I'm a book snob. I don't know how people can be bothered to read chick lit, for example. I generally find crime fiction boring. But here's the weirdness: I don't know why people read the old classics of literature either. I try, every now and then, and am reminded of what I realised already at university, as I was studying literature:
Most of these classics are great, on a theoretical level. They are fun to analyse because they have so many levels. And I love to be familiar with them because they are an integral part of our culture. But they don't speak to me emotionally. They fail to pull me in, because they were written for people of another time and another mindset. Another generation.
Perhaps I'm unimaginative, dull, even a bit thick in the head, since I can't get into that other mindset and identify with anything that is too far removed from my own time and culture. But I can't get rid of my stupidly romantic notion that reading should be fun AND challenging, a book should sweep me off my feet.
Reading should be like one of those whirlwind romances that leave you flabbergasted, heartbroken and feeling like you have lived an entire lifetime and in three alternate universes at once.
2 comments:
Book snob indeed!
The old classics have a charm of their own - a bygone era, of mews and gas-lit streets of some grey cobble-stoned city. Cravats and top-hats. The Dickensian adventure or Holmes at some crime scene. Or maybe the rolling heaths of Wessex and Hardy's incorrigible pessimism. Their 'far-removedness' from my teeming subcontinental abode was their charm.
As for the rest, yes. A book has to be all of those and more.
Perhaps sufficient far-removedness is a requisite for liking them? At least the pessimism of many of them (not only Hardy) is not far enough removed from the melancholy of my part of the world. I'm thinking I need to read more literature from other continents.
Post a Comment