(no subject)

[tephra]

So I'm reading the reviews for A Good Offense (the sequel to The Best Defense) and I find this:

"...im not getting the whole purple haze thing, it flew right over my head."

For some reason that made me snicker.

Frankly, the reviews joisbishmyoga gets for these stories often make me depressed. Apparently people are reading and yet not reading these days. It's like they forget things that they read just a few sentences ago. Their comprehension seems spotty at best, and ask them to remember something from a previous chapter? Not going to happen apparently.

Now I know I have a somewhat odd and persistent memory but I can't believe that people can really forget something they read just a few minutes ago. My ability to remember stuff I read years ago (decades in some cases) can't be that bizarre, and remembering something from a month ago should be really simple and common, right?

Comments

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

Information must be delivered in ten-second soundbytes within infodumps. Comprehension is irrelevant.

Jo is bashing her head against a wall.

I've seen arguments that, well, gee, you can't possibly expect readers to keep track of all the stories they're reading when you update only once a week, or that tidbit of information was ten chapters ago. Well, gee, I've read hundreds of stories, am in the process of reading dozens more, have half a dozen exceedingly complex plotlines of my own memorized, and yet I only need to read a few paragraphs of a story I read once, three or four or ten years ago, to remember the whole thing. I certainly recall the myriad "tidbits" of the many and varied stories that haven't been updated in a month, two months, a year, three years...

Ah, ah, but you have no life, Miss Speedread Freakshow! Ah, ah, but I do. That's the half-dozen plotlines of my own that I have memorized, for surely the sheer complexity of them compensates for not having ten weekly appointments written in my day planner.

[tephra]

I've decided that despite all their whining like any given story is the most important thing to them in the world that they don't actually care about the stories they read. I don't remember stuff I read that I had no interest in (like several year old articles on celebrities in the magazines in the doctor's office) so it seems logical that people that can't remember things from the beginning of the chapter, or the last chapter, or even 10 chapters ago can't really be interested in what they are reading.

It could be a function of how they learned to read too, come to think of it. My dad (who is nearly 77) doesn't read for pleasure, and can't understand why anyone would. My mom (who is a decade younger) reads voraciously. Dad doesn't get "pictures in his head" when he reads, mom (and my brother and I) do. There are times I 'll remember a story and have to wonder if it was a book or a movie, that is never an issue for dad. Maybe somewhere in the last 20 years the method of teaching reading has changed again. Though I was reading before I went to school at all so maybe it changed even earlier.

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what the teaching methods for reading ever were. I've heard about this "phonics" stuff in recent years, but I had no need to pay attention in class during reading units, so I didn't. I can't remember not being able to read.

I've also gotten pictures, but more often I fall into a reading trance where the information just flows in without any real need for images or sounds, because the story data is coming too fast. I think. It's a very strange effect and I have trouble noticing it.