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What do you enjoy reading?
5 years agoHi everybody!
Do you enjoy reading? What sorts of written texts do you get most pleasure from?
When I was a kid I used to spend most of my pocket money on comics. I was never very interested in superhero comics, but rather my preference was horror and ghost-story comic-strip booklets, and booklets of humourous comic strips (Beano, Dandy, Whizzer n Chips, Krazy, and so on). As a teenager I discovered Viz comic, and I became a big fan of that, too.
Reading novels at school and for school homework always felt like a chore, an obligation, ...until one day when I discovered Ray Bradbury, in particular, The Illustrated Man collection. Later we were "required" to read and analyze in class Orwell's Animal Farm, and I found myself proactively seeking out Coming Up For Air, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1984 and any other Orwells I could get ahold of.
I'd heard, around and about, that Oscar Wilde was pretty much the wisest Irishman ever to have picked up a typewriter and I was disappointed he didn't figure even peripherally in my "formal" education, so when I left school, I spent several months' worth of Saturdays at the local library getting dirty-fingernailed in all the beautiful stuff he ever wrote, along with his (if you set it alongside his other work) bleakly dark and ugly The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which reads unmistakably as the painful words of an incorrigible optimist who's been brutalized to the point of despair and knows he has little time remaining before his death.
Kurt Vonnegut did nothing short of change my life in too many ways to list. And Agatha Christie has also had quite an impact on me. And I know I'll ever recover from what the phenomenal Glitt O'Rourke had to tell me and the world. (https://amazon.com/dp/B00I4Y25NE/)
I've always enjoyed reading newspapers (a habit I was "required" to pick up while I was at university; I was also trained, very helpfully, in how to wring "the truth" out of news reports). I especially love the socially- and economically-liberal Economist newspaper because it's so entirely in-your-face and, as a matter of strict editorial policy ever since its inception in 1843, refuses to bother reporting on any news event about which it doesn't have a clear, analytically-justifiable bias. I like "The Independent" newspaper; in particular, I enjoy the irony inherent in its name, bearing in mind its very transparent left-of-centre, social-reformist bias on every news story. The FT and the Wall Street Journal are good fun, too, for other reasons.
I sometimes enjoy reading social media, but I find there's such a preponderance of chaff to sift through before one finds any actual, bona fide wheat that it's often too overwhelming to be worth my effort.
What do you enjoy reading?
