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Oct. 13th, 2011 10:41 am*sideeye* I am a little put off by any book that has thirty pages of preface and introduction wherein the author says that when he first wrote the book he was young and dumb and no longer believes what he wrote then. I will accept that the second edition was probably not his idea, but when you start a book off that way, you really present no compelling argument for why I'd want to read the rest of the book, even aside from the bad argument. (Which, yeah, the second it came up in the actual text I pegged it as BS, because it really doesn't make that much sense, whether from a medieval or modern context. I am very, very leery of using class violence as an argument in literature, especially medieval literature.)
It did take me a surprising amount of time to be able to say to myself, "Look, if even the author doesn't think it's worthwhile, why the hell would I want to read it? Life is too short and my bookcase is too full to read books that even the author thinks are wrong." (Fortunately it's not for class, it is me poking cautiously at some of the Robin Hood research out there while I try to figure out if I'm interested enough in lady Robin to actually write it.) So back to the library that goes! And I will ponder the rest of the books on my shelf to figure out what to read next. Yesterday I took out two books on cross-dressing (one on medieval women, one on women in the military) and C.S. Lewis's translation of the Aeneid, because it was the first one that came up as a bilingual edition. (I mean, I did not go to the library planning on getting Lewis's translation, I just wanted an edition that had the Latin on one side and the English on the other, and while I'm sure Tilton has more than one, that was the one that came up first on the search engine.)
It did take me a surprising amount of time to be able to say to myself, "Look, if even the author doesn't think it's worthwhile, why the hell would I want to read it? Life is too short and my bookcase is too full to read books that even the author thinks are wrong." (Fortunately it's not for class, it is me poking cautiously at some of the Robin Hood research out there while I try to figure out if I'm interested enough in lady Robin to actually write it.) So back to the library that goes! And I will ponder the rest of the books on my shelf to figure out what to read next. Yesterday I took out two books on cross-dressing (one on medieval women, one on women in the military) and C.S. Lewis's translation of the Aeneid, because it was the first one that came up as a bilingual edition. (I mean, I did not go to the library planning on getting Lewis's translation, I just wanted an edition that had the Latin on one side and the English on the other, and while I'm sure Tilton has more than one, that was the one that came up first on the search engine.)