A Summary Of Gerald Graff's Disliking Books
A Summary of Gerald Graff’s “Disliking Books”
Gerald Graff’s disliking books starts off as him declaring that his early fear of reading made him a better teacher to his students. It seems he had a lot of pressure put on him to read from his father who would push him to read, but Graff never became interested in reading likely because it felt forced if he was to enjoy reading it would have to come naturally. And though he speaks of his childhood in a sort of rough manner being a culturally mixed neighborhood and that the rougher working class children might beat him up if he was too peculiar or different or intellectual.
He enjoyed the more practical pursuits in math and science rather than literature, as they would apply to everyday life and would make a good career field to go into, and when Gerald was child, boys who were bookworms were deemed "sissies" and beaten up. He did not want
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Most students from his background when they reached college would have to get serious which meant either pre-law pre-med or a major in business to take over the family business, but it being Graff had no family business and was not interested in medicine or the law he did not and enrolled in the liberal arts.
His father pressured him to read more rather than just comic and magazines and even locked him in his room with nothing but a book, but none of it stuck because he was interested in them. The first time he seemed to really enjoy reading was in college when he began reading Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” when he chose to write an essay of it for class and his professor urged him to read of critics that were both for and against it. It was then he realized that even great authors made mistakes that even undergraduates could point
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