Back To School

Came across a ghastly thing called sparknotes or some such while googling One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Gave the context to the book, which was great, but also had high-school students review it in the attempt to make their assignments easy. At the end of the summary was a set of questions you could attempt and then be judged (by who? how? "yes, yes, 10 on 10...for perfect recollection of paragraph 2 on page 122.")on how well you'd understood the novel.

Took me back to school and all those rapid readers. For the lucky few who've never had to undergo that torture, rapid readers are the things that can put you off Dickens forever, what with their questions at the end of each chapter and the monotonous reading-aloud-before-the-class of 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'Oliver Twist'.

I almost feel lucky for having escaped. The next time I'm struggling to complete a book, I'll visualise a 'guide', questionnaire et al. That should get me going again.