Dumbest Literature Mistakes You've Made

If I may ask, how did the detention end up arising out of that? I like Huckleberry Finn, but that seems like a point you ought to be able to discuss in class.

I've never ever read Decameron so far (although I'll have to in my university) but until just now I thought Decameron was the name of the main character. A literary case of Refrain from Assuming, only backwards.

Because someone brought up Stockholm Syndrome and it get incredibly off topic and etc. I think... I don't remember it too well besides what I bought up and the result.

i, like many people, used to think that the lord of the ring was frodo, but i blame tolkien for that

Yeah, the actual LOTR barely shows up

"There is only one Lord of the Rings, and he does not share power."

I went and bought Dostoevsky's Demons, thinking that as a fairly low-key novel (I'd certainly never heard of it before then) it would probably make a good entry point into his oeuvre before moving on to heavier stuff like The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov, and the blurb sounded oh-so-interesting with mention of terrorism and philosophical conflicts among obsessed characters.

Turns out you'd really have to want to read a book about 1870's Russian politics to read a book about 1870's Russian politics. Otherwise it's a spectacular waste of time.

Hmm...I think I'm usually pretty good about this sort of thing...or maybe I'm just repressing the memories.

There was one thing from my senior year in high school, though: I might have taken The Taming of the Shrew more seriously than I should have.

edited 10th Aug '14 6:18:15 PM by KarkatTheDalek

I remember at some point in Rivendell, Pippin did call Frodo the Lord of the Ring, and one of the resident authority figures gave him a sound verbal bitchslap for it.

'Twas Gandalf, in particular, who delivered said slap.

This is directed at a comment a few pages back - you mean the heart wasn't actually beating? Ah, I'm an idiot. I was almost the only one in class who could tell what was happening in 'The Raven', and I never realized this. I'm so ashamed.

It's sort of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, but I think most likely the beating is all in the narrator's head, given that while had had a Face of a Thug thing going on, the narrators employer/murder victim was probably just a nice normal guy.

A mistake I recently realized:

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is being adapted into a tv series, and like many, I was surprised at Norrell's casting, as a young actor was chosen. The character "reads" as a crusty old man, and IIRC Ian Holm was the favored fan casting. However, although it's easy to miss (and I did) the book actually suggests Norrell is somewhere between his late 30's and late 40's, and so the casting was actually accurate.

I kinda said it before, but does "not really reading much of anything at all" count as a mistake? The classics mostly just weren't sent my way in high school. None of my peers ever really expressed interest in reading anything on their own except for Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comics. One of the only classmates I remember who did any unsolicited reading was an antisocial jerkass who spent one fall reading Helter Skelter. Said jerkass was also somewhat of an otaku, so he was almost singlehandedly responsible for me shunning anime for ages.

My second mistake was spending a summer trying to read and report on both Gone with the Wind AND The Grapes of Wrath in an attempt to comp out of English II. I failed miserably. The books just wouldn't. Fucking. END!!! (On the flip side, my mom's a bit of a Steinbeck fan, so she recommended to me The Pearl and Of Mice and Men, both of which I found much more enjoyable by which I obviously mean "shorter".)

My third mistake was trying to get into Harry Potter. This one took a long time, since my mom believed the "tool of the devil" and "kids injure themselves trying to be wizards" bullshit even after i told her that most of that was hyperbole and scare tactics. I breezed through the first three books, but once I hit Goblet of Fire I realized that nothing was really leaving an impact on me. And I was starting to find a lot of the elements quite... silly, actually.

I guess it depends on the age you get into it, and perhaps personal taste as well. For me, Harry Potter was a part of my childhood, so I'm willing to defend it to extent that I save for very few works (the others include Pokémon and Avatar: The Last Airbender).

edited 18th Oct '14 10:32:40 PM by KarkatTheDalek

I was about 13 when I got into it.

No, you're perfectly justified in thinking that about Harry Potter. And you didn't get into it "to late". It didn't impact me all that much, but that was probably because I'd been reading classics since I was a kid (I read the Hobbit and LOTR before I was thirteen). Ironically, Naruto impacted me a lot more and I only got into that when I was 17...

Mistakes I made: Getting into fanfiction and not knowing what all the different tags meant until I blundered into fics that had them. Seriously, fanfic sites should have a list of all the common ones.

I was significantly younger than that when I started, actually. Regardless, it's probably just a subjective thing. Let's leave it at that.

I had almost no reference point for it when I picked it up. Fantasy and magic literally had never crossed my path before. Pretty much all I read before then were comic strip treasuries, Dave Barry columns, and one Tintin book. I'd imagine it's not unlike offering a large meal to someone who's been adminitered nutrients through IV their entire life... they don't know what to think of it because they have no point of reference as to what's good or bad.

Does feeling like you have to read a book through to the end even if you're not enjoying it count as a literature mistake?

I've done that a few times. The worst was when I read the entire unabridged "Great Expectations", not even for school. I didn't like it but I read the whole thing. Speaking of which, do you know Charles Dickens was paid by the word? That's why he was so frickin wordy.

Dumb literature mistake i only found out this week that i've been making: I avoided reading John Scalzi for years because I thought he was the same person as John Ringo. I have no idea how I conflated the two, they don't even have the same publisher, oops.

Tackling Joyce's Ulysses for an ISU in grade 13. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

For the longest time I confused The Scarlet Letter, and The Purloined Letter.

Think that's a mind screw, you've not seen anything until you've tried reading Finnagan's Wake. The only thing you can say about it comprehensively is the sentences make grammatical,if not logical, sense. Even Wikipedia when classifying it pretty much says I give up.

Not one I made, but one time my dad confused Lord of the Rings with Lord of the Flies. (For the record, I don't think he's read either of them.)

I called Lord of the Flies Lord of the Files for a long time, and no, I'm not dyslexic.

I bet Lord of the files would be a better book. It could be about nerds in an office building and coming up with ways to get out of paperwork.