{"id":39717,"date":"2019-09-22T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39717"},"modified":"2019-09-21T09:21:09","modified_gmt":"2019-09-21T13:21:09","slug":"qotd-light-reading-aka-trash-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/09\/22\/qotd-light-reading-aka-trash-novels\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: &#8220;Light reading&#8221; aka trash novels"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>As a pretentious young viper, I would sometimes pick fights with my mother over what she was reading. I would examine some paperback she had set down, and pronounce it to be trash. She would agree, with the qualification that &#8220;light reading&#8221; was the more genteel expression. I cannot now remember what many of the books were, but the genre of detective fiction was well represented, and then-recent novels which could be located on bestseller lists. Sometimes it would be a pop &#8220;major author&#8221; \u2014 say, D. H. Lawrence in one of his repetitive attempts to write sentimental pornography on the virgin-and-gypsy theme. Once I congratulated her on attempting something translated from German. &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s your father reading that. I don&#8217;t read books by foreigners.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She had the habit of reading, formed early, and could often be found lost in a book. To her mind literature was meant for an escape: from nursing, housework, and raising difficult children. So if the book was arduous, it was also useless. &#8220;You can&#8217;t be serious all the time,&#8221; she would say, &#8220;you have to take a break from it sometimes.&#8221; To which I would reply, &#8220;But surely you can be serious some of the time.&#8221; For I wasn&#8217;t only a viper. I was also a little jackass.<\/p>\n<p>David Warren, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidwarrenonline.com\/2017\/08\/08\/summer-reading\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&#8220;Summer reading&#8221;, <em>Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2017-08-08.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a pretentious young viper, I would sometimes pick fights with my mother over what she was reading. I would examine some paperback she had set down, and pronounce it to be trash. She would agree, with the qualification that &#8220;light reading&#8221; was the more genteel expression. I cannot now remember what many of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,57,41],"tags":[374,86,375],"class_list":["post-39717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-children","tag-criticism","tag-parents"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-akB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39717"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51219,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39717\/revisions\/51219"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}