Celebrate the Small Things: The Classics

I cut my teeth as a reader on Stephen King's horror stories: Carrie, Salem's Lot, Christine, Pet Sematary etcetera, and from there it was on to thrillers, sci-fi and more horror. The movies I watched and the books I read were basically in these genres. I read some other stuff at school including some really old stuff by a guy called Shakespeare, and I remember reading and studying The Crucible, but for entertainment I read pulp horror fiction.

At some point in my journey as a reader, which I suspect coincided with the beginning of my writing 'career', I broadened my reading to include everything: and I mean everything. Everything from bumper stickers and public toilet graffiti to classic works of literature like Don Quixote.

It is about the classics that I wish to write now because I have fallen so madly in love with them, I can confidently say it is my favourite genre. Interestingly, I think my writing style could be termed neo-classical, because I am heavily influenced by both the vocabularic breadth and syntactic complexity of the classics.

Having arrived at the classics party quite late, I have much catching

up to do, but I am attacking this deficit in my life with relish. I just finished reading Moby Dick, and as I usually am, I was struck by how amazing the writing is. Melville's novel of obsession is famous, but I wonder how many contemporary readers have taken it on. 19th century literature is not light reading. I loved it. Read my review on Goodreads

So today I am giving thanks for great works of literature like Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and I'm grateful for the fact that you can get many such classic novels for free on Kindle.

Next up: Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Bring it on!