I have read voraciously through the whole of my life. It has given me more pleasure than any other activity. I know – I know – but a book will last for hours!
It is not unusual for people to ask me what my favourite books were and I’d trot them out. There were the usual suspects:
Jack Kerouac – Dharma Bums and On the Road
John Fowles – Magus
John Steinbeck – East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath
Ken Kessey – Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
DH Lawrence – Sons & Lovers, Women in Love & Lady Chatterley’s
Henry Miller – Tropic of Capricorn
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World and Island
George Orwell – 1984 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
Robert Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land
Jerry Rubin – Do It!
Robert Sheckley – Journey Beyond Tomorrow
Larry Niven – Ringworld
Kurt Vonnegut Jnr – Breakfast of Champions and Ice Nine
Plus a few hundred more!
Then I got to thinking and I realised that a number of these books that I had revered I had read in my teens and early twenties. That meant that I had not read them for over forty years.
I decided that it would be good to go back and see if they were as good as I remembered them being. So I began to intersperse them with my current reading. Do you know what I discovered? Half of them had obviously been rewritten by inferior writers over the intervening years.
So come on you publishers – I want the original books back that I loved so much! Many of these are nowhere near as good as they were!
How about checking out my blog: http://ophersworld.com/
It might make you angry, sad or cheerful. Who knows?
What do you mean – mhalf of them had been re-written? Do you mean you bought recent editions and the text had been changed? How can they do that when the authors have died? I have the original copies of most of those books which I bought more than 40 years ago although some of them I may have given to my old school when I donated hundreds of my books to their library.
No Bede – they’ve not been rewritten. It was a light-hearted comment on the fact that some of them appear, to my mature self, not to be anywhere near as good as i thought they were and the writing much poorer than I remember.