“A book, being a physical
object, engenders a certain respect that zipping electrons cannot. Because you
cannot turn a book off, because you have to hold it in your hands, because a
book sits there, waiting for you, whether you think you want it or not, because
of all these things, a book is a friend. It’s not just the content, but the
physical being of a book that is there for you always and unconditionally.”
~ Mo Willems
This
morning in my online perusings, I stumbled upon something in the Guardian about
'The Year of Reading Woman Authors'. Curious as to what that meant I read
the article and then made the mistake of scanning through the comments. Vitriol!
As a young
child, I had no idea who the authors were, I just loved the books: Madeline,
Curious George, Babar. When I read on my own I gravitated towards women
authors because they wrote about my interests: Carol Ryrie Brink, Louisa
May Alcott, Catherine Woolley, Lenora Mattingly Weber. It never crossed
my mind to think I should be broadening my horizons by reading male authors.
When I
look at what I read now though, my reading does lean more heavily toward male
authors, not by any conscious design. I admire the spare writing of E.
B. White, Wendell Berry, and Verlyn Klinkenborg. I just discovered the
exquisite writing of Melville Davisson Post. It doesn't matter who is
writing the book: what matters is good writing.
Josephine
Tey, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie write male main characters very
convincingly. Wendell Berry wrote Hannah Coulter beautifully.
The arguments quickly segued into bitterness about this being a man's world. How
comforting that as a Christian I can see it as all part of the Creator's
design, accept the way things are, and go curl up with a good book.
