Reading Levels

I'm not sober and the air stinks because the Dismal is burning, let's begin! I forgot to mention, it's 5:40am - as of starting this.

I think government and school system mandated reading levels and parent based suggested reading levels are shit because not everyone reads at the same fucking level. I possibly have more issues with it because when I was a youngin' always read at a high level than whatever grade of school I was in. If people had tried to tell me I wasn't old enough to understand what I was reading, or it wasn't "age appropriate" for me I would have just looked at them like they were an idiot and wondered why they were getting between me and my books. So, thinking back to some of what I read, I started reading the Babysitters Club books when I was in second grade. I read Goosebumps in second and third grade. I was in a reading group in fourth grade and I remember reading A Wrinkle In Time and I think The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. in sixth grade I picked up The Color Purple and my mom gave me The Scarlet Pimpernel which I read tangentially to The Time-Warp Trio as a nice reading snacklette.

Seventh Grade in class we read Romeo and Juliette, Beowulf, and some others that don't stand out. I read The Fox and the Hound and Watership Down on my own accord that year. Eighth grade we read Animal Farm, To Kill A Mockingbird, and some other things and I was getting into manga, which lead to shounen-ai and yaoi manga before long. The summer between seventh and eighth grade I read the Bounty Trilogy, which I'm sure many would argue was not meant for 14 year-olds.

Ninth grade we read Romeo and Juliette again for some horrid reason, and also Night, Great Gatsby, Maus, Across Five Aprils, Yellow Raft on Blue Water, Catcher in the Rye, Tuesdays with Morrie, I borrowed/took The Invisible Man and some other books. And I read a bunch of things outside of that. Tenth grade was my lowest school inspired reading level and I can't think of anything I was given that stood out for me, aside from Dickens, which I didn't like, and Romeo and Juliette, AGAIN, because my teacher that year should not have been teaching a Pre-IB tenth-grade class. We also read Frankenstein which was a regular 9th grade class book, and we studied world religions which I had learned the previous year in history. One of the few times SLHS faulted me, imo.

Eleventh grade we read Othello, Hamlet, Perfume, The Stranger,  and some others. And twelfth grade we read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and a small number of books because we had to focus for our IB exams. The entire time I read a wealth of books. At some point I read the Abhorsen Trilogy, The Chrestomanci series, Diana Wynne Jones, Tamora Pierce, Eric Jerome Dickey,  and a shit ton of dirty, dirty manga. I still read book written above my age and assumed reading level, but if someone had stopped me because they considered what I was reading to be bad for me and above me I would have been very angry. There is one person who did, my mom and only once. The one book she told me not to read was The Color Purple, I was 13 and had read half the book by the time she stopped me. I retaliated by finding and reading other Alice Walker books.

As an adult looking at the books I read did not always understand everything, but I understood a lot more than people assumed I should have. Essentially, books and children's reading levels should be taken on a case-by-case  situation.

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Oh, yeah - the inspiration for this was this dumbbutt article about A Study in Scarlett setting a bad example for children about Mormonism. Being pissy that old literature is hateful and an banning it instead of talking about it is more damanging. This would be like banning all old literature that poorly represents black people or all religions. What about the literature where women were happy homemakers and never got educated? (Note: 50s and 60s era homemakers/making was propaganda. After the war women were all like 'fuck yeah, we don't need to stay in the home' and men were all like 'fuck, I need a job' so marketing firms were all like 'hey, if we make it sound like the last generation had it right, and our current technology [microwaves and such] will make homemaking a breeze, maybe we can encourage women to not leave the home and to raise children. If you noticed, it kind of only worked for about one generation, then feminism came back full force and women got lives and the opportunity to choose where they went.)

Point! Making blanket statements on what type of literature of right for all people of a certain age is damaging because not everyone reads at the same level. I currently read books by Hunter S. Thompson and Jonathan Ames and will then roll over and spend some time reading a lower level but not insultingly written book by John Green or JK Rowling. (Well, Rowling a little, she could have challenged vocabularies more) and then happily pic up Warren Ellis or Brian K Vaughn. I slide up and down the cognitive reading scale, I always have. I also spoke with my mother about what I read... Augh, it's so smokey and gross and I'm sleepy. Banning and preventing people from reading something because it stereotypes and puts people into a box of misinformation is not the way. Attempting intelligent discourse and educating is the way. I mean, the depiction of Germans in almost everything is abysmal, all because one dude was a power-crazed dick. Then black people, the happy servants. It has been banned as a black mark on history, but it's not entirely gone, the level of presenting the old stereotypes has changed but not been eradicated. Pretty much anyone who isn't a WASP gets the shaft, but literature prevales because there are more important things to consider and discuss because education and understanding can be born from a lack of information, only if people are diligent and work to better inform the masses. (finished 6:20am)


Jasmine P.