Posthumous Praise
Created | Updated Sep 11, 2003
Where have all the good books gone?
Why is it I can't "get into" any books lately? Is there a shortage of good books, or is it something in me? I will spend hours (yes hours) in my neighborhood book market reading the backs of thousands of books (and sipping $20 worth of caffeinated drinks)and none of them seem captivating. I am in the middle of about 6 books right now, each one I can only tolerate for so long (as it goes I have been reading the Autobiography of Salvador Dali for two years).
I ask this because I have given it much thought (or at least I think I remember thinking about it). Is it really a lack of "Fresh" material in the world? Or is it more the case of (as some have proposed) an inability to find pleasure in beauty.
I have heard it said (it turns out) that our collective conscience is focused on the morose and there for, finding it harder and harder to extract joy from our surroundings. We all collectively flinch in anticipation of the next disaster (IE: child abduction, terrorist bombing, Earth colliding comet, Nuclear explosion or the Earth itself is about to end, as an alien race wishes to make an intergalactic highway (personally that’s the one I've been awaiting with butt clenching anticipation)).
But as I see it now there is the simple matter of cookie cutter novels. You have these writers who have to put out 2 or 3 books a year (they can’t have found the exquisite joy of procrastination), so they don't over exert themselves with the details. It is however the details that I am looking for. I have to deal with the mundane everyday. I am looking to escape. Escape into that "Other World", that Middle Earth. I want to find myself Hitchhiking into the Galaxy, exploring the depths of the Ocean floor, climbing a mountain in the skin of a large African land mammal (I am not going to explain this since it should only be read by persons in the know. Enough at least to accurately construe the anti truncated pachyderm theorem)... in other words DETAIL, ESCAPE, ADVENTURE…
Why is it I can't "get into" any books lately? Is there a shortage of good books, or is it something in me? I will spend hours (yes hours) in my neighborhood book market reading the backs of thousands of books (and sipping $20 worth of caffeinated drinks)and none of them seem captivating. I am in the middle of about 6 books right now, each one I can only tolerate for so long (as it goes I have been reading the Autobiography of Salvador Dali for two years).
I ask this because I have given it much thought (or at least I think I remember thinking about it). Is it really a lack of "Fresh" material in the world? Or is it more the case of (as some have proposed) an inability to find pleasure in beauty.
I have heard it said (it turns out) that our collective conscience is focused on the morose and there for, finding it harder and harder to extract joy from our surroundings. We all collectively flinch in anticipation of the next disaster (IE: child abduction, terrorist bombing, Earth colliding comet, Nuclear explosion or the Earth itself is about to end, as an alien race wishes to make an intergalactic highway (personally that’s the one I've been awaiting with butt clenching anticipation)).
But as I see it now there is the simple matter of cookie cutter novels. You have these writers who have to put out 2 or 3 books a year (they can’t have found the exquisite joy of procrastination), so they don't over exert themselves with the details. It is however the details that I am looking for. I have to deal with the mundane everyday. I am looking to escape. Escape into that "Other World", that Middle Earth. I want to find myself Hitchhiking into the Galaxy, exploring the depths of the Ocean floor, climbing a mountain in the skin of a large African land mammal (I am not going to explain this since it should only be read by persons in the know. Enough at least to accurately construe the anti truncated pachyderm theorem)... in other words DETAIL, ESCAPE, ADVENTURE…
