In elementary school, it seems that I didn't read many books. Some books, such as "The Secret in the Attic" and "Anne of Green Gables," I don't remember the content anymore, and at that time, I may not have read them carefully. I only read the beginning and ending of "Treasure Island." Since elementary school, we have had post-reading feedback in our assignments, and other classes even had reading comprehension questions. When writing these post-reading feedbacks, I would unconsciously write them as excerpts, but I don't remember the content of the excerpts now. The things in "Goats Don't Eat Grass Again," "Bronze Sunflower," "Childhood," and "Mother" are still fresh in my memory.
There were many recommended books in junior high school, but there were reading comprehension questions in every Chinese exam. These questions would ask how much Xiangzi bought the yellow cart for, who ran the cart factory, where Captain Nemo went, and similar questions. Whether these questions can test if a person has read a classic is not the point (the answers are also quite obvious), but if a person reads books to answer these strange questions, then reading has lost its essence. It seems that our batch of students in the high school entrance exam has changed, and they won't ask those questions that are hard to answer anymore.
I still vividly remember "Camel Xiangzi," "Gulliver's Travels," and "Jane Eyre" from junior high school, but if you ask me to write the post-reading feedback for these books, I would probably just write "sympathy for the fresh and free."
I feel like I read indiscriminately. At least I won't stop reading just because the content is highly theoretical. I could read "Rural China" in the first year of high school, but "Dream of the Red Chamber" excluded me, I didn't read much of it, and during the reading process, I only perked up a bit due to the low-level jokes inside, never really got into it. In the first year of high school, because I planned to do research-based learning, I read some social science papers, and after reading them all at once, my head would feel a bit dizzy.
In high school, there were tasks for post-reading feedback, and I repeatedly searched online for methods to write post-reading feedback. Some people say you should grasp the main contradictions of the characters, but when I read "Oliver Twist," I only paid attention to Oliver, feeling relieved for his life during adoption, and feeling sad and angry for his days in the thief gang, there's really nothing much to write about. "The Mountain" and "Morning Dao" are the same, the novels themselves are short, and there's not much to talk about. If we were to talk about feelings, a simple "shock" would suffice. The novel "The Three-Body Problem" is long, but what feelings does it evoke?
There was a sample post-reading feedback for "David Copperfield," each paragraph roughly describing what kind of person David is, what kind of person his mother is, what kind of person the Murdstones siblings are... This is easy to write, but also very boring. I look at my own reading, not aiming to write a post-reading feedback that could win a prize in a city-level essay competition, as long as I feel moved and shocked while reading, feeling that there are people in the world living similar lives, then it's a success.