I'm just kidding. Do read.
Read!
And don't read just any pulp page turner.
There are countless sources on the web to direct you to good reading, the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list is just one example. And you don't have to spend a lot of money. Heck, most of these great books can be found at your library, ergo, for free.
I almost never buy books at full retail price. The rare exception: when the author is still alive and would benefit by the dollar royalty from my purchase, or more importantly, when the author is standing right in front of me.
Growing up I was a slow reader. My mom invested heavily in helping me excel as a reader including hiring me a reading tutor in high school. And though I conceptually understand to this day how to speed read, I still read only slightly faster than a good typist types. So what? So it takes us slow readers longer. So what if it's taken me my whole life to begin to catch up with what I might have wolfed down in a few semesters of college as an English major. I'm enjoying every little bite.
The language of the Great Gatsby is as amazing as I've often heard tell. I feel gypped that no wise mentor or friend placed it in my hands many years ago. It took being a student of Hunter Thompson, watching Hunter and a slew of others close to me die, and finally climbing out of the anti-depressent fog I'd been in (partially to cope with all this death) to comprehend that this was the work that inspired Hunter. Now I'm getting it. And man, what a treat. Just bask in the language of this descriptive passage that seems to come out of nowhere early in the book, seemingly utterly unnecessary in the context of the story and yet oh so perfect.
Hopefully, most of you are long familiar with Gatsby and will find my belated discovery of Fitzgerald ironically quaint. Fair enough. Here then is the passage, as new and beautiful to me as it is old and exhaustively analyzed (yet still stunning) to academia.
From The Great Gatsby:
"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight."
Read!
And don't read just any pulp page turner.
There are countless sources on the web to direct you to good reading, the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list is just one example. And you don't have to spend a lot of money. Heck, most of these great books can be found at your library, ergo, for free.
I almost never buy books at full retail price. The rare exception: when the author is still alive and would benefit by the dollar royalty from my purchase, or more importantly, when the author is standing right in front of me.
Growing up I was a slow reader. My mom invested heavily in helping me excel as a reader including hiring me a reading tutor in high school. And though I conceptually understand to this day how to speed read, I still read only slightly faster than a good typist types. So what? So it takes us slow readers longer. So what if it's taken me my whole life to begin to catch up with what I might have wolfed down in a few semesters of college as an English major. I'm enjoying every little bite.
The language of the Great Gatsby is as amazing as I've often heard tell. I feel gypped that no wise mentor or friend placed it in my hands many years ago. It took being a student of Hunter Thompson, watching Hunter and a slew of others close to me die, and finally climbing out of the anti-depressent fog I'd been in (partially to cope with all this death) to comprehend that this was the work that inspired Hunter. Now I'm getting it. And man, what a treat. Just bask in the language of this descriptive passage that seems to come out of nowhere early in the book, seemingly utterly unnecessary in the context of the story and yet oh so perfect.
Hopefully, most of you are long familiar with Gatsby and will find my belated discovery of Fitzgerald ironically quaint. Fair enough. Here then is the passage, as new and beautiful to me as it is old and exhaustively analyzed (yet still stunning) to academia.
From The Great Gatsby:
"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight."
