Books, books and more books

Here is a brief list of books my 11 year old daughter has read in the past seven months:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twilight, Eclipse and New Moon by Stephanie Meyers
Dante's Inferno (half of the book, but she's not finished, yet)
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (Prologue and The Wife of Bath's Tale)
Sir Gawain and The Green Knight Anonymous author
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Pamela by Samuel Richardson

This is an incomplete list; some of the books were required reading from the Great Reading lists in "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Bauer and some are books Emily just happened to pick up to read. The point I want to make is my youngest daughter is capable of reading good quality fiction; although, she quite enjoyed Stephanie Meyers' books, she did not consider them good quality. I thought they were like candy for the brain but Emily is the one who read them repeatedly.

There is something terribly sad when one reads reviews of the new Ipad from Apple or of the Kobo reader; they are determined satisfactory based on a reader's ability to read a story quickly. For the time being, a good old fashioned book is still read faster than technology and still weighs less. But, to be honest, that is hardly indicative of a person's ability to grasp information, think on it and interpret it. Speed might be convenient but is hardly relevant when encountering a good tale; some stories need time to be told and swallowed and digested comfortably. Maybe there are pieces of information that can be skimmed and quickly inculcated but I doubt they are literary masterpieces. I don't know if literary masterpieces can be written on a computer and immediately published (and I am not being ironic). But judging the speed and quality of a lot of current books, I find a lot of writing superficial.

The one thing I have begun to notice, as both reader and writer, is the ignorance of an awful lot of writers. I wonder if the superficiality of the Ipad and the Kobo reader will increase this trend? My children read books; all of them have read or are reading the Bible and the Koran--not because I am big-time religious but because so much of world literature is dependent on a familiarity with such works. They are important pieces of writing that need to be thought about--similarly, important books by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, the Morte D'Arthur and other books are important works to be thought about. I know of an English college professor (a graduate of an university) who had never heard of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." Not everyone has to have read the book, but it is a demonstration of ignorance not to have heard of it. I keep wondering if the Ipad will lead to a mere familiarity with a Wikipedia definition rather than an actual encounter with the novel. I don't know but I do find the latest trends in some literature worrisome.

The Guardian makes a mockery of some of these concerns with their latest book lists, although some of them are quite relevant and others amusing:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/bestbooks