Literary Transgression: Reading at Group Gatherings

This post is part of a long-running and sporadic series of Literary Transgressions! These Transgressions feature posts by me, Kate, or one of our delightful readers in which we share an embarrassing literary admission with some commentary. If you’d like to join the madness and share your own Literary Transgression, please e-mail us at literarytransgressionsATgmailDOTcom. We’re always looking for guest posters!

Remember when you were a kid and it was perfectly acceptable to just hole up in a corner during social gatherings and read a book while adults socially ebbed and flowed around you? Transgression admission time: I really wish I could still read instead of being social at certain gatherings!

I was a tag-along at a conference last week filled with ‘adults’ who all knew each other and had loads in common. As the odd girl out (and the youngest person there by about twenty years), I desperately wished I could just be my 10-year-old self again and dig out my book without being glared at for committing social rudeness.

Riddle me this…

Literary Transgression: Poetry

I loathe poetry.

Well, maybe that’s unfair. I do like some poetry: Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, John Donne, Edna St. Vincent Millay, selected Rilke and Blake, and a smattering of Yeats, Shelley and Coleridge. I enjoyed what I read of Edmund Spenser very much, and I even got on board with a few of Anne Bradstreet’s poems.

What I don’t like is how poetry seems to be the official chosen form of the teenage writer, most of whom  seem to labour under a few poetical misconceptions. Namely, that 1) because poetry is short, it’s easy to write; 2) if it rhymes, that’s better; 3) the best poetry is autobiographical; and 4) metaphors must be made explicitly clear to the reader, because the reader is not as smart as the writer.

Literary Transgression: Encyclopædias

While this may not be particularly transgressive or literary, it is still a slightly embarrassing confession and confess I shall: I love encyclopedias. I’m not talking about online encyclopedias that are governed by an angry hoard of anal fussbudgets (any and all of these such an encyclopedias shall, of course, out of decency remain nameless). I’m talking about those dying breed of printed and bound encyclopedias updated sporadically and used to briefly and in as unbiased as way as possible define the known world. I love them, both in theory and in practice.

Another Literary Transgression

(This is second in a series of Literary Transgressions! These Transgressions features posts by me, KT, or one of our delightful readers in which we share an embarrassing literary admission with some commentary. If you’d like to join the madness and share your own Literary Transgression, please e-mail us at literarytransgressions@gmail.com.)

Clio, the muse of history

While I realize I spend a lot of my time on Literary Transgressions complaining about “fluffy” history books, I would now like to take a moment to indulge one of my literary transgressions and admit that I actually most often love “fluffy” history books. Yes, you heard it here first, my snobbery only extends into the academic realm and, personally, I actually like Alison Weir’s books. No, I would never use them or read them for school or any academic purpose, but that doesn’t stop me from reading them constantly in my spare time! (Nor, apparently, does it stop me from complaining about them in the blogosphere.)

Transgression Time!

(This is the first of a series of Literary Transgressions, posts in which Corey or I will either post an embarrassing literary admission of our own with some commentary, or post a transgression one of our readers has sent in. If you have a Transgression you’d like to submit, please e-mail it to literarytransgressions@gmail.com)

I love graphic novels and comic books.

Love love love. Give me a superhero, and I’m enthralled.

The sad part is, I’m not even one of those fans who has an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel, DC and the rest. I can’t even name the rest. Probably I’ve never read a true comic book in my entire life. In fact, I know my only exposure to Marvel has been through the Iron Man movie, and my DC reading has been limited to Watchmen and V for Vendetta. The only credit I deserve is that I at least read the latter two novels before I saw the movies.

My lack of knowledge only makes this transgression more embarrassing.