Pass the Cheerios .. I Feel Like Reading

Back when Rowling was still writing additional volumes of Harry Potter one of the guys who worked with me openly suggested that this Hogwarts saga was what literature was all about. I politely argued the point and introduced him to this website dedicated to reading. A few weeks later he conceded the argument but replaced it with a variation of the tired old suggestion that reading, reading anything, was valuable since it inevitably developed the habit: Harry Potter was the gateway to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

I’m not so sure about this.

I’ll concede that the physical act of reading provides some level of exercise for the brain but walking to the kitchen to get another beer from the fridge does not a marathon make. If you’re nine years old, read Harry Potter, but by the time you reach forty you should be ready for Ulysses

Or maybe something from this month’s reading list.

1. The House of Twenty Thousand Books — Sasha Abramsky
2. Petty Troubles of Married Life — Honoré de Balzac
3. City — Alessandro Baricco
4. The Biographer’s Tale — A. S. Byatt
5. Manhattan Is My Beat — Jeffrey Deaver
6. Colonel Jack — Daniel Defoe
7. The Corsican Brothers — Alexander Dumas
8. Wives and Daughters — Elizabeth Gaskell
9. Gun Island — Amitav Ghosh
10. Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov
11. Barney’s Version — Mordecai Richler
12. Captain Blood — Rafael Sabatini
13. Farmerettes — Gisela Sherman
14. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — William L. Shirer
15. And Quiet Flows the Don — Mikhail Sholokhov
16. The Murderer — Georges Simenon
17. Scattered All Over the Earth — Yoko Tawada
18. Burr: A Novel — Gore Vidal
19. Dead Men’s Trousers — Irvine Welsh
20. Maisie Dobbs — Jacqueline Winspear