Away. Traveling. Sorry. This is all I managed on Thursday.
Our lives are humdrum. That's why we read. We read to touch something beyond our normal experience and yet there is nothing more fascinating than other people. But, it is hard to write about ordinary lives. Ordinary lives can be boring. One such novel nearly put me off reading for life: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Luckily, I was reading other books at the time - mostly science fiction and stories set in exotic places. I was 14 or 15. Most of those books I have forgotten but I remember some from that time: Silas Marner by George Elliot, Hard Times by Charles Dickens and, different this, The Inheritors by William Golding. The first two are books about ordinary lives lived against a background of others' wickedness. Silas Marner discovers human love in place of gold. Stephen in Hard Times finds it in the muck of industrial revolution.
It is hard to write about ordinary lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment