The Good Things of Reading

 Dear Reader, give Thornfield Hall a look and a subscription. A sensible amount of excellent posts on books and reading books. Today I received She Only Reads Novels!. It reminded me of my own experiences and opinions.

The prejudice against novels and poetry is prevalent in our society - something to fight against in our new age of book-banning and "revision." Good old Dad once called me "a non-participant in life" and punished me for reading on a weekend by making me mow the lawn.  All the neighbors saw me sobbing and mowing, so he rescinded his order - for his image. I raced inside, slammed the door of my room,  and returned to my book - possibly J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Thank God my mother and grandmother encouraged reading!  Is there anything more glorious than discovering Dickens? The  richness of language, his gorgeous use of anaphora and hyperbole, eccentric characters, wit, and brilliant storytelling?  I was also enamored of  the Brontes, especially Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Influenced by Gothic novels and the Romantic poets, the Brontes wrote vigorously, lyrically, and  suspensefully about impoverished, independent heroines, dark, brooding anti-heroes, and forbidden love - not without wit!

Reading novels can be serious or fun, or serious and fun, but it is not an uncritical activity.  We do not consider Georgette Heyer the equal of Jane Austen, which is not to say that Heyer doesn't  have her merits. (But I simply cannot read Heyer!)  And then there are Margaret Drabble and A. S. Byatt, both great writers, two quarreling sisters - do we have to choose one?  Or can we read both? Or, as a character in a silly HBO space comedy said, "Are you a Drabbler?"

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When someone belittles reading novels - or attempts to ban a book - I think of 19th-century Russian novels, Lawrence's The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley's Lover,  Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and the long, long history of censorship. Now editors at publishing companies are "revising" (censoring) Ian Fleming's  James Bond books to expurgate the language and attitudes of the past and brighten things up.. I dread the prospect of a sanitized James Bond.

With this high level of book-banning and censorship, how long before the Library of Alexandria burns - again?

Hear, hear.

Our humanity is at stake nowadays - not from AI - but from ourselves, from our walling ourselves off from that same humanity, by refusing to see the human in the Other, by our fears of treating others as we would to be treated. Literature is the vessel of our humanity.

sch

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