Reading truly is wonderful, isn’t it? Reading the good books, at least, and the great ones, especially.
Again tonight I marvel at the fact that new books are sold at all.
I recently plowed through The Secret Garden (heh), finished again the wonderful The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and am currently enjoying The Wind in the Willows.
Also- today I heard my mom bitch and moan for like 15 minutes about the low quality of the books she’s been reading and listening to. Her choices are exclusively newly published works, most of them from Amazon and Audible, some from libraries like Hoopla.
She reads the book equivalent of shovelware. Trashy, factory churned out books designed to get pennies for a sale at online stores.
Yeah, not for me, I think.
Honestly, tho. If anything good has come out of being sick this year it’s that it’s finally rekindled my long dormant love for novels. I guess I can be grateful for that.
The Wind in the Willows is just… a reeeeally well written book. 50 pages in and I’ve not found a word that seems out of place. It’s really, really good. TBH, it’s light years ahead of anything I’ve touched that’s been published in the last 30 years or so.
IDK. Older novels just seem so polished. They seem so well planned and executed that they’re almost breathtaking in their efficiency. They were clearly made by and for people who cared quite a lot about the quality of their work.
Oddly, it’s kind of… difficult to talk about them, tho. IRL, people don’t want to hear it. I could talk about reading The Wind in the Willows to people in know IRL, but man, the weird glances I would get, lol. It’s somewhat hard for me to understand, but there you go.
I get the same reactions when I tell people about watching and enjoying films like Snow White. “Isn’t that rated G? Aren’t you a man?” Responses like this- from people who watch horrible, disgusting reality TV shit.
Well, yes, I am a man, but Jesus, people. Do we not have standards? I do.
I think I’ll finish this post with one of my favorite Schopenhauer quotes:
“One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.”
Well said.