We all have our maxims and rules by which we live. Some we develop by ourselves, others we gain by observing the example of others, yet others are from something we read and decide that it is a jolly good idea.
Some of the sources of my philosophies of life familiar ones (parents, teachers, friends, scriptures, etc.), while others are decidedly less conventional.
For the past month I've been trying (rather unsuccessfully) to read Rudyard Kipling's classic adventure novel Kim. By all accounts it is an exciting story, but I just can't get into it. But today, I picked up a book and finished it in about three hours.
I wish I could say that the book was Kim.
It was, instead, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas.
It was then that I realised that one of my maxims in life is the same as one of the late, great P. G. Wodehouse's observations:
"Reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was a thing I had been meaning to do these last forty years," wrote Wodehouse, "But you know how it is. Just as you have got Hamlet and Macbeth under your belt and are preparing to read the stuffing out of Henry the Sixth, parts one, two and three, something of Agatha Christie's catches your eye and you weaken."
Add Wodehouse's own work to that of Christie, and there you have, in a nutshell, my philosophy on reading fiction.
Some of the sources of my philosophies of life familiar ones (parents, teachers, friends, scriptures, etc.), while others are decidedly less conventional.
For the past month I've been trying (rather unsuccessfully) to read Rudyard Kipling's classic adventure novel Kim. By all accounts it is an exciting story, but I just can't get into it. But today, I picked up a book and finished it in about three hours.
I wish I could say that the book was Kim.
It was, instead, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas.
It was then that I realised that one of my maxims in life is the same as one of the late, great P. G. Wodehouse's observations:
"Reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was a thing I had been meaning to do these last forty years," wrote Wodehouse, "But you know how it is. Just as you have got Hamlet and Macbeth under your belt and are preparing to read the stuffing out of Henry the Sixth, parts one, two and three, something of Agatha Christie's catches your eye and you weaken."
Add Wodehouse's own work to that of Christie, and there you have, in a nutshell, my philosophy on reading fiction.
