5/10/2023 0 Comments Books like the idiot elif batuman![]() ![]() Thomas Jefferson blamed literature for encouraging “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.” But it is this very power - to inspire us to insist a flock of sheep is an opposing army - that is literature’s true subject, according to the critic and journalist Elif Batuman. The novel’s ability to seduce readers with its alternate, and invariably more attractive, versions of reality was much lamented in the 19th century. ![]() Jo March - unforgivably - marriage to an insufferable pedant and surrender of all creative ambitions. Emma Bovary to debt, seedy affairs and protracted death by arsenic. Don Quixote succumbs to delusions, debt and sundry humiliations. Consider the fates of our most famous bibliomaniacs. $27.Ī strange thing about novels is how often, and strenuously, they proclaim the dangers of novel-reading. ![]()
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