Reblogging

This is how awesome thinking comes about. Collaboration.

The fascinating, wonderful Naja linked to my previous post about graphic novels via Tumblr. I met Naja in the course of my English degree. She kept cropping up in my classes, in those delicious English classes about children's lit and fairy tales which felt like cheating because it wasn't work to study these things, not really, it was fun.

Anyway, here's something Naja says in her blog about my blog which, by the way, you can read right here:

Novels are only just a majority in my favourites collection, and sometimes I feel like a bad lit student for it, because I have such a short attention span and I much prefer WHAM POW PICTURES! to some weird snooty elite.

It's certainly not the most interesting thing she has to say (you really should read the whole blog) but I'm quoting it here because I relate to it. I have very little patience for long books, for wordy books, for overly literary books or for classics. I almost quit literature at uni after having to read Wuthering Heights in first semester, first year, but lucky for me I took a class on fantasy the following semester and fell back in love with books.

All this made me think about another blog I recently read, incidentally by Doc-in-Boots, the academic who runs all those classes on children's lit and fairy tales which Naja and I attended.

I've been feeling guilty lately because I feel as if my attention span has shortened, as if exposing myself to graphic novels and short stories and children's novels has made me less capable of reading a literary book cover to cover. I've also been feeling guilty because my ereader is really really handy, and I've become less patient with heavy, thick paper books.

The Doc-in-Boots blog made me feel less guilty, because it made me realise that it's not that my attention span has shortened. It's just that I've found mediums which suit the way I read.

When I was seven years old I would get up at 7am on a Saturday morning to watch Saturday Disney, but I would have a novel in hand to read during the commercials or any boring parts of the show (the bits that weren't Disney). And before I had an ereader I didn't like heavy books any more than I do now. I simply abandoned them when my wrists started getting tired. At least now I have the option of buying them electronically in the first place (as I've done with Bill Bryson's The Short History of Nearly Everything). And I hated classics even more in my childhood than I do now (I distinctly remember being disgusted by Great Expectations). At least now, thank Heaven, I know that there are lots of wonderful books out there which don't count as 'literature' - graphic novels, children's books, genre fiction, fractured fairytales.

Anyway, that's my blog about Naja's blog about my blog. Which brings me back to my first point: thought works best when we share it. Reblogging is fantastic.