Instead of Teaser Tuesday, I decided to ramble on a little bit about a topic that's rather near and dear to my heart: "getting" books from different eras.
Brilliant books like Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy (or simply fun ones like the Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton) are falling by the wayside in favor of ones whose pop culture references and language resonate with the people of today. Now, I'm not saying this is anything new, or nothing would ever get written, but I have to say that it kills my heart a little bit when the language in something written as recently as the 70s will cause my friends to say, "No thanks."
I think that some people have the impression that just because a book was written 20 or 100 years ago, the authors lacked humor, and any book they read will be drier than a History Channel documentary on watches. Not so! A great example of this is my current read, the Sherlock Holmes novels, which have lines like: "...the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife...", scenes with Sherlock Holmes and Watson bursting into simultaneous laughter at things that would take too long to explain here (they're funny, I promise), and epic bromance lines with Sherlock telling Watson he would be lost without him.
The other cause of this is probably laziness, which annoys me infinitely more - not because I think that everyone should have to make a huge effort to read for pleasure, but because there are gorgeous, exciting stories waiting behind the hansom cabs and jolly good chaps.
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