Literary Taste

What shapes our literary tastes? I don't know the answer, of course, but I recall that my high school senior English teacher believed that the three great novels were Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace, in that order. I made a point of reading each, and they did not disappoint, though I would put Tolstoy at the head of the class. I have since read a scattering of the classics, and almost never been disappointed, but I'm not much a reader of literature. Modern literature I find a much more uncertain quantity. Some I have really liked, but there are a lot like Gravity's Rainbow out there - long, fitfully amusing and frequently appalling, but ultimately tedious and unpleasant.

What literature I do read is mainly middle to low brow. I didn't learn to read until I was about eight, and the first books I read were Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels. I can't say that at any fundamental level my tastes have evolved beyond that.

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