Another Thursday is upon us, and that means it is time for yet another Booking Through Thursday prompt. What will it be this week, you ask? Here you go…Prompt: Do you prefer reading current books? Or older ones? Or outright old ones? (As in, yes, there is a difference between a book from 10 years ago and, say, Charles Dickens or Plato.)
Until I got really serious about my college career as an English major, I was an equal opportunity reader. I read Current Stuff, Older Stuff and Outright Old Stuff without any rhyme or reason. I was as likely to pick up Beowulf as Alexandre Dumas as Stephen King. However, as I worked my way through my undergrad career and went through survey courses and started specializing, I leaned more and more toward contemporary literature and that is more or less where I have planted my academic flag: in contemporary lit (i.e. roughly 1950 and forward). That is not to say that I won’t pick up Bede or Alcott, there is something to be said for the predecessors of Charles Johnson, Angela Carter, and, say, Don DeLillo … after all, the postmodern movement and contemporary literature are writing in conversation with and writing against what came before it, but I lean toward books from the last 50 years before most anything else nowadays.
1 comments:
Yeah. I rarely read anything prior to 1950 or so myself, Russians and French excepted.
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