![]() I used to think that it was cheating for a sighted person to “read” that way but a friend who is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago persuaded me otherwise. Sighted persons can do it, too, and there are whole sections of bookstores that offer taped novels and nonfiction titles for sale. ![]() What brought this inner debate on anew was a feel-good television story about a Books for the Blind program, where people with reading disabilities can check out books on tape from a library and “read” them by playing the cassette. But once I started, I always read every book, good or bad, all the way through. OK, some of the Dostoyevsky was tough sledding, and reading it all the way through was hard for me. ![]() Well, I like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” even more. Was it wasted time if it was enjoyable? Didn’t you like the James Lee Burke novel that you read? This is an internal debate that I have over and over. It’s just hard to shake the feeling that I’ve wasted a lot of my time. Then what? I’d have gotten into a better college? Landed a better job? Improved my mind? If only I had concentrated on really good writers, then. Now that I’m retired and in my 60s, it’s beginning to dawn on me that our time on Earth is finite and I’m sorry that I spent so much time reading second-rate books. Even as a youth, I imbibed a mix of Homer (in translation, of course) and Franklin W. For every Leo Tolstoy there was an Ian Fleming. Sometimes I think that may not be a good thing.īut I could never concentrate on the Scotch or the cheap bourbon alone - at least, not until a few years ago. Scenes from Zane Grey and Harold Robbins mix tipsily in my head with passages from James Joyce and William Faulkner. Bloodshot and bedraggled, none of us seemed to know how we got there or why. I recall sharing a batch of it with some ATOs in Birmingham, and the next thing I knew, we were in a restaurant in Atlanta having lunch with somebody’s mama. It may have tasted bad, but it was potent. We poured all the leftover liquor still in containers - wine, whiskey, beer, whatever - into a big vat, called the mixture spo-de-o-de and downed it. The result, in my mind, is a bit like my response to the concoction we used to make in college after a fraternity party. I’ve been a voracious reader most of my life, and I’ve consumed quantities of literature of all kinds. Meanwhile, many of the single-malt Scotch writers are authors they forced you to read in school: Shakespeare, Proust, Chaucer and the like. Most of the books on today’s best-seller lists are the equivalent of Old Crow, in my opinion. You know pretty quickly that there’s a difference. The best way I can describe it is to take a page from my drinking days and say that it’s the difference between a sip of single-malt Scotch and a shot of Old Crow bourbon. It’s all subjective, but you know it as soon as you get halfway through the first chapter. Both of those deductions are true.īut it begs the question of exactly what is a second-rate book. You might deduce readily that I’m a slow reader and that I’ve spent a lot of time with second-rate books. If I had a nickel for every hour I’ve spent with a second-rate book, I’d buy an island in the Caribbean, fly regularly to Paris for lunch in my own jet and get Aretha Franklin and Fats Domino to entertain at my birthday parties.
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