“In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possible come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so, The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.
I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion…”
- From C.S. Lewis's "Lilies that Fester"
I've been thinking about summer reading and beach novels, and I've been wondering if I shouldn't buy a book cover to hide the washboard abs of the young man featured on the front of the latest book I'm reading, my first "summer-time reading." After all, English teachers are supposed to read Pulitzer Prize winners and Booker award-winning fiction, and I always wince a bit when asked "What's that you're reading?" when the cover of the book I'm holding is pink and the content is fluff. But then I remembered this CS Lewis quotation, and I realized that there are a lot of live dogs that I love: Watermelon by Marion Keys, Lucky You by Carl Hiaassen, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri, and Knave's Wager by Loretta Chase. And then there are the dead lions whose corpses I never want to revisit: Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Prairie by James Fennimore Cooper, most of Catcher in the Rye and nearly every novel that Hemingway ever wrote.
So I want to start this blog by defending bad books, books that may have not been censored, but which have been mocked and dismissed. This summer, Iwhile I'll read some classics and prize winners, I also plan to take a bad book to the beach, tuck a trash novel into my purse, and curl up on the couch with a really predictable bit of banal writing. And I want to post the "Readers' Bill of Rights" as set forth by Daniel Pennac in Better than Life:
Readers' Bill of Rights
Allow yourself...
1. The right not to read.
2. The right to skip pages.
3. The right to not finish.
4. The right to reread.
5. The right to read anything.
6. The right to escapism.
7. The right to read anywhere.
8. The right to browse.
9. The right to read out loud.
10. The right to not defend your tastes
