Archive for books
woe be unto the reader
It goes without saying that I enjoy reading – somewhere, amidst all the papers that litter (purposefully) my room, I have the Accelerated Reader badges from elementary school, and up to a few years ago, I could still fit my “I am an AR Star” shirt that I got in the fifth grade. My favorite series then was the Boxcar Children (I was a late convert to Harry Potter).
Now, my reading is almost purely (and at times depressingly) non-fiction: an endless stream of subscriptions to The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. You can usually catch me reading two books at a time, one fiction (if not literary) and one not. (I’m currently finishing Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence and am starting Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring).
Even as I fret over the lack of color in my reading (occasional pick-ups of The New Yorker or Atlantic), it also goes without saying that all of it is atypical (put kindly) compared to readers themselves, let alone my generation, or the nation as a whole. According to the NEA’s Reading at Risk, The nation’s readers have declined 7.3 percentage points from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002. And of those who do read, only 16% consume more than 12 books a year.
The best sentence known to mankind.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
- Jack Kerouac
What a sentence.
Forget about all of the imagery, parallelism and the literary devices that make it special; for me, it’s holistically one of the most memorable sentences in the English language. Ever since I read it a few days ago I’ve been enamored with Kerouac, his alcohol and drug-induced prose, and his fellow writers of the Beat Generation, or beatniks.
It’s this sentence that has single-handedly inspired me to read Kerouac’s On the Road. His utterly insouciant, free-flowing style is something that you really don’t find in today’s modern literature, and it’s a real shame.
Shaj Mathew
kahutzler
