Back to the classics

I believe I have mentioned this before, but when it comes to my reading list, I have taken a tip that I picked up from one of my old Phoenix roommates. For every "easy" book I read, I then read a "hard" one. For example, I might read one of the Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood) series, and then follow it with Dickens' David Copperfield.

Needless to say...there is no lack of variety in my literary repertoire.

The latest addition: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. I mean, how can you go wrong with the best-selling novel of the 19th century? Well, you can't. It's a piece of literary genius. Period.

It's just like a woman to stir things up. And Stowe did exactly that.



From Wikipedia: Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States alone. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."

Next on the reading list: Everyone Loves You When You're Dead by Neil Strauss

Song of the day: "Always Like This" Bombay Bicycle Club