A Lot To Ponder

 I sat and read over this item briefly.  How you read and get some extreme view of reality....really wasn't explained.  After three minutes of reading I gave up trying to comprehend where this idea came from.

To be honest....I never read Lord of the Rings, Brave New World,  Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Catcher in the Rye, or Atlas Shrugged.  

Yeah, I read 1984 and Animal Farm around the 7th grade summer vacation.  

Yeah, I did read virtually all of the Steinbeck books by the end of high school.  I read Hemmingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls (twice actually). 

I also read Uncle Toms Cabin, the Great Gatsby, and The Jungle.

By the summer of 1977 when I left for the Air Force, I'd probably read just over 400 books.  For the next decade after 1977?  You can add another 250-odd books. 

So I pondered this government study....to say x-books are dangerous. If this were true....you are left with two odd problems.  First, you'd have to also identify books that cause folks to be very liberal or left-extremist....making them a problem.  Second, do you just go and ban stuff like Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick because of the threats contained?

But then you come to the odd prospective....if you handed the book Catch-22 to a 15-year old kid....how does he view things after he wraps up the book?  Or say you gave a copy of Call of the Wild to some 13-year old girl, and asked for a review....does she go and say the book demonstrates humanity, or does she give the honest opinion....the Yukon is a crappy place and best to be avoided?

Having grown up in rural Alabama, I would tend to say that 50-percent folks probably read a total of five books by the time they finished high school.  So I'm not sure that this extremist-book-agenda stuff really affects them.  

The 40-percent of young gals I went to school with in the 1975-to-1977 era.....mostly read nurse Jane hyped-up romance novels, with high suggestive 'lust' on every other page...wanting doctor Earl.

This brings me to an odd conclusion.  What if you had a iron-clad leftist liberal....far-left extremist and gave him a copy of 1984 or Animal Farm, would he cut loose at the end and admit he was 'lost', and had now found his reality in life?  Would he be that weak...just requiring one single book to straighten out his life?