[SaltergateBorn]

I`m another one who loves reading and am never happier than when I`ve got my head in a `good` book. In fact, I was a very naughty boy today; I snuck off down to the library to get well stocked up for the next few weeks / months / years. (That doesn`t really count as `panic buying`, does it?) I`m sure the disguise – blonde wig, skirt, fish-net stockings – will have worked, though, and I`m not expecting a knock on the door from somebody in a blue uniform anytime soon. Unless one of you dobs me in, of course.

I agree with everything you`ve all said, though, about studying literature at school and it`s really sad that so many people that I`ve met over the years have been turned off books completely by the same experience that Snoots and Dancing had. I took English Literature at A Level pretty much because it was the only subject that was feasible and that the syllabus allowed to be fitted in with the ones I really wanted to do; French and Spanish. I have to say that I hated it and really struggled with it; and that is somebody who has always loved books. Why the hell could they not devise a syllabus that made Geography or Economics – which is what I really wanted to do – compatible with Modern Languages? They seem a pretty obvious match to me.

I suppose the question really boils down to one of how do you `teach` literature? Sure, you can probably teach `creative writing` but is that really the same thing? You can probably answer that better than any of us, Dev. The way I remember it is that we had to dissect and analyse virtually every sentence of whatever masterpiece we were studying and then spend twice as much time again reading all the various critiques that had been written by individuals who were all very learned and distinguished, I`m sure, but whose opinions at the end of the day were no more valid than ours were. What a waste of bloody time.

That applied to Shakespeare in particular. My wife and I both love the theatre – we try to get down to Stratford 2 or 3 times a year if we can – but we virtually hacked to death the plays we studied at school. Apart from which, why did they put dark, brooding, lugubrious plays like Macbeth and Hamlet on the syllabus? If we`d done things like Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night`s Dream, A Comedy of Errors – all just as `worthwhile` (whatever that means) it could well have turned us on to the stuff rather than turning us right off.

My advice, Snoots, would be to try to get a few pages into a few books by different writers and see if any of them `grab` you; you`ll know within a few pages if he or she does. Somebody will. A `good` writer to me is one who grabs you by the scruff of the neck – or some other part of your anatomy - and draws you into their world and then you can`t get out of it again until you`ve finished the book. Pure escapism – and it`s great. Tolkien can certainly do it, as Dev says, although my recommendation personally would be Stephen King. Even if the settings are fantastical, they both create flesh-and-blood characters that you care about and you want to know what happens to them after the book is finished. That`s why SK writes so many sequels; because people write to him and ask him what became of so-and-so after the story ended. So he writes a sequel to tell them. And the stories themselves are ones you can`t escape from once you`re in there. SK`s are often more gruesome, macabre, horrific than JRRT`s but they both hook you in good and proper.

And there endeth the gospel according to Salts.