Saturday, July 23, 2005

Reading Break

Here's a delightful essay on the flattening of literary affect and relative joylessness of most mass novels. It's a nice piece because it reminds the reader of why we enjoy certain novelists, even as we might fume that he should have mentioned them. This line in particular reminded me of the joys of reading J.G. Ballard:
"By some perverse twist of intellectual history, the very reason we once read novels- to be liberated from solemnity and absurdity, to be engaged in a merry war with everything around us- is the very reason we won't read novels which perform such a service now."

Maybe that'd why Ballard's books are so hard to find in North America.

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