Given the choice, I would much rather read "literature" than a bestseller.
The only way a book can become a classic is if people are reading it years after it was written. That's the only reason all the "classic" authors are regarded with such high esteem.
My two favourite writers are Shakespeare and Joyce; both fairly "heavy", but when you get down to it they've got a lot to say, and often an extremely witty way of saying it.
Although Dan Brown or whoever can keep many readers hooked, there's so much to read, and so little time: Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Pascal, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Pope, S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, H. D. Thoreau, G. Eliot, Hazlitt, Twain, Wilde, G. B. Shaw, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Waugh, H. L. Mencken, Joyce, Huxley, Orwell, the list goes on and on.
Basically, I can never hope to catch up with the present day, because there's so much from the past I haven't caught up with!
The only way a book can become a classic is if people are reading it years after it was written. That's the only reason all the "classic" authors are regarded with such high esteem.
My two favourite writers are Shakespeare and Joyce; both fairly "heavy", but when you get down to it they've got a lot to say, and often an extremely witty way of saying it.
Although Dan Brown or whoever can keep many readers hooked, there's so much to read, and so little time: Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Pascal, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Pope, S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, H. D. Thoreau, G. Eliot, Hazlitt, Twain, Wilde, G. B. Shaw, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Waugh, H. L. Mencken, Joyce, Huxley, Orwell, the list goes on and on.
Basically, I can never hope to catch up with the present day, because there's so much from the past I haven't caught up with!
