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The alleged perils of novel reading.
Sep. 3rd, 2025 07:58 pmReading novels, instead of proper "literature," is bad for you. Very bad. If you're a student, it will cause you to slack off your studies to the point of being expelled from school for being "a dolt and a nuisance." If you're a woman, it will cause you to become "insane, incurably insane from reading novels."
So says the author of "A Pastor’s Jottings; or, Striking Scenes during a ministry of Thirty-five years." (Anonymous, published by the American Tract Society, New York, 1864 - 348 pages, about 60 unnumbered chapters).
If you think all this is quaint and outdated, just mentally substitute "social media" or "screen time" for "novels" and it will suddenly all look like very familiar, very modern bullshit.
The fact that a religious book written and published in the US *during the civil war* does not have anything in it pertaining to the great moral issue of the time, (zero hits for Negro or slavery, only one hit for "slave" talking about someone being a slave to sin), says a lot about the priorities of the author, none of it good.
Since no one other than Google seems to have a digital copy of this public domain book, and google does not allow anyone to download their precious books because capitalist enshittification, here is the full text of the chapter titled “Novel Readers” (p. 314- 320). ( Read more... )
So says the author of "A Pastor’s Jottings; or, Striking Scenes during a ministry of Thirty-five years." (Anonymous, published by the American Tract Society, New York, 1864 - 348 pages, about 60 unnumbered chapters).
If you think all this is quaint and outdated, just mentally substitute "social media" or "screen time" for "novels" and it will suddenly all look like very familiar, very modern bullshit.
The fact that a religious book written and published in the US *during the civil war* does not have anything in it pertaining to the great moral issue of the time, (zero hits for Negro or slavery, only one hit for "slave" talking about someone being a slave to sin), says a lot about the priorities of the author, none of it good.
Since no one other than Google seems to have a digital copy of this public domain book, and google does not allow anyone to download their precious books because capitalist enshittification, here is the full text of the chapter titled “Novel Readers” (p. 314- 320). ( Read more... )