How nice to hear that Anne Frank was not in the distant past! I’m 73...some days I feel culturally antediluvian. I have a friend who just turned 90. She and her husband are beginning to feel culturally isolated. They aren’t in a nursing home, live as they have for the past 70 years and feel they just don’t fit in any more.
The young people I come in contact with _might_ read Hamilton....I don’t know. They all know who Wolverine is, however. I hear an awful lot of people say they are “too busy to read”. An author I corresponded with, who teaches creative writing, refers to the mass of readers who complain of hating 1st person narrative as ‘unsophisticated’.
I fear the definition of cultured has changed. I grew up on world mythology. They were my bedtime stories. However, to my father’s dismay, the character I liked most was Loki.
Well, I had no favorites in mythology. I only liked the stories which were properly gory for a youngster. And I loved the Odyssey because I longed to see Greece and other worlds outside my boring suburban neighborhood. That is surely the joy of reading.
Do children read Anne Frank anymore is a question?
I tend to look at ‘distant pasts’ in very long terms because as you will see from my tagline I am interested in the faraway past.