A Conversation Half Way Through Secondary School
A Friend: How many books have you read?
Me: How could I possibly know how many books I have read?
Him: I know how many books I have read.
Me: How Many?
Him: Two.
The member of staff in charge of academic development become concerned that not enough general reading was being done so he required that each pupil submit a monthly report on a book that they had read that month. Some of us enjoyed writing a summary of a book that we had enjoyed reading not necessarily that month - I submitted a second or third draft - whereas others had to find a book to read, asked teachers for advice and disliked whatever book they "had to" write about. Ye gods!
Most of my leisure reading was sf. Trying to reread some of those books now, I realize that what I wanted then was the sf trappings. It was sufficient for me if a novel was about people travelling through space and colonizing other planets and so on. Now that would be nowhere near enough. I have been unable to reread some of those old books to their conclusions.
CS Lewis, who became a Professor of Literature, wrote somewhere that it was possible to read all the way through English literature - not every work, of course, but nevertheless all the major poems, plays and novels. I am nowhere near doing that and would not want to try. Apparently, Neil Gaiman read everything in the juvenile section of his local Public Library, then started reading through everything, starting from A, in the adult section - but preferred fantasy. In his place, I would have sought out the fantasy, not read everything starting from A.
The morals of this story:
I still read continually but now also blog about it;
I do a lot of rereading of certain favoured authors;
Poul Anderson gives us all that sf stuff - space travel, extraterrestrial colonization etc - but also a lot more than that and that makes him endlessly rereadable.
(Back from the meeting with enough time to add one more post.)
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