters and subplots that boggle the mind.

But reading a book requires a different mindset.  And when I try to communicate this to my students, they tend to shut down.  So I’m asking if any teachers who are reading have any metaphors, allegories, parables, etc they use to explain how and why we should read.  Please post them here, if you don’t mind.

* Why haven’t you subscribed to this yet?  You really should.