Are email and SMS also ruining language and wordplay and writing?
I’m not so concerned about that. We live in a society that is less verbally adept than it was. I myself can’t recall seeing either of my parents ever read a book. But being Irish, the craic, the storytelling, was extraordinary. Of course it was as stupid as it was brilliant, but that’s the Irish. You can go to a little pub on the west cape of Cork and find an old drunk who talks like William fucking Yeats! Your kids are 11, eight and five. What’s story time like at the O’Rourke house? It’s a lot of fun, but there is a terrific amount of junk out there for kids too. I’ll be 62 this year and when I was a kid there was no “tween literature”. You went straight from Robert Louis Stevenson stuff and Kipling to grown-up stuff. The household debate right now is that my 11-year-old daughter wants to read that Twilight vampire series but it’s so goddamn badly written that I forbid her from reading it on the basis of literary style! What were your great reading epiphanies as a youngster? The Brid
I’m not so concerned about that. We live in a society that is less verbally adept than it was. I myself can’t recall seeing either of my parents ever read a book. But being Irish, the craic, the storytelling, was extraordinary. Of course it was as stupid as it was brilliant, but that’s the Irish. You can go to a little pub on the west cape of Cork and find an old drunk who talks like William fucking Yeats! Your kids are 11, eight and five. What’s story time like at the O’Rourke house? It’s a lot of fun, but there is a terrific amount of junk out there for kids too. I’ll be 62 this year and when I was a kid there was no “tween literature”. You went straight from Robert Louis Stevenson stuff and Kipling to grown-up stuff. The household debate right now is that my 11-year-old daughter wants to read that Twilight vampire series but it’s so goddamn badly written that I forbid her from reading it on the basis of literary style! What were your great reading epiphanies as a youngster? The Brid
