{"id":632,"date":"2006-08-21T19:21:31","date_gmt":"2006-08-22T00:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=632"},"modified":"2020-01-03T10:48:42","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T15:48:42","slug":"step-away-from-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/step-away-from-the-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Step away from the book"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Telegraph<\/em>, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:<\/p>\n

. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.<\/p>\n

I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.<\/p>\n

They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.<\/p>\n

At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before<\/a>: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:<\/p>\n

Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.<\/p>\n

But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books: . . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[384,1481,1120,302,1174,236,1092],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-books","tag-books","tag-commercial-fiction","tag-genre-novels","tag-literary-fiction","tag-popular-novels","tag-reading","tag-the-writing-process"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6045,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions\/6045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}