This is one of the strangest, most Russian doll-ish reading experiences I’ve ever had. I’m a high school English teacher reading another HSET reviewing a novel about HSET’ing by another HSET. It’s like being a trucker watching another trucker stream a third trucker’s big-rig simulation sesh on Twitch.
I enjoyed Why Teach?, which I read while it was being serialized on his Substack newsletter, but yeah, Prague was on a whole other level. Great fun to see the evolution of a writer in real time.
Now I'm stuck wondering if the editorial advice was wrong, and the novel might have been stronger with a third person POV.
I think it’s very very difficult to write this kind of depressed, ethical, overthinking POV. I tend to just wonder oh god is this how my stream of consciousness sounds
I look at it as, there's a more rollicking or strange novel possible here if the protagonist is different, but if the goal was to write about a basically normal guy with conventional ethical commitments who's trying to teach in dusty provincial Middle America in a very particular era that all Millennials will remember, it's an eminently believable portrait. And that seems to be what the novel is going for
Don’t disagree, though I’m also not going to entirely capitulate and say that it’s just an (imo) less appealing goal, as I tend to think ingenuity can make something great out of any particular intention.
Great review, and lines up almost exactly with my feelings on the book. It's funny about that Odyssey craft project -- that's the type of stuff that's absolutely loved by PD folk and schools of education and, yes, the sort of teachers who want us to move past the canon and teaching full books.
I got into teaching because I wanted to study literature and writing and my dad (who was helping pay for college) told me I needed to get a degree with a job attached to it. Not bad advice, though I sometimes wish I'd had more models in my life for the options available to me. Not my dad's fault, of course.
Also - glad to see another Dead Poets Society hater out there. That movie is not good, and he is not a good teacher.
Neither my dad nor any of my five older siblings teach, so I definitely can’t blame a lack of imagined options. It is funny how often teaching turns out to be a compromise to careerism rather than the fairly romantic, impractical pursuit it seems to many
This is one of the strangest, most Russian doll-ish reading experiences I’ve ever had. I’m a high school English teacher reading another HSET reviewing a novel about HSET’ing by another HSET. It’s like being a trucker watching another trucker stream a third trucker’s big-rig simulation sesh on Twitch.
Wait til Shull reads this comment
I enjoyed Why Teach?, which I read while it was being serialized on his Substack newsletter, but yeah, Prague was on a whole other level. Great fun to see the evolution of a writer in real time.
Now I'm stuck wondering if the editorial advice was wrong, and the novel might have been stronger with a third person POV.
I think it’s very very difficult to write this kind of depressed, ethical, overthinking POV. I tend to just wonder oh god is this how my stream of consciousness sounds
I look at it as, there's a more rollicking or strange novel possible here if the protagonist is different, but if the goal was to write about a basically normal guy with conventional ethical commitments who's trying to teach in dusty provincial Middle America in a very particular era that all Millennials will remember, it's an eminently believable portrait. And that seems to be what the novel is going for
Don’t disagree, though I’m also not going to entirely capitulate and say that it’s just an (imo) less appealing goal, as I tend to think ingenuity can make something great out of any particular intention.
Great review, and lines up almost exactly with my feelings on the book. It's funny about that Odyssey craft project -- that's the type of stuff that's absolutely loved by PD folk and schools of education and, yes, the sort of teachers who want us to move past the canon and teaching full books.
I got into teaching because I wanted to study literature and writing and my dad (who was helping pay for college) told me I needed to get a degree with a job attached to it. Not bad advice, though I sometimes wish I'd had more models in my life for the options available to me. Not my dad's fault, of course.
Also - glad to see another Dead Poets Society hater out there. That movie is not good, and he is not a good teacher.
Neither my dad nor any of my five older siblings teach, so I definitely can’t blame a lack of imagined options. It is funny how often teaching turns out to be a compromise to careerism rather than the fairly romantic, impractical pursuit it seems to many