Posted on 12/12/2025 3:13:21 PM PST by Borges
I’m the Luddite opposite of today’s people.
Thrilled to get my first library card as a child in the mid 1950s and to get special permission to get adult books with it. Used it for the three volume complete history of the FDR era by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. And then science fiction. And those Landmark series books (Constitution, founding fathers, history of American wars).
It’s all part of the plan to turn America communist.
THAT book Silas mariner almost made me give up reading. Thankfully I had better reading material at our local city Library (Carlsbad NM) in 1960 to keep me going. Today I still will NOT read any English novels from that time.
We all should.
Tess is so great. What was your issue with it? TSL takes some getting used to but it’s still really good.
I was never a reader. I hated all the books we were assigned to read in school just out of spite. We were told WHAT to think about a book rather than what WE as students thought. They were all boring.
You can speed up audio books!
I remember I was in 3rd grade when I read The Hobbit the first time, then The Lord of the Rings trilogy. (can’t even count how times I have read those).
Yeah, sad, my problem is I try to read so many books at the same time.
Ain't it the truth. Or maybe they all just looked good to a guy who'd been stuck on a cattle drive or a long ocean voyage for months with no women. After reading a few of the L'Amour books, I noticed his main characters had a penchant for slightly freckled girls with auburn hair.
“Books like “The Scarlet Letter” and “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” made sure of that!”
Or anything by Franz Kafka.
Yeah, and they were always like "I never could talk to a woman but my brother could gab them up. No women would look at me. I was too tall and my shoulders too wide."
Even the classics need to be reworked and rewritten before being worthwhile.
The industry is filled with editors who can't write and freelance authors who can't write either. The publishers just "move product".
Writers in the past studied great writing in multiple languages, including Greek and Latin.
My experience is that teenagers are fascinated by Kafka.
What do you mean they need to be rewritten?
Last year I read over 80 books. I have not read near that this year. Too much home stuff going on.
Classics Illustrated was a go-to for me in my younger days. lol
I tested at 12th grade reading level when I was in 6th grade. Outside of class, I only read sports themed books until my junior year in HS when I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
During my 4 years in Germany, I basically went without TV. What spare time I had was spent reading such novels as The Kent Family Chronicles, Texas (by Michener), and Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer. Frederick Forsyth was a favorite, too.
Had an English Literature class in HS 1974. Consistent with reading books in class and writing a summary of the contents/themes. Loved it.
Rewrite them for active voice instead of passive. Get to the point for each chapter. Remove the fluff. Get rid of irrelevant characters. Trim down any elaboration of MacGuffin plot devices.
MacGuffin (from Wikipedia): A MacGuffin is a term, popularized by film director Alfred Hitchcock, referring to a plot device wherein a character pursues an object, though the object's actual nature is not important to the story. Another object would work just as well if the characters treated it with the same importance. Regarding the MacGuffin, Alfred Hitchcock stated, "In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is almost always the papers."
A literary work is Art not a string of sausage you can rearrange. It’s about more than story - it’s style, tone, language etc.
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