Monday, June 9, 2014

Classic Sci-fi that somebody really ought to turn into a graphic novel --a really big graphic novel.

Niven, Larry (1970) Ringworld  New York:  Ballantine

 
     In March of 1980 (I know because I wrote the date on the inside front cover), I bought a copy of Larry Niven's Ringworld.  I was, at the time, in the 8th grade.  I remember buying it and reading it and enjoying it.  Recently I decided to reread it all these years later.  I discovered something surprising.

At the time I first read it, Niven's book was way above my reading level.  There were words and concepts that I did not understand (and the dictionary definition didn't help either.)  So, according to the way some researchers think about adolescent and young adult reading, I should have been frustrated at the difficulty of it.  Reading that book should have been a huge mistake that resulted in me being so frustrated that I would turn my back on reading forever.

As it turned out, though, I found reading something that was too difficult for me to understand fully oddly exhilarating  I remember feeling the same way about some books by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. VanVogt.  As I reread it, I was that there were some sexual references that were subtle enough that they must have flown right over my head -- but I also remembered how I felt trying to puzzle out the relationships between the main characters, Louis Wu -- a long-lived human; Nessus - an alien being from a race whose defining characteristic is cowardice; Speaker -- one of the kzin, a catlike predator alien species; and Teela Brown -- a human who is the result of a selective breeding program that isolates luck as a characteristic.  I remembered how cool the concept of a vast ringworld was -- built by and incredibly advances civilization, yet fallen into ruin. 


I have no idea if 8th grade geeks of today would find it as exciting as I did, but it seems to me that it might be worth a shot.  Or maybe it would be better for high school kids.  Really, though, this book commercial is less about the book and more about this idea -- if a student wants to read something that you know is way to hard for him or her, let him or her give it a shot.  The combination of being allowed to make a choice and the challenge of something they shouldn't be able to read may give them the chance to jump a reading level or two when no one is looking.
 

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