Okay, so you know all that. But you are the kind of person who without thinking destroys the idea that a person should learn.
You think it's okay to attack a person for learning.
I want people to read things because it's important that they do so.
I am happy that you are au fait with Poe, Shelley, Byron et al.
You think I am pompous. I don't think that I am. I just want people (and I definitely mean kids) to read things other than Harry Potter stories. I was brought up to read all kinds of things. I read CS Lewis and Tolkien as a kid and I didn't need a big Hollywood movie to tell me about it.
Reading things like that gave me an introduction to grown up books. Lets face it, Tolkien didn't really write for nippers.
All I'm saying is that there is an infantilism about culture at the moment and if a few of us stood up for literature and bought a few books that were difficult but in the end rewarding maybe we could arrest that slide and we would be able to look at one another on the underground and think to ourselves: "Well he/she is reading 'Keep The Aspidistra Flying' by George Orwell or reading 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan" and we would feel in ourselves that things aren't so bad.
