I was considering doing a Top Ten list of books I read in 2014, but then I realized that lists are not how most of us experience reading.
We read things and they interact with other parts of our lives in ways that often run perpendicular to any quality in the writing itself. A list of the “best” books I read in 2014 might not convey as much meaning as telling you about the adventures in reading I had.
So, that’s what I am going to do instead…
So …
You guys know I’m not a Franzen fanatic, but I feel compelled to share my thoughts on his recent interview at Scratch.
The consensus seems to be that it was a great back-and-forth, and I agree. Straightforward questions, frank answers. What an interview should be.
Here are my thoughts on the the highlights, starting with the stuff with which I agree and saving my only disagreement with Franzen for last.
From The Clergyman’s Almanack (1815) as quoted in America and her Almanacs : Wit, Wisdom, and Weather 1639-1970 by Robb Sagendorph:
“The indiscriminate reading of Novels and Romances is to young females of the most dangerous tendency … it agitates their fancy to delerium of pleasure never to be realized … and opens to their view the Elysium fields which exist only in the imagination … fields which will involve them in wretchedness and inconsolable sorrow. Such reading converts them into a bundle of acutely feeling nerves and makes them ‘ready to expire of a rose in aromatic pain’ … The most profligate villain, bent on the infernal purpose of seducing a woman, could not wish a symptom more favorable to his purpose than a strong imagination inflamed with the rhapsodies of artful and corrupting novels.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. (Just imagine what they’d say about Twilight! Or internet porn…)
