Salman Rushdie’s observation about reading strikes me as right. He said children love stories because they nurture the imagination, as opposed to our reasoning or logical faculties. The stories you love are a picture of your imagination.
My imagination has changed through the decades, but there are some consistent features. There was little science fiction in the stories I loved as a child and little now. Some of the stories that left me thunderstruck as a teenager still astonish me. Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” is an example. My interest in other writers — Guy de Maupassant and Jack London are in this crowd — has faded.
I continue to be intrigued by Jonathan Gibb’s site “A Personal Anthology.” He asks his guests to pick 12 short stories for an imaginary anthology. I think that your list of stories is a picture of an individual imagination, more revealing than a photograph.
• Sources: Salman Rushdie, “Ask Yourself Which Books You Love,” New York Times, May 24, 2021. Jonathan Gibbs’s site is at https://apersonalanthology.com/. For my notes on Gibbs’s challenge, see “What short stories would you recommend?” Nov. 2, 2022, and “Willa Cather: ‘Neighbor Rosicky,’” Nov. 21, 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment