Sitzfleisch and the Novel

My new fave grumpy old man has a delightful rant up about the crimes and follies of the AP English exam. I admit I can't claim actually to have read either Rutherford's London or Follett's Pillars of the Earth, so I cannot responsibly pretend to confirm that they are in fact tedious potboilers. I admit that I've actually enjoyed a bit of Follett here and there though it never occurred to me to class it as high art. And while I haven't actually read Rutherford, the people who lug around copies of Rutherford often strike me as tedious potboilers themselves.

So I suspect that he is onto something. But as I sugget in his comment section, I think he may be overlooking an important instrumental necessity here: the purpose of the AP English exam is to feed the maw of the great beast--perhaps in particular, to get them ready for law school (those med school bound are doing AP biology, I hope). And as I must have said before: brilliance, or acuity, or insight, are not at the top of the list of qualities that you want to cultivate in a prospective law student--or even a prospective lawyer. Far more important is sitzfleisch--the capacity to prop up that $140 casebook under the gooseneck lamp and pull out your yellow marker and undertake hours and hours of parsing For training in sitzfleisch, I suspect that Rutherford and Follett would stand fairly high on the list.

Added note: I do think he is a bit hard on Child's Christmas in Wales, though. Another instance of a perfectly good artifact spoiled by an English teacher.