The unliterary who read to pass the time reminds me of a story told to me by a WWII veteran, of waiting in a long line of other young men for their physical. Someone in the line had a racy paperback, and when he had read a number of pages, he tore then off and handed them to the next guy to read, and so on, so the book was passed along, in pieces, through the line.
Those who read only a less than ten books in the year would include both my parents, who are older baby boomers. Eyesight problems are partly responsible (a serious accident left my father with blind spots in his vision that interfered with his ability to scan a printed page, and my mother is slowly going blind), but neither of them ever read as much as I do. Yet they are both intelligent and wise, and they both inspired me to read as much as I do. Reading was, after all, a luxury to the previous generations of my working-class ancestors.
I just checked, and the cover of that edition of The Woman in White is the image that George R.R. Martin has as a mural in his bookstore in Santa Fe. I photographed it when I visited Santa Fe last year, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t original art. A curious discovery . . .
I think we have to bear in mind that the classics that we admire today were not written to be "serious reading." They were the bestsellers of their day. The problem is that they have become more difficult for modern readers simply because their concerns, their style, and their allusions have become unfamiliar with the passage of time. They now require a more serious effort from readers than they did when they were written, simply because of that distance in time.
But somehow modern "serious" literature has taken that difficulty born of the passage of years and made it into a hallmark of seriousness. Thus, "literary fiction" is made deliberately difficult to flatter those who fancy themselves serious readers. On the other side, popular fiction has been refined down to the raw essentials of reader appeal, feeding adrenaline fixes at predetermined intervals.
The result is a great literary void and the near absence of the kind of books from which the cream emerged to be the classics we rightly admire. This, I would suggest, makes it hard to compare reading habits between now and the past. The past has a smorgasbord of delights to choose from. Today, the buffet consists almost entirely of candy bars and old mutton.
Certainly there are other factors at play, but we are comparing apples and oranges as long as the available selection contains neither apples nor oranges.
The unliterary who read to pass the time reminds me of a story told to me by a WWII veteran, of waiting in a long line of other young men for their physical. Someone in the line had a racy paperback, and when he had read a number of pages, he tore then off and handed them to the next guy to read, and so on, so the book was passed along, in pieces, through the line.
Those who read only a less than ten books in the year would include both my parents, who are older baby boomers. Eyesight problems are partly responsible (a serious accident left my father with blind spots in his vision that interfered with his ability to scan a printed page, and my mother is slowly going blind), but neither of them ever read as much as I do. Yet they are both intelligent and wise, and they both inspired me to read as much as I do. Reading was, after all, a luxury to the previous generations of my working-class ancestors.
Poor Kansas! Ha. Thanks, Joel.
I just checked, and the cover of that edition of The Woman in White is the image that George R.R. Martin has as a mural in his bookstore in Santa Fe. I photographed it when I visited Santa Fe last year, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t original art. A curious discovery . . .
I think we have to bear in mind that the classics that we admire today were not written to be "serious reading." They were the bestsellers of their day. The problem is that they have become more difficult for modern readers simply because their concerns, their style, and their allusions have become unfamiliar with the passage of time. They now require a more serious effort from readers than they did when they were written, simply because of that distance in time.
But somehow modern "serious" literature has taken that difficulty born of the passage of years and made it into a hallmark of seriousness. Thus, "literary fiction" is made deliberately difficult to flatter those who fancy themselves serious readers. On the other side, popular fiction has been refined down to the raw essentials of reader appeal, feeding adrenaline fixes at predetermined intervals.
The result is a great literary void and the near absence of the kind of books from which the cream emerged to be the classics we rightly admire. This, I would suggest, makes it hard to compare reading habits between now and the past. The past has a smorgasbord of delights to choose from. Today, the buffet consists almost entirely of candy bars and old mutton.
Certainly there are other factors at play, but we are comparing apples and oranges as long as the available selection contains neither apples nor oranges.
Excellent article, thank you!