#dangerous reading

[spiraphobia]

[book-of-pandora]

"Oh, those horrible, revolutionary, freethinking books!"

Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts

[unnuminous]

The thing about reading that makes it dangerous is that if you come across a piece of really unpleasant, but extremely vivid and well-crafted imagery, it’s going to stick with you forever. You’re going to think about it for years. It’s never going to leave the back of your mind. You gotta be careful what words you put into your brain

[mackenzie-brown]

“They’re coming,” was the boy’s only answer, sending a  shiver down the old man’s spine.

viewBook.at/TheShiftingTheShiftingTrilogy

[mackenzie-brown]

She stepped out onto the turf and her breath froze in her throat.

viewBook.at/TheBookOfSoulsAnImeldaStoneAdventure

[tiny-fierce]

(OOC anuminous Now that you've shared your dangerous reading story -- when I was about 13 or so I was a heavy reader. I couldn't put a book down, ever. So I was forced to go take a shower and as soon as I was out I ran to my bedroom in my towel to keep reading. I put one foot up on the bed to hold the book open and then thought I could pull underwear on over my other foot with a hop.

I tried, and fell. I damn near broke my arm. Wound up hyperextending it badly enough that I had to go to the urgent care and get an x-ray.

Reading. Dangerous. Specific to Dresden, I was walking down the stairs a few years ago reading one of the books - I forget which - and wasn't paying attention. I thought I was out of stairs and I was not. I was three stairs shy. I definitely fell and am lucky I didn't break my ankle but I sure did try.)

[thirstygargoyle]

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me that any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called 'tinny'. It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbons) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books. Now that I was reading more English, the paradox began to be aggravated. I was deeply moved by the Dream of the Rood; more deeply still by Langland; intoxicated (for a time) by Donne; deeply and lastingly satisfied by Thomas Browne. But the most alarming of all was George Herbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment; but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through what I would still have called 'the Christian mythology'.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, in Selected Books, 1367-1368.

(The whole common sense angle, and the thinness of much atheist writing, ties in with Spufford's comments on how the whole 'atheist bus' farrago showed 'New Atheism' up for the aloof, privileged, and basically clueless thing it tends to be.)

[thirstygargoyle]

It was here that I first read a volume of Chesterton's essays. I had never heard of him and had no idea of what he stood for; nor can I quite understand why he made such an immediate conquest of me. It might have been expected that my pessimism, my atheism, and my hatred of sentiment would have made him to me the least congenial of all authors. It would almost seem that Providence, or some 'second cause' of a very obscure kind, quite overrules our previous tastes when It decides to bring two minds together. Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love. I was by now a sufficiently experienced reader to distinguish liking from agreement. I did not need to accept what Chesterton said in order to enjoy it. His humour was of the kind which I like best -- not 'jokes' imbedded in the page like currants in a cake, still less (what I cannot endure), a general tone of flippancy and jocularity, but the humour which is not in any way separable from the argument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the 'bloom' on dialectic itself. The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly. For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or 'paradoxical' I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out of the question. Moreover, strange as this may seem, I liked him for his goodness. [...] In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere -- 'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, in Selected Books, 1353-1354.