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Big Reads

My friend S and I were discussing why and how our kids have largely missed out on reading the "big" novels that define the last couple of centuries of world literature. Why it was much easier to read them back in our day. One of the thoughts we had was around the relative distance between the reader's life and that of the cast of characters in the novel. When the distance is too great then the ability to relate is diminished and the interest in the story wanes. In pre-internet days, when access to information was limited and the world was vast and unknown, the concept of this distance applied very differently. 

As a teen reader I was as far away from the Napoleonic wars as I was to the the Gupta and Maurya campaigns I read about in history class. Similarly the events of the day reported in the newspaper seemed infinitely remote from my life- there was no way to interact with those who were experiencing the falling of the Berlin Wall for example. There was no social sharing of the event so it remained distant to the rest of the world - much like the a day in the WWII might have been to those who were not directly impacted by it. The lack of immediacy created a sense of equi-distance from it all and our own lives. 

As such, it was relatively easily to immerse oneself into a story set anywhere at anytime and get into the flow of events. The "big" novels were able to transport us in place and time in the most magnificent way. Now the world is smaller, more connected and there is a big difference in our separation from events past and present. It seems this has made it impossible for our kids to enjoy the kind of escape and learning we were lucky to get from our reading.

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