Don't get me wrong, some of this stuff is good, I liked Moby Dick for instance, Mark Twain and Jules Verne made for good childhood reading, and sometimes a sweeping story is a good read just for the complexity of the characters, but unless you're one of the pretentious overblown pricks who sips Starbucks coffee and bitches about the state of modern agriculture simply because everyone else drinks Starbucks and you don't even know the difference between a herbicide and pesticide, let alone why ranchers need to use antibiotics on their herds, then there really isn't much enjoyment in these literary masterpieces. I mean, there isn't any enjoyment regardless of how pretentious you are, but with pretension comes the prerequisite of not being able to think for yourself and just do what every other pretentious prick does (I was going to say "think" again instead of "does", but that would have been silly).
Now, why the big rant you ask? Well, sometimes it just feels good to bitch, but I'd also like to point out that there are options to crap like The Great Gatsby (as God as my witness I don't know how I made it through that book, I'm rich and have lots of parties because I have unrequited love, wah, wah, wah!), the least of which being video game books.
A few years back I read a four book series based on the original DOOM games and they were good. If you played and enjoyed the games then these books are right up you're alley, it's like you're back in the game, except this time you have motivation to kill beyond the possession of a rocket launcher and plasma gun. I recently started reading the books based on the Warcraft games and you know what? They're good stories. OK, they don't have the high brow themes of The Lord of the Rings, but they do have interesting characters doing things that I'm interested in. As a matter of fact I'll probably read the Diablo and Starcraft books when I'm done this too. Sidenote: This technically regarded as blasphemy in the geek/nerd world, but the Lord of the Rings books could have seriously benefited from a good editor. The fact that I still considered these books good is a testament to how amazing the stories actually are, I mean seriously, how much do I need to know about the hair on a Hobbits foot? However, it's impossible to not respect how such a grand sweeping saga can be based on the simple theme of time, no start, no finish, just a continuation with events occurring throughout, none of which can compete with the passage of time.
My point here is that reading is good and it should be a good thing to do. School seems to be a dichotomy of ideas, I grew up with teachers saying "Reading is good!" but then giving me the most horrible crap to read. I don't care what anyone says, Shakespeare doesn't make for good reading, it's a lot of work for little gain. True, most, if not all, of our modern plots and stories are heavily influenced by his writing, but that just means you can get this stuff without the anachronistic language and behavior. If you want to read this, great, go ahead, but damnit, do it because you enjoy it. If i hadn't had a strong ingrained love of reading, and 2 hours on a school bus with nothing else to do, school would have crushed the reading bug in me.
I for one am going to stop hiding my love of entertaining books, if it's a good story that makes me feel like I've actually used a few hours of my life and not wasted time laboring, that's good enough for me. I'd suggest everyone try the same thing and read something entertaining, you never quite know what you'll learn.
Watch for a list of Robs Best Books, coming to a blog near you! Same BatBlog, Same BatBlogger!
No comments:
Post a Comment