Exactly. I did a degree in lit (and lang), but I don't read as much as I'd like. And I'd rather not read at all than read garbage - there's a wealth of difference between entertainingly bad and just unreadable. Fortunately there's plenty of good stuff about.
Actually, I re-read Fahrenheit 451 a couple of years ago, having (rather ironically) seen the movie adaptation on TV. But as Bradbury says, I interpreted the book not as the death of literature so much as the rise of television and its detrimental effect on the intellect. TV is passive, literature is active, and human nature will tend toward the passive in a lot of cases. And I have to say, given the choice between "The Mill on the Floss" or "Crime and Punishment" and a re-run of "Die Hard" on BBC1, I'll go for the latter in a trice. I have read the first two, not as many times as I've seen the third, and I'll happily admit to finding Willis leaping around a skyscraper more entertaining.
Each to his or her own
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