Thought for the day

   

    "Ensconced as we are in our individual hall of mirrors, our literary preferences reflected endlessly back to us in slightly altered form, it can be tricky to see a way out. If your default frame of reference for selecting a book is that it looks like, sounds like or is like something you've read before, or that someone you like likes it, how do you begin to navigate your way through literary terrain that has few familiar landmarks, where book jackets don't give off the signals you're used to and where hardly any of your contemporaries may ever have ventured?"

    From Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer by Ann Morgan.

Comments

[Spade & Dagger]

I've heard this author on the radio several times - fascinating how she decided between reading authors who wrote directly in English or were translated in to English from the authors first language (and the difficulty in getting the translated versions). Some of the authors she found had truly massive audiences in their home countries (even continents) and yet were totally unheard of elsewhere in the world. Food for literary thought indeed.

[Cornflower]

It is indeed food for thought, and Ann Morgan's undertaking, sampling the literature of all nations in the course of a year, was - as you allude to, beset by practical difficulties.

[Faye @ Literasaurus]

What a brilliant and timely quote. I've been pondering recently over whether I'm in a bit of a rut reading-wise and whether I do tend to make 'comfortable' choices based on familiarity and previous experience. Then I spend the rest of the time wondering whether I even mind! Whatever the outcome, I think I'll be adding this book to my 'to read' list. It sounds like excellent food for thought. (Love the blog by the way - I think this might be first comment(?) but I've been lurking for a good while!)

[Cornflower]

Thank you, Faye! Glad you like it.

[Ann]

This is very timely - thank you. Last week I put in a couple of requests at my local library for new Aussie fiction/non-fiction. I realized I was not only stuck in the past, but also another hemisphere! I'm still exploring all the questions that came up from this. Some of the answers are rather uncomfortable 'light-bulb' moments. But these are the things that push us forward into the new.