My usual diet of book reading over the last five years or more has consisted of books that are described as “classics”.
Many of these books are set in the nineteenth century and include Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann. More modern books included those by Graham Greene, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and so on.
For a change I decided last week to try a modern book, a best seller. So, I headed over to Audible and chose a book that has an enormous number of top reviews, a book called “Geneva”.
This was, and is, a bestseller. It had to be good.
I ended up “hate listening” to it. The difference between this book-full of cliches and incredible, unbelievable plot-and what I usually read was enormous.
I’m glad I’m finished it.
Now I have a better idea of what makes a book a “classic”, notwithstanding the difficulty in definition. Perhaps it is a book that endures through the effluxion of time.
Maybe you will like Geneva, but it was not for me.
I’m heading back to the classics!