arvTales

There is two and a half hours left. In theory, I could read a book, watch the telly, or just veg. But I am not doing any of those things. I am writing. I just finished reading a piece that professed itself to be a well-written, well-thought-out article. It wasn't.

One of my biggest pet peeves is reading something you expect to be a grade 'A' writing but turns out to be not worth the paper it was printed on. I see it all the time in the Toronto Sun, even sporadically in the Star and rarely in the Globe & Mail.

I really dislike bad writing. That's pretty much the whole point of this entry: me bitching about people who can't write.

Reading that piece--and seeing an advert for the "Raise A Reader" campaign that seems to be everywhere--got me thinking. Reading is not enough. You have to read the right things. We run into problems here because what is the "right" thing? There is so much crap out there in bookstores, libraries, and the internet, that it's sometimes hard to determine what is worth your time to read. The quality of writing worldwide has gone down a bit, I would bet. There's more content being written everyday but it turns out that most of it is just not worth reading.

It must have been easier a hundred years ago. It was hard to create books so the only things that were printed were the good stuff. Or not.

The classics are classics because they have been tested by time, by generations. They are great literature. I hope that there is still great literature being created today.