14. MORE FRUSTRATED

How to Read Literature Like a Professor has been frustrating me since the very beginning. I think it's weird how we had to read this book AND On Writing, because they're pretty much opposites and seem to contradict each other. In my opinion, How to Read Literature Like a Professor has quite a bit of (in the abbreviated form of what apparently is one of Stephen King's favorite words) bs. I feel like there's a lot of that in this book. So many things he mentions seem very unnecessary to me. And while examples do help me in understanding some certain concepts, what frustrates me even more is the author's use of examples taken from literary works he's expected EVERYONE to have read. So even when he's explaining an example, sometimes I still have no idea what he's talking about. EVEN MORE FRUSTRATING is the fact that most of his examples ruined a lot of stories for me. In that chapter about political stuff, he was telling how some Edgar Allan Poe stories (THAT I HAVE NOT READ YET, BUT WAS PLANNING TO READ IN THE NEAR FUTURE) actually contained hidden messages about politics. And in his VERY DETAILED EXPLANATION, HE JUST WENT AND SUMMARIZED THE STORY AND GAVE AWAY THE ENDING. I am very frustrated. Well, I'm gonna go back to reading now so I can just finish this book already. Hopefully I'll be done by tomorrow to have one last blog post about it. And hopefully I won't have to be in contact with this book too much afterwards.