Reading

I've decided I need to spend more time reading and less on the audio-visual media. I've dropped Malory about half-way through, though; too many damn jousts. Which is a shame, because the language is so endearingly quaint ("And the thyrd syster, Morgan le Fey, was put to scole in a nonnery, and ther she lerned so moche that she was a grete clerke of nygromancye")--even better than the KJV. So I picked up Lord of the Rings for the third time and am enjoying it completely*. But that's the story of my life: I almost always prefer the middle- to the high-brow. I like Woody Allen better than Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis better than James Joyce, Wodehouse better than Dickens, etc. There are only a handful of canonical authors that I find as engrossing as the best popular writers: Flannery O'Connor, Dostoievsky, Yeats, and Faulkner are the only ones I can think of right now. Still, I keep trying to read the Big Names, I guess out of a desire to get some kulchur. Lately I've been eyeing The Anatomy of Melancholy.

*Even Tom Bombadil and his hippie lover aren't so annoying to me this time.