Join The Debate!

I won't judge you, matlock,

But I will give you some good advice -- advice which I would not give to a nincompoop or an idiot (because I would know they wouldn't take it anyway).

Buy yourself a copy of Dr. Elizabeth Kantor's "The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature." Sit down with it and have a good read. As you're reading, you may find that this fiction you're so quick to dismiss actually has a lot to offer you, and your children and your grandchildren as well.

You might realize that the tiny box labeled "contemporary" is more stifling than you'd thought, and you'd like to start thinking outside it. You might discover that this brief span between the time we're born and the time we die is really only .0000000000000000000005% of Life and the World, and that things that happened fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand years ago are actually worth knowing about.

You might become curious about places you can't visit in "real life" -- places like ancient Greece, sixteenth-century Venice and Cyprus nineteenth-century England, Narnia and Middle Earth. You might start to wonder what it's like to see these places through the eyes of someone else, and, for a little while, to BECOME someone else, and walk in their shoes. You might even find that when you get back to "real life," you've picked up greater understanding along the way, and that even "real life" has more to offer than you thought it did.

Best of all, you'll decide to introduce your children to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Anne of Green Gables, the March sisters, Mowgli, Alice in Wonderland, and the Pevensie children -- just so they won't try to squeeze themselves into that tiny box labeled "contemporary," and they'll see Life as much bigger and wider.

It would have done "poor Anna Nicole" a world of good if she, too, could have read this book and a few of the other books it points its readers toward. She might have developed the mental and imaginative resources to withstand the temptation of artificial highs. She might have gained the understanding and the dignity to live a fuller and happier and more productive (if more anonymous) life. Hopefully her daughter will be luckier, and will grow up in a household where imagination and accomplishment are valued, and where she's encouraged to crack a book once in a while.