Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Old-fashioned pleasures ...

... `The Familiar Hearts of Strangers'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I clicked on the link in this post Andrew Seal's regarding his New Year's resolution, wherein read this:
Frankly, I'm terrified of becoming one of these narrow readers—one of the men who call themselves "common readers" and pride themselves on the "capacity for ignoring the tribalism and exclusivity endemic to the world of books," all of which washes out to mean that they never bother themselves with questions about what kinds of books they're not reading. Instead, they obsess over the "quality" or "worth" of the books they've already read, as if the notches on their bookcase represent the whole universe of books and what that universe really requires is a good ranking system. I don't ever want to be like that. I might as well go back to collecting baseball cards.


That's me - a common reader. Though I somehow managed to read - and review - a book by a guy named Tan Twan Eng last year. I do find this bit about obsessing "over the 'quality' or 'worth' of the books they've already read" peculiar. To savor the quality of that which has quality - a good Bordeaux, for instance - is hardly to obsess over it. An obsession is "a persistent unwanted thought."

1 comment:

  1. Since you didn't provide your readers with a link to the actual post I wrote, here it is. They might want, you know, context or something.

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