One of the tremendous benefits of modern life is the ready availability of books. Reading a real book is altogether a different experience than reading on the internet. It is an organic and serene experience, like a cow grazing. One may go over the ground at one's own pace, and go over the same ground again and again, if one likes. One may wander here and there, and return to ground already covered, just to get the tatse again. These things are possible when reading online, as well, but not nearly as much fun. With a book, one can think to oneself, "This passage I'm looking for was about a half-inch from the front cover of the book, on the left hand page near the top" and find it quickly enough, usually. this seems more difficult with online texts, unless you know exact phrasing and have a search feature.
Reading from the screen of a computer or some other device is an experience of a somehwat lower order, BUT... what literature is available immediately and for free on the internet is absolutely astonishing and wonderful.
It turns out that a great deal of G.K. Chesterton's literary output - poems, novels, essays, non-fiction - can be found complete and very handily organized at a website called, simply readbookonline.net.
The site is a profound temptation for readers, though. Pray for strength. We all have business to attend to.
Below is reproduced the introductory paragraph of the first essay of Chesterton's book titled Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. Enjoy...
The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever allowed to write at all. The first efforts of eminent men are always imitations; and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is whether the publisher had (as his name would seem to imply) some subconscious connection or sympathy with the public, and thus felt instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell; or whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable: most authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it by good ones. This is in some degree true even in the case of Dickens. The public continued to call him "Boz" long after the public had forgotten the _Sketches by Boz_. Numberless writers of the time speak of "Boz" as having written _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and "Boz" as having written _David Copperfield_. Yet if they had gone back to the original book signed "Boz" they might even have felt that it was vulgar and flippant. This is indeed the chief tragedy of publishers: that they may easily refuse at the same moment the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is easy to see of Dickens now that he was the right man; but a man might have been very well excused if he had not realised that the _Sketches_ was the right book. Dickens, I say, is a case for this primary query: whether there was in the first work any clear sign of his higher creative spirit. But Dickens is much less a case for this query than almost all the other great men of his period. The very earliest works of Thackeray are much more unimpressive than those of Dickens. Nay, they are much more vulgar than those of Dickens. And worst of all, they are much more numerous than those of Dickens. Thackeray came much nearer to being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens ever came. Read some of the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellowplush or Michael Angelo Titmarsh and you will realise that at the very beginning there was more potential clumsiness and silliness in Thackeray than there ever was in Dickens. Nevertheless there was some potential clumsiness and silliness in Dickens; and what there is of it appears here and there in the admirable _Sketches by Boz_.
It's not only true of novelists, either (I'm referring to Chesterton's point about mediocre early works). I don't know if any of you have seen National Lampoon's Class Reunion, the first film John Hughes scripted. If you haven't...keep it that way. But any aspiring scriptwriter would be heartened to watch it and reflect that such a catastrophe, easily one of the worst films I've ever stopped watching halfway through, was written by the same guy who wrote The Breakfast Club (which is a masterpiece-- and this meat cleaver in my hand is waiting for anyone who disagrees...)
Posted by: Maolsheachlann | 12/19/2009 at 03:15 PM