Saturday, October 20, 2012

Confessions of a Lazy Reader

I'm going to be honest with you.  The main reason I read older classic novels is because I'm lazy.  It's true.  This will come as a surprise to those who know me and consider me a titan of industry, an energetic mass of effusion and movement, a mover and shaker in the world of literature and finance and espionage.

Anyway, these older books have stood the test of time and I know I can depend on them to be worth reading.  I hate wasting my time on a bad novel.  Raise your hand if you've read a book lately that had good reviews but you didn't like it.  I know, me too!

There are so many books to choose from - thousands ... tens of thousands ... entire armies of books building up higher and mightier every day.  So which ones will you dedicate hours of your life to?  How do you decide?

You can read plenty of reviews out there that like every single book.  It's crazy, but so many review sites I go to seem to be dedicated to praising whatever book they just read.  Who do you trust?

A Town Like Alice, and The French Lieutenant's Woman are perfect examples.  Check goodreads and Amazon.  They praise those books.  Wunderbar!  Magnifique!

Then you read them and you're like, meh...  And people will call them deep, or so full of metaphor and symbolism and this and that.  You want metaphor and symbolism, read Moby Dick.  But people want to feel wise and show off.  Puh-lease!

With this website, I hope to cut through a lot of the crap that reviewers have been spewing for so long.  I'm wading through piles of steaming novels just to find out what's good out there.  I know I've got a lot of well known classics on this site, but I hope to start reading some lesser known 19th century novels as well.

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