Quote of the Week...from Joyce Carol Oates

Read widely, and without apology.  Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.                                                                  ---Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a widely acclaimed writer with 58 published novels and many collections of her short stories dating back to the late 1960s and continuing through to the present.  I just finished reading her 2018 novel Hazards of Time Travel and will discuss it in a future article.  According to the Wikipedia article about Oates, she holds to a tightly disciplined regimen with her writing and performs it longhand...yet another successful professional writer who practices this strategy.  In light of what I just heard about the head of a Catholic school banning all copies of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series from its campus, I thought that her quote pretty much says it all.  The irony to the banning of Harry Potter would be clear to anyone who actually had taken any time or effort to read this wonderful series, which is an allegory of the battle between clearly delineated forces of good and evil in our real world and how ordinary people often become unwitting accomplices of the "dark side" through their apathy, expedient rationalizing, and denial...

I do pretty much as Joyce Carol Oates suggested and read whatever I want, even so-called "young adult", "junior", or "children's" books...which often have a submerged, more mature message.  I read the opinions spanning the political spectrum, from far right to far left in orientation...owning (and enjoying), for example, books by both Greg Gutfeld and Al Franken.  I also love history and popular science literature...and if you've read this blog for any length of time you already know that I am a sucker for fantasy and science-fiction stories.  My favorite author has long been Stephen King, and I'm looking forward to reading his new book The Institute...and plan to soon read (for the third time) my all-time favorite King novel, 11/22/63.  From time to time I'll tackle more classic literature, and sometimes, as with the case of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and James Joyce's Ulysses, I'll walk away from the experience with a lot of confusion and frustration...and even a little anger. I write reviews for what I've read on this blog, but that's not why I read.  I read because...pure and simple, it's FUN!